Crafted places/places for craft: Pop-up and the politics of the ‘crafted’ city

Abstract

In recent years cities across the Global North have experienced the rapid rise of ‘pop-up’ culture; a trend for creating temporary places in disused sites and buildings. Pop-up has been widely promoted within the creative industries as providing cheap and flexible access to space and is now a popular format for craft makers and sellers. In this chapter I propose that examining pop-up’s intersections with the craft economy offers important insights into craft’s impact in contemporary cities. I explore pop-up as a geography through which craft’s logics of one-off, handmade production and flexible labour are transforming the urban fabric. I consider how craft’s emphasis on the unique and the handmade is, through pop-up, infused into the materiality of the city and how its labour logics of flexibility also find spatiotemporal form in pop-up’s own versatile urban landscape. The growing intersection of craft and pop-up cultures, begs a pertinent question: if craft’s sensibilities are being advanced and extended in the city through pop-up, then what does the politics of this ‘crafted’ city look like? More specifically; in a contemporary condition characterized by widespread precarity, how does this extension of craft’s logics reflect and shape assumptions about how cities should be lived, governed and reproduced?

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