Temporary urban practices of co-production. Including unrepresented voices in the making of the city

Temporary urbanism initiatives have become an increasingly widespread practice amongst activists and practitioners aiming to trigger grass-roots processes of urban regeneration and social innovation. This paper presents the process and findings of ‘Temporary urbanism as a tactic to co-produce community resilience’, a five-year project to empower various local communities groups to take ownership of urban spaces through the collective creation of temporary installations. Drawing on David Harvey’s notion of the ‘Right to the City’ , the freedom to make and remake our cities as an essential human right, the project instigated a series of tactical, small-sized, co-created, temporary interventions in public spaces in Portsmouth, UK, involving unrepresented voices in urban decision-making processes. Prompted by the research question; “How can temporary urban practices become effective tools to include unrepresented voices in the city-making and to generate community resilience?” the authors identified a series of guidelines for improving temporary co-creation practices to foster community resilience. Temporary urban space initiatives can play a vital role in creating opportunities for grassroots direct democracy , but if these experiences are not followed by institutional learning and changes to planning policies, their outcomes will remain limited in time and space.