Vacant shops and derelict building sites are the urban scars of Athens’ economic decline and endless austerity programmes. But amid even this beleaguered landscape, pockets of unusual activity can be glimpsed – carved out by the growing number of “pop-up” interventions in the Greek capital.

With youth unemployment running at well over 50%, initiatives such as The Loft, which uses abandoned spaces for youth-led art projects, offer precious opportunities for young people to develop their creative and social skills. “Pocket parks” are bringing new vitality to the city’s vacant lots. Athenian entrepreneurs, too, have turned to pop-up culture as a way to revitalise their city: nomadic bars and cinemas travel around providing temporary entertainment sites, while supper clubs and pop-up restaurants offer ad-hoc, low-cost food venues.

In Athens, this flurry of short-term activity seems a logical outcome of the economic crisis: temporariness as an important means of maintaining cultural and commercial activity in a city crippled by long-term debt.



But the Greek capital is far from alone in utilising the concept. Over the past decade, pop-up culture has taken cities across the globe by storm, repurposing vacant sites or buildings in a huge variety of ways – from short-term shops, charity workshops, bars and restaurants to galleries, studio spaces and interim housing.

In the UK, the pop-up phenomenon was explicitly promoted by TV retail consultant Mary Portas and then-communities minister Eric Pickles as a way to regenerate high streets in the aftermath of the 2008 recession, and to provide rates relief to landlords encumbered with vacant properties. The cities of Brighton and Amsterdam are both using pop-up shipping containers to respond to problems of homelessness.

In Christchurch, the pop-up concept was deployed to swiftly rebuild the city’s retail centre after the 2011 earthquake

Post-earthquake Christchurch, with its new ‘container’ shopping mall. Photograph: Alamy

In Christchurch, New Zealand, shipping container architectures were also deployed to swiftly rebuild the city’s retail centre after the 2011 earthquake. In disaster situations, these temporary structures and other pop-ups such as the city’s now-famous “cardboard cathedral” are valorised as a flexible, fast and low-cost solution to damaged or dilapidated urban environments, used to keep city life ticking over until a longer-term solution is found.

The space-finding organisation Gap Filler also emerged in Christchurch after the earthquake. According to its co-founder and director, Coralie Winn, what began as a response to the destruction wreaked on the city “has grown into a city-making initiative with a longer term vision”.

For Gap Filler, pop-up is not just a means of recovery but a promising model of participatory organisation as the city moves forward. As academic Simon Dickinson says, the earthquake opened up fissures in “the cultural and political conservatism of the city”, giving way to ideas which are “bigger than disaster recovery itself”.

What started as a niche practice is now ubiquitous in Europe and the US, and increasingly prevalent across the rest of the world, from Nairobi and Kampala to Buenos Aires and Mumbai. Pop-ups are having a transformative impact on how cities of the future are imagined and produced – but is this increasing reliance on temporary businesses and services always a good idea for our cities?

Certainly, they can be a legal and secure way to “unlock” urban spaces which would otherwise lie dormant, helping temporary projects that benefit communities to get off the ground. The UK-based charity 3Space temporarily took on several vacant JJB Sports stores after the company’s collapse into administration, opening them up for uses including an upcycling workshop aimed at the homeless and a drop-in clinic for men in deprived areas of Glasgow.

As governments become more receptive to the idea, short-term business ventures are being rolled out and supported by councils to facilitate a range of uses for vacant sites. Hull City Council is designing a pop-up farm which will occupy disused sites and tackle food poverty, while “zombie” car parks globally are being transformed into temporary cinemas, yoga classrooms, work space for small businesses, mini-golf courses, bars and restaurants.

Like Airbnb and Zipcar, space-finding organisations allow wasted urban spaces to be distributed to those who need it, when they need it, at a time when its owners don’t. The temporal and spatial flexibility of pop-ups seems to help create cities of participation, sharing and resourcefulness.

Bunker puts on free electronic music events at various locations around Hong Kong. Photograph: Brett Ford/4D Images

This phenomenon can also open up space, both geographically and culturally, for radical or alternative uses. Deep underground among the second world war ruins, or high in the surrounding mountains, Hong Kong partygoers arrive to attend pop-up club nights held in some of the city’s remote and abandoned locations. Bunker, a series of free electronic music events, has emerged in response to Hong Kong’s limited music scene (made up of “either commercial gigs or exclusive clubs [with] nothing in between”, according to its co-founders). Although originally a small party set up by friends, Bunker is using the short-termism of pop-up to avoid legal constrictions and enable a free, anti-commercial and underground music scene.



For French architect Stephane Malka, the legal ambiguity of pop-ups enables a radical reinterpretation of space. In one of Marseille’s wealthiest neighbourhoods, Malka’s A-Kamp47 project is a “vertical village” on a wall between a cultural centre and a railway network, using the blurred boundaries of public and private space to disrupt traditional visualisations of home and shelter.

The project seeks to use these intermittent spaces to make homeless and marginalised people more visible. According to Malka, A-Kamp47 stands as an “instant pop-up installation: the marginalised, the clandestine, squatters and the homeless are sheltered”. Lack of legal definition allows the village to exist without immediate interference, and encourages public consideration of who has access to home and shelter, and who doesn’t.

As pop-ups become an everyday feature of cities, we should be alert to the conflicting ideologies embedded within them

Marseille’s A-Kamp47 is making homelessness more visible. Photograph: Laurent Garbit/Malka Architecture

Of course, pop-ups can also be a highly commercialised phenomenon. Global companies including Nike, Starbucks and Puma have all created temporary novelty shops, while Adidas opened one resembling a giant shoe-box in Shoreditch, epicentre of London’s hipster economy. It isn’t difficult to see why such global companies would jump on the same band wagon. As Professor Susan Luckman at the University of South Australia notes, the business model plays into the “media fuelled contemporary consumer demand for the new, especially among the youth market”.

It is well established that capital growth thrives on fast turnover times. Given that the immobility of real estate has traditionally been capitalism’s biggest hindrance, pop-ups could well be the culmination of a capitalist dream – submitting not just products but places to its economic logics. In fact, promoting the temporariness and flexibility of space is perhaps the most significant effect that pop-up culture is having in cities, impacting even on how housing is considered.

Schemes that place “guardians” in empty commercial properties utilise the pop-up format to promote short-term and insecure tenancies. Companies such as Camelot and Guardians of London promise cheap rent in exchange for exceptionally short tenancy agreements, which can see renters evicted with just two weeks’ notice. This promotes an understanding, particularly among the urban young, that insecure conditions are a normal and accepted part of living in extortionately expensive cities.



This normalisation of temporariness has begun to move into the public as well as private sectors. In Lewisham, south London, the local authority has devised a “pop-up village” which will move local people in need of housing around vacant sites across the borough that are awaiting redevelopment. In Lambeth, community groups have responded to cuts to local services by setting up a weekly temporary library, while across the Atlantic, A-Kamp47’s Stephane Malka has been commissioned to build five units of mobile schools in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro.

Atlanta-based SCADpad created temporary micro-apartments in city parking spaces. Photograph: SCADpad

These projects could be life changing for the vulnerable people they support. Yet in celebrating pop-ups as the solution to urban problems, are we simply distracting from the lack of structural public provision in these areas – and worse still, normalising, even glorifying, its absence through passionate avowals of temporariness?

If Lewisham’s housing project is anything to go by, it could be that, rather than opening up urban space to under-empowered people, the pop-up approach only makes them easier to displace when more profitable uses of the space are found.

Across the world, temporary hospital units are replacing permanent specialist departments as healthcare resources come under increasing strain. In Atlanta, Georgia, the SCADpad project at the Savannah College of Art and Design has built micro-homes in car-park spaces to highlight the need for adaptive re-use in an under-resourced and over-populated world. In NYC, Garrison Architects have created a prototype home designed to house displaced citizens “in the event of a catastrophic natural or manmade disaster”.

While such designs speak to real-world concerns of future catastrophe, they also further a somewhat dystopic vision of the future in which short-term services and response systems replace the secure structures and welfare systems that cities once aspired to.

And so, as pop-ups become an everyday feature of global cities, we should be alert to the conflicting ideologies embedded within them. As we seek to build on the innovation, resourcefulness and inclusion they enable, we must remain conscious of their potential to normalise and even glorify the precariousness of urban life.

Ella Harris and Mel Nowicki are based in the geography department at Royal Holloway, University of London. Their ongoing project, Precarious Geographies, explores the role of place in the creation, experience and resistance of precarity.







