Temporal entrainment: temporary use stabilisation in German and Dutch contexts of urban regeneration

Abstract

Over the last two decades, temporary uses have proliferated in practise. Urban (planning) scholarship discourses have witnessed this, too. However, shifts in understanding temporary uses emphasize how new understandings should be framed in relation to broader and processes of change. This dissertation’s work pursues such a new framing through two key conceptual and substantive aims. The first regards the possibility to frame the relationship between long-term processes of change and short-term temporary uses through a temporality lens. The second is to develop a temporality relevant vernacular to articulate insights gained through this lens. Three research questions operationalise these aims: How does temporary use stabilise? Which factors are key to the explanations of how temporary use stabilise? And, how can we explain temporary use stabilisation and supporting factors through a temporality lens?

The empirical insights from data collected between 2015 and 2019 in the comparative case study contexts of urban regeneration in Bremen (GE) and Rotterdam (NL) inform the analyses and mixed-methods approach of the work. These include qualitative analyses of interview transcripts, site and participant observations, as well as a range of scholarly, policy and grey literature. These also encompass hybrid qualitative and quantitative analyses through bibliometrics and fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analyses. The empirical insights explicate the diverse patterns of temporality through processes in temporary use (adaptation, professionalisation, and communication), which are also contingent on configurations of conditions as supporting factors for stabilisation. Elaborated through a series of five contributions, the dissertation presents analytical work and proposes a line of reasoning that argues for the framing of temporary uses processes as temporalities, which express various and interacting rhythmic patterns. This introduces less binary illustrations of how temporary uses by explicating through characterisations of temporalities, which do not rely on duration as a keystone measure for temporary use. Instead, processes of temporary use (stabilisation) are understood as layered, interpenetrating, and subsuming processes in temporary uses (adaptation, professionalisation, and communication). A temporality framework that mobilises the concepts of 1) trajectories, 2) rhythmanalysis, and 3) entrainment helps explains stabilisation.

The rhythmanalytical vocabulary articulates the diverse patterns of synchronisation and syncopation, while the notion of trajectory helps delineate paradoxical paths of stabilised temporary use in space. Altogether and interwoven with the temporalities of broader and external processes such as urban regeneration, temporary uses become stabilised in the forward motions of entrainment. These findings also unearth other temporal concerns for how time is understood, leveraged, and made inclusive. There are lessons to be learned by scholars and practitioners about the variety of rhythms and paces, as well as how they undergird new notions of capital, politics, futures, and spaces. Most relevant for scholarship, this dissertation draws attention to how unmindful respect for conventions (re)produce blinders in methodology. Lastly, a more thoughtful engagement with time and temporality in the full range of domains in research design (philosophical, conceptual, methodological, and substantive) through process- and longitudinal studies could give further insights on temporary use stabilisation.