Learning from Temporary Use: Translating Values in the .../file/FerreriLang.pdf · Over the last fifteen years interim use projects in vacant urban spaces have come to the foreground

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Mara Ferreri and Andreas Lang

Sheffield Transience and Permanence in Urban Development Workshop

Learning from Temporary Use: Translating Values in the ‘fringes’ of the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park Introduction

“Very rarely does a 30 year masterplan or framework get delivered in the way it was planned. Interim uses are a key ingredient to evolving and applying long term strategies to specific areas for a specific purpose and group of people, and are therefore an opportunity for the LLDC [London Legacy Development Corporation] to test and build its long term aspirations through a meaningful interim phase.” (V.V.A.A. 2013 Learning from Others report v.1: 7)

Over the last fifteen years interim use projects in vacant urban spaces have come to the foreground as a field of interdisciplinary activities and as a new tool for urban policymakers and planners (Bishop and Williams, 2012). While short-term commercial and social uses of vacant buildings and land have always been part of the cultural and economic landscape of cities, over the last decade temporary uses in the urban environment have become increasingly recognised as belonging to a distinctive discourse and field of practice (Haydn and Temel, 2006). Within this field, community-led spontaneous (Deslandes, 2012) and unplanned (Oswalt et al., 2013) approaches to transforming the city sit alongside more institutional and planned interim use schemes, at times promoted and funded by national and local governments and organisations. The incorporation of interim uses as forms of ‘tactical urbanism’ (Mould, 2014) in policymaking and planning is exemplified by the London Legacy Development Corporation (LLDC)’s development of an Interim Uses Strategy for the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park (QEOP), formerly the site of the London 2012 Olympic Games (LLDC, 2013b). Established in 2012, the LLDC has replaced the Olympic Delivery Authority and the Olympic Park Legacy Company and is London’s first Mayoral Development Corporation (MDC), development vehicle introduced by the Localism Act 2011 and in this case created by and responding to the Greater London Authority. As such, the LLDC combines functions and powers of its prior incarnations, such as the assembly of land through compulsory purchase and the management


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of the vast site and the powers of local government, such as the responsibility of setting local plans. It is in the context of the Legacy Community Scheme masterplan 2015-2031 for the QEOP and adjacent areas that the LLDC has prepared its Interim Uses Strategy (LLDC, 2013b), which has undergone non-statutory as well as statutory consultation during 2014. As part of that, in 2012 the LLDC commissioned a research project titled Learning from Others to a range of organisations and researchers (LLDC, 2011). The final report, for internal distribution and as such not available to the general public, was delivered in 2013 and composed of 7 volumes that covered a range of topics such as ‘Live Art and Performance Projects’, ‘Delivery and Financial Models for Interim Projects’, ‘Local and Community Projects’, ‘Material Recycling and Reuse Projects’ and ‘Precedent Atlas’. The reports include the analysis of ‘interim uses’ case studies in London and internationally and offer policy recommendations and ‘lessons’ for the Olympic ‘legacy’. The study is significant for a number of reasons. First of all, as the recognition by officers involved in the development of the regeneration scheme of the LLDC, of ‘interim uses’ as a defined set of ideas, practices and modes of leasing land on a temporary basis to a range of community and commercial projects. Interim uses are here understood as a different set of activities from the customary temporary uses in vacant site during long term developments, such as parking and storage, and as such, as requiring the LLDC to ‘learn’ through research into practices and schemes elsewhere. Secondly, it clearly outlines the hope and intention that interim uses can be useful ‘tests’ that can play a key part in the evolution of long-term urban development strategies. Lastly, and consequently, the value of interim uses as ‘pilots’ for large-scale development bodies is framed within the language of learning. Policy-makers and planners are imagined to be not only learning to translate ‘other’ practices, some of which community-led and grass-root, into the more permanent trajectory of local development plans, but also, perhaps more importantly, the corporation itself is imagining interim uses as a site of learning through experimenting and testing new approaches to ‘grass-root’ urban design and delivery of socio-economic regeneration programmes. This study of interim uses in the QEOP stems from a research collaboration between the School of Geography at Queen Mary, University of London, and the Hackney Wick-based local art-architect studio public works, that has been actively involved in the field of grass-root temporary uses in London and in Hackney Wick. The project, titled ‘Revaluing Temporary Urban Use’ ran for six months (June-December 2014) and was intended as a situated critical investigation into the different and at times competing values ascribed


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to interim uses in Hackney Wick and Fish Island and their relationship to wider dynamics of urban transformation. Based on prior doctoral research, the emergence of the temporary use discourse is understood to require the production of discursive and practical conditions for the enrolment of community groups, art/architect urban practitioners and other actors. From this viewpoint, interim use projects are seen as practical and symbolic sites of negotiation and learning of different values about the practices and about urban development more broadly. If interim uses are sites of learning, what is it learnt and who is doing the learning? What kind of learning (and value translation) is taking place in the ‘fringes’ of the QEOP? How are these lessons understood and negotiated? Interim uses: place-marketing in the era of ‘regulatory capitalism’ Over the last decade critical urban scholars have began to consider temporary uses as tools of urban policymaking and governance in relation to plans for local development. The incorporation of temporary practices of empty space use into ‘creative cities’ urban policy making have been discussed by Jamie Peck with regards to Amsterdam’s ‘broedplaatsen’ (breeding places) schemes (Peck, 2011) and by Claire Colomb’s work on the reinvention and staging of the ‘new’ Berlin (Colomb, 2012a). For Colomb, the incorporation of temporary urban uses into urban policymaking evidences a shift in local development policies “toward the explicit promotion of the cultural industries and the concept of the “creative city” to encourage “creative spaces, of which former “urban voids” are a key component” (Colomb, 2012b). In the context of the strategic production and diffusion of new imaginings of the city, interim uses are important tools in place marketing, understood as

the intentional and organized process of construction and dissemination of a discourse on, and images of, a city, in order to attract tourists and investors or generate the support of local residents for a particular urban vision (Colomb, 2012: 138).

In the context of the London 2012 Olympic Games, there has been an evident strong need for Olympic authorities, such as the LLDC, to generate construct and disseminate a discourse and images of the Lower Lee Valley and its transformation as positive, in order to attract visitors, investors and, importantly, to generate local support in the context of increasingly more private developments (Raco, 2012).

As noted by Andres in her study of temporary uses in Lausanne and Marseille, there is a need to analyse the specific distribution of power between sets of stakeholders in contexts of “multistage governance arrangements that lead to the employment of temporary uses as an


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instrument for regeneration”(2013: 760).

Arguments have been made not to consider the Olympic projects less an exceptional occurrence in the urban landscape and more as the exaggeration of wider trends. As argued by Mike Raco, the interesting question is “what it is that these ‘wider trends’ consist of and how major projects reflect and reproduce them” (2012: 452). In Raco’s work on the delivery of the London Olympic Games, he has argued that the Games can be read as the enactment of the new order of ‘regulatory capitalism’ as the emergence of “hybrid relationships between states and powerful corporation, to the point that the distinctions between providers and policymakers become increasingly blurred.” (2012: 453). What existing and emerging trends can be discovered in the deployment of temporary (interim) uses mechanisms in and around the QEOP? Are we seeing new forms of governance at play? Are new relationships between a development corporation and local communities being tested? Scholars engaged with the study of temporary uses in contexts of urban austerity have highlighted the power of interim use as forms of urban prototyping and as devices for collective learning (Jimenez, 2013). Grass-root ‘makeshift’ temporary uses (Marrero-Guillamón, 2014) are understood to combine both elements of technical experimentation in the design and delivery of more sustainable and participatory ways of building as well as innovation of social relations and forms of organising.

The translation of different values of interim uses in the ‘fringes’ of the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park have been investigated through the critical analysis of guideline documents, public and semi-public commissions and internal reports, with a range of stakeholders, and through individual and group interviews with urban professionals, LLDC commissioning officers and representatives of community groups. Values are here understood as processual, dynamic and discursively articulated. Different values may be translated between institutional divides, modified in the encounter with legal, economic or cultural barriers, and even re-appropriated and disrupted.

After a brief overview of the wider context of planned and proposed interim uses agendas in and around the QEOP, the paper will explore the process of imagining, designing and establishing the interim use pilot project Hub67, as an instance of ‘grass-root/community’ temporary use in Hackney Wick and Fish Island in a moment of heightened urban transformation.


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Interim and meanwhile uses in the ‘fringes’ of the Olympics As has been widely argued, the 2012 London Olympic Games project can be seen as the latest chapter in the context of a longer-term attempt to redevelop the Lower Lea Valley in the wider context of the Thames Gateway Development project (Poynter, 2009). In order to understand the conditions under which the interim use pilot project Hub67 has come into being, it is important to briefly review a somewhat longer history of the relationship between temporary uses and the areas directly affected by the London Olympics Games. Between June 2009 and March 2010, the London-based national organisation ‘Meanwhile Project’ has been promoting the concept of ‘meanwhile’ urban uses through over 30 public events and projects, mostly in London. These included public presentations and talks, participation in public round table discussions and workshops in collaboration with other intermediaries, public and private organisations and institutions. One such event during summer 2010 was a roundtable discussion titled ‘Site Life Debate’ in association with Property Week, a UK-based magazine for national and international property news, which had ran a temporary uses competition and had been active promoting interim uses on stalled development sites, through their Site Life campaign.1 The ‘Site Life Debate’ roundtable took place in Stratford Town Hall in the London Borough of Newham. According to an officer in the regeneration team of Newham Council, the debate and consequent conversations between the editor of Property Week and senior officers in the Regeneration team were the main inspiration for the launch, in late 2010, of the ‘Meanwhile London Competition’ (Interview, 27 September 2011). The competition sought proposals for temporary projects, to be delivered during the Olympic Games in three vacant development sites in the Royal Docks, one of which was owned by the London Development Agency. As such, the competition received public backing from the Mayor of London and was directly influenced by City Hall through a partnership between Newham Council and Design for London. Ever since, the now disbanded Design for London appears to have been a central actor and source of inspiration in the development of an urban policy discourse around temporary uses in London. The relationship between the agency, temporary uses and the LLDC became concrete under the leadership of Peter Bishop – author of the already mentioned The Temporary City (2012) – as former head of DfL

1 In July 2010 a report of the ‘Site Life Debate’ was published online on the Meanwhile Project website http://www.meanwhile.org.uk/news/property-week-roundtable [14th accessed September 2011].


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and deputy CEO of the London Development Agency, and, after the disbandment of the DfL, through a ‘transfer of team’, in the words of a senior regeneration officer at the LLDC, of many key officers to the Olympic Park Legacy Company first, and then to the LLDC (Interview, 15 July 2014). The officers who migrated between the two had been in charge of a program of small-scale interventions in the areas adjacent to the QEOP, as surveyed in the publication ‘Stitching the Fringes: Working around the Olympic Park’ (Design for London, 2013). In the Mayor of London’s forewords to the document, the promise and imperative of local development in the ‘fringe neighbourhoods’ is connoted as ‘central’ to the ‘legacy vision’:

For the Games to realise their real promise, Stratford, Hackney Wick and Fish Island, Bromley-by-Bow, Leyton and the areas around Hackney Marshes must grow and improve in parallel with those in the Park. These fringe neighbourhoods cannot feel like they are on the edge, looking across at something new. Instead they must be a central part of the transformation (2013: 4).

Design for London’s approach was defined, in the Stitching the Fringes report as one of ‘catch and steer’. As explained by a senior officer in Design and Physical Regeneration team at the LLDC, according to this approach the LLDC would directly intervene to steer small-scale projects that appeared to have strategic importance (Interview, 15 July 2014). Arguably, the approach of Design for London has found legacy in the multifold ways in which different departments within the LLDC have been directly and indirectly encouraging interim uses in and around the park. Within the QEOP, In preparation for the redevelopment of the scheme, the land has been parcelled for different types of interim uses: “some were allocated to grass, some were allocated to commercial uses, some were allocated to servicing the park and some were allocated to grass-root interim uses” (Interview, 15 July 2014). In the distinction offered by LLDC officers, commercial interim uses range from events, which could last a day or weeks, such as seasonal fairs, theatre performances and circuses, motor racing competition, to less visible commercial lettings, such as open storage or car parking. Some of these uses are managed by private agents or third sector intermediaries, such as Urban Space Management (Urban Space Management, 2014). Others by real estate developers, as is the case with the Australian development company Lend Lease, the initial developer of the Athletes’ Village, and owner since April 2010 of a plot of land, adjacent to Stratford City, set to be developed into The


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International Quarter, through a joint venture with London Continental Railways (Fig. 1).2

Figure 1: Commercial interim uses (Winter Fair) on TIQ land, December 2014.

A further step in the development of the LLDC’s strategy for interim uses was the publication of the Grass-root Interim Uses Project Guidelines (LLDC, 2014) which identified and demarcated clear interim uses sites on the west side, alongside the Lee Navigation Canal, for grass-root interim uses project. In the ‘fringe neighbourhoods’ of the QEOP, the LLDC has continued a ‘catch and steer’ approach to a range of community and interim uses, from temporary community allotments to pop-up shops (Leyton) and roof gardens (Stratford). Alongside the more directly managed interim use programme, these uses have been commissioned and supported through calls for proposals and small-scale funding, such as the ‘Emerging East Commission’, a programme known as ‘launch pads’ (Interview, 2 September 2014). As the LLDC gains planning powers over a larger portion of land than in the QEOP, over areas formerly under the jurisdiction of four of the five Olympic Host Boroughs: Hackney, Tower Hamlets, Waltham Forest and, most significantly in terms of land extension, Newham, its role in Hackney Wick and Fish Island is strengthen as the area comes within its new boundaries. Values of grass-root interim uses Across the range of community-oriented interim use programs, there emerges a consensus among officers about the value of interim uses within their wider regeneration and urban development remit. The first value identified in our research is the value of connecting and ‘activating’ the ‘fringes’ of the QEOP (even if the term ‘fringes’ has ceased to be used at the LLDC) (Ibid). By using the land on the western

2 The International Quarter at Stratford City, http://www.tiqstratfordcity.com


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side of the park, across the canal from Hackney Wick and Fish Island, for instance, interim uses aim to “create links into the existing communities” by drawing attention to the new routes set out by the Local Plan, bringing together the existing communities and the new communities that will exist on the Park. In the words of a senior regeneration officer, the Legacy Community Scheme’s task of creating “a new bit of city that feels complex and interesting and multi-layered, and that means something to somebody, is not easy. It’s going to need all of those pilot projects to support it becoming lived in and owned” (Interview, 15 July 2014). If the processes of land assembly and of constructing the London 2012 Olympics site was all about the enclosures of large areas of publicly accessible land, often for common use (such as Manor garden allotments) through the erection of an impenetrable wall (Powell and Marrero-Guillamón, 2012), the ‘legacy’ is all about manifest openness, porosity and connectivity. In the recently proposed Local Plan, the routes into the Park are understood by LLDC officers to play both a practical and a symbolic role of bridging across the two areas that had been separated by an insurmountable fence for nearly seven years.

“Those are routes that are unfamiliar at the moment and that need to become part of people’s local mental map of the place and by lining these routes we can…shorten the distance, the sort of mental distance, between here [HW] and here [QEOP]” (Interview, 15 July 2014).

If during the Olympic Games the ‘Stitching the fringe’ program of interventions was “about trying to make the Olympics make sense to those who were living on the boundaries”, now the aim with interim uses is about “trying to make it all feel like one place rather than two places” (Ibid). Community interim uses across either side of the canal are thus seen as instrumental to the visual and experiential acceptance of the QEOP’s vision and its place-marketing (Colomb, 2013) acting at the level of the imaginary to shorten the mental distance between the two. As further explained by another officer, some of their aims with interim uses are “about defining platforms and spaces where further longer-term masterplanning and development work is due to take place” and to ensure that residents and visitors “get used to seeing more activities on the site” (interview, 2 September 2014). The second value of community interim uses is linked to a concern with design and urban sustainability. A key lesson identified by the Learning from Others report is that interim uses can “provide an opportunity to promote quality and focus on good design in the built environment” and “be used to test design agendas” (2013: 7). From the standpoint of the Design and Physical Regeneration team, interim uses offer the valuable opportunity for “doing things which we haven't done before in an environment where this sort of things hasn't


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happened before” and testing “different types of interim use experiments” (interview, 2 September 2014). The open-endedness and possibility of failure were highlighted as including taking risks, which was considered “quite important about being an innovative regeneration body” (interview, 2 September 2014). Following from this, a third value of interim uses is identified as a way to more directly deliver activities that fit the regeneration remit of the LLDC, particularly around the delivery of community facilities required in the planning permission for the Legacy Community Scheme. This is achieved by “investing in uses which promote our regeneration objectives. And they are our priority themes of sports, healthy living, arts and culture and community engagement” (Interview, 15 July 2014). According to the Learning from Others report, one of the benefits of interim uses is that “projects can be easily created and collaboratively delivered by the community, young professionals and the public and private sector, allowing a healthy mix of different people involved in the place shaping of an area” (2013: 7). Partnerships between public and private sectors, community groups and professionals to deliver community facilities in contexts of urban regeneration, are presented here as a desirable ‘healthy mix’. In the remaining part of the article we will focus on how these three ‘values’ of grass-root interim uses are articulated in the LLDC pilot project Hub67, a recently opened temporary community youth hub located at 67 Rothbury Road, on the corner with White Post Lane, in Hackney Wick. The case of 67 Rothbury Road site, Hackney Wick The 67 Rothbury Road site is one of seven land plots and buildings acquired by the London Thames Gateway Development Corporation (LTGDC) in summer 2010 in the areas surrounding Hackney Wick Overground Station. The purchase took place from PricewaterhouseCoopers, administrators to Paul Kemsley’s Rock Investments, and accompanied a £3m investment by the LTGDC into improving access to and through Hackney Wick. Working with the London Development Agency (LDA) and the Olympic Delivery Authority (ODA), the investment focused on physical redevelopment of alleyways, paths, pedestrian bridges, new lighting and surveillance of public spaces. Prior to the acquisition, the site had hosted since 1999 the studios of Bangla TV, now demolished and relocated to Pudding Mill Lane. The vacant site was a few hundred meters from the exit of the Hackney Wick Overground station and on the pedestrian route along White Post Lane towards the popular Queen’s Yard, a courtyard with Mother’s artist studios, the Yard Theatre, the White Building, Crate Brewery and Pizzeria and several other art and design studios and companies.


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As reported by the Estates Gazette, Peter Andrews LTGDC chief executive stated at the time that Hackney Wick was expected to be “capable of emerging from underneath the shadow of the Olympic stadium to become the next destination for creative industry creation and growth after the 2012 Games.” The purchase was aimed at creating the infrastructure of transport and public spaces that would support the “successful transition of the area to create a new district with great character and vibrancy” (Peter Andrews, quoted in Norman, 2010). The planning application submitted by the LTGDC in 2011 for acquired land proposed the construction of a mixed-use development of over one hundred flats, 60,000 sq ft of affordable workspace and 17,000 sq ft for retail.3 The development, however, was delayed and in early 2012 the Real Estate Department was approached by a series of companies seeking to rent out the vacant site to establish food and retail outlets, in the expectation of high footfall in the area during the Games.4 Colleagues in the Design department decided instead to “let it for free and do a Meanwhile competition” (Interview, 15 July 2014). As explained by a member of the Design team:

We thought, we have got these sites, wouldn't it be great to do something that was more open to the community? That made the most of it and met our objectives and our priority themes? That looked at animating routes, ultimately, in the longer-term, into Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park? [Something] that came and was grown from the local community? And had maybe a different offer than some of the other projects that we've been doing, like the White Building, which was more for the artistic community and creatives? (Interview, 2 September 2014)

In the narrative of the officers, beyond the already discussed aims of ‘animating’ routes into the QEOP and meeting the ‘priority themes’ appears the value of projects that originated in the local community, understood as different from the ‘creative’ community of HW and the LLDC-funded refurbishment of the White Building, a venue and artist studios building. Around two months ahead of the Games a call was put out for the three-month use of one part of the 67 Rothbury Road site. The winner of the bid was Frontside Gardens, a temporary volunteer-run skate

3 Critiques were raised by several local community groups such as by residents of Lea Bank Square (see blog: http://leabanksquare.blogspot.co.uk/). 4 The high footfall did not materialize because Transport for London decided to alternate traffic at Hackney Wick Station to control passengers flow during the Games.


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park assembled through recycled materials. Following a series of extensions to its original three-month period, the skate park has remained ever since and its lease has recently been renewed until September 2015, as part of the London Legacy Company Ltd Interim Use Strategy, one of the vehicles for the LLDC’s short to medium term programme of community oriented projects.5 Hub67 Behind the Frontside Gardens skatepark, the 67 Rothbury road site has also seen the establishment of a second community-led interim use project: a community and youth centre named Hub67 (Fig. 2).

Figure 2: Timeline. Source: public works/Camilla.

The idea of setting up a community hub originated in 2010 when the organisers of the local annual Hackney Wick Festival (not to be confused with the Hackney Wicked Festival), successfully applied for the £1m Big Local fund, awarded by the Big Lottery to a hundred community groups in the UK with the aim to support residents “to make [their] community a better place to live, changing things for the better" (Big Local, 2014). With the fund, the organisers set up the 'Wick Award' (http://wickaward.co.uk/) and led a local consultation to decide how to spend the fund. The results of the consultation, in 2011, were overwhelmingly youth-centred. As narrated by the chair of Hackney Wick Festival, local resident and former youth worker Tracie Trimmer, a "community hub, particularly for young people, was something that was coming up again and again" at a time when the area was increasingly witnessing the opening of "eateries, the cafes, those kind of places that the

5 Frontside Gardens has recently been presented as a positive case study in ‘Interim Uses’ section of the LLDC Local Plan, under statutory consultation in summer 2014 and currently awaiting approval (LLDC, 2014, Local Plan. Policy B.3: Creating vitality through interim uses).


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average Hackney Wick residents can't afford or don't identify with” (Interview, 17 July 2014). Finding a local venue where to establish a youth-centred community centre, however, proved difficult. "That all went very wrong. We didn't really have a venue, we couldn't find anything." (Ibid.) For two years Ms Trimmer was actively meeting civil servants, local politicians and officers from Hackney Council and the LLDC to garner support for the centre, until one day she was approached by an LLDC officer at a local community event and told about the LLDC’s decision to give her a building for the youth hub, ‘a secret millionaire moment’. The centre was going to be located on the 67 Rothbury St site, behind the Frontside skate park. The hub was originally to be built during spring and summer 2013, but the beginning of the project was delayed by series of logistical and legal issues internal to the LLDC. Finally, in late autumn 2013, a selection of architecture and design studios, including public works, were invited to tender for the provision of ‘design services for a temporary community hub at 67 Rothbury Road, Hackney Wick’ (LLDC, 2013). The bid was won by architectural studio LYN Atelier, with a proposal that centred on two components: a participatory design process that would involve future users and a sustainable design process through the re-use and repurposing of existing materials from the Olympic Games, such as the metal containers and fences (Fig. 3). These two components motivated what was defined ‘a pragmatic’ approach to the proposal:

given where we are and given what we got, the whole premise being you need to reuse and [given] the uncertainty of what we were really going to be [re]using […] the detail and the niceness would be in the detail rather than in the actually form. I just quite liked the idea that you find some cabins and stack them up on top of each other and say this is a community center, now we are going to make it nice. That tends to be our approach. Not really design for the sake of design (Interview with Andrew Lock/LYN Atelier, 17 July 2014).

Given the community-led consultation exercise of 2011 and the identification of the need for a community youth hub, architects at LYN Atelier expected to be presented with an already established youth group ready to engage in the design and decision-making process. Their original plan was to “try to make it as simple a thing as we can and then get the community in to make it their own” (Ibid), since it was understood that the more the building would be designed, the less ownership there would be by the community (Ibid).


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Figure 3: HUB 67 Proposal (2014: 4). Source: LYN Atelier.

However, the long delay between the consultation, the offer of a site (2013) and the actual beginning in spring 2014 had negatively affected the participation and interest of local young people and youth workers. To solve this, Ms Trimmer and other community members tried to set up an itinerant youth club with the aim of building a potential user group to be involved in the design. Many venues around Hackney Wick offered spaces, but their uncertain and flexible availability over time was seen as disruptive to the process:

"The thing about young people is that we needed to develop some consistency. We needed to have stuff happening at a time when they knew that it was happening. We couldn't shift things from one week to the next because on an outreach basis we didn't have that sort of relationship with them. So we needed to be able to say to them, pitch up on a Tuesday night, wherever it is and will see you there. And that wasn't possible because of the shifting nature of a lot of stuff that happened in the Wick." (Interview, 17 July 14).

The second issue affecting participation and interest in the design process had to do with the actual building location. For Ms Trimmer, the ‘two communities’ that needed to be connected were not the old and the new neighbourhoods in the QEOP as perceived by the LLDC, but were the two social, cultural and economic divide within Hackney Wick itself. Apparent to local residents is the chasm between the communities living in the social estates, such as the Gascoyne Estate, the Herbert Butler Estate and Wick Village in the northern part of the Wick Ward, and the ‘creative’ area south of the railway line, where most cafes, restaurants and nightlife venues are located. In her experience, the relationship between the residential side and the ‘creative side’ is ‘very limited’ because of the unaffordable prices of food and beverages and because "a lot of people, a lot of young people particularly are intimidated by these spaces." To stress her point, she recounted


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meeting a young woman of twenty one who had lived in the Lea Bank square her whole life and had never crossed the Wick beyond the railway station, something that in her experience is ‘not uncommon’. In this context, the community hub was intended

“for people who haven't made a lifestyle choice to live in Hackney Wick, but who have no choice but to live in Hackney Wick. […] This isn't another trendy venue when you can get a flat white or a flapjack… it really is about people who I think have been left behind" (Interview with Ms Trimmer, 17 July 2014).

The Rothbury Road site is, however, located in the southern ‘creative’ side of Hackney Wick, relatively distant from the residential areas. Ms Trimmer is afraid that this might constitute a barrier to participation as “it might be [too far] and there will be people who will have problems getting there. We're going to have to do walking buses" (Ibid). Hub67: testing design and community approaches As a pilot project for the LLDC’s Grass-roots Interim Uses Project, Hub67 in Hackney Wick has come under the funding programme known as the ‘launch pads’. In the explanation of the two LLDC officers working on the project, this is defined as “about identifying key node sites within existing communities where there were underutilised resources” (Interview, 2 September 2014). The value of the project lies in being a pilot for different ways of designing spaces as well as for working with local communities. This twofold interest in design and communities informs the meaning of interim uses as about

testing and piloting different ways of working and trialling new ideas. From a design perspective […] more ambitious, creative, recycled, reused, up-cycled approaches. From a community perspective is about trialling and piloting models, new approaches, new kinds of facilities, which is exactly what Hub 67 is aiming to do. And it's always about doing that in a temporary, kind of light touch way, where we can take a few more risks and we can try these things out (Interview, 2 September 2014).

In the experience of the architects involved in the design and construction of the hub, however, the relationship between the multiple agendas of the LLDC and unpredictability of experimenting with new design approaches to repurposing and reusing existing materials has proven complex to negotiate. To begin with, with the decision to extend the temporal length of the project to over two years has meant that the construction had to be


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subjected to building regulations, which is usually not the case for interim constructions expected to last less than two years. This has been particularly complicated by the fact that while the LLDC has required the building to have full certification for thermal efficiency, the containers had been formerly assembled for short-term summer use, so the architects have had to rethink their approach to the reuse and repurposing. The requirements of the LLDC, moreover, meant that the building specifications document amounted to over 250 pages, mostly to shift the risk of experimenting with recycled materials from the organisation to the suppliers. As explained by Andrew Lock from LYN Atelier “it’s all about liability, [about] who will take on the risk of reused stuff” (Interview, 17 July 2014).

At the same time, besides the PR, the possibility of realising such a project makes the scheme valuable despite the fact that the studio expects to make a loss, or at most to break even with costs. The technical challenge to design and build reusing existing materials is moved by considerations of environmental sustainability and the need to reuse and recycle. As explained by the architect, the belief in experimenting with yet untested methods is combined with the excitement of being able to potentially inform the future developments by the LLDC through processes of documenting and teaching:

I believe that we should be able to build buildings like these, and we should be able to reuse, and it is really exciting to be working with a massive organization that has got no way of doing it, to try and work out how we are going to do it. […] [W]e should be able to prove that the LLDC can produce something with recycled stuff, there should be real life building contracts in order to make this happen, and so I hope at the end we could sit down and say, ok, we’ve learnt this and this and this, and we are not going to do again like this, or we will, and that it does become constructive, because otherwise it is all a bit bonkers… (Ibid).

For the architects, the pedagogical value of the project lies in the chance of learning with and for the LLDC how to deliver a community space through yet untested design processes revolving around the sustainable reuse of existing materials. In addition, the delivery of the building is understood as a tangible evidence of how it is possible ‘to change the way we build buildings’ with the possibility that lesson could inform future LLDC commissions and building contracts. The building was finally completed in November 2014 and opened to the public in mid December 2014.


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Figure 5: Hub67, White Post Lane façade, 15 December 2014. Source: the authors.

Besides giving the land rent-free and paying for the commissioning of the building and its construction, the LLDC will also be involved in its management. In the first year the Hub67 will receive funding from the LLDC and from the Wick Award. For the LLDC officers, the Corporation is ‘basically managing a venue’ and as such has set a list of Key Performance Indicators such as “opening hours every week, number of visitors through the doors, number of community groups supported by use of the space, training sessions, educations sessions” (Interview, 2 September 2014). To manage the hub a full time paid manager will be employed by the LLDC, with the salary coming from both the LLDC and the Wick Award, and the management structure also involved a steering group composed of residents, local and non-local professionals as well as the Hackney Wick Festival committee (Hub67, 2014). From a community perspective, the method of management and decision-making of the HUB 67 activities is a version of a mixed approach, combining community groups, public and private organisations, to the delivery of local regeneration benefits. Written in the management and funding structure is a push for Hub67 to achieve financial sustainability by the second year. Reflecting on potential future core funding after initial fund, however, Ms Trimmer considers that that might be difficult to obtain since charities and public organisations are increasingly shifting towards project-based funding. This raises the possibility, after the initial year, of having to seek alternative income through commercial hire of the venue, as actually already written into the most recent draft of Hub67 Management Plan (Hub67, 2014).


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Seeding permanent uses Besides testing new design and community approaches in the delivery of regeneration benefits, the Hub67 is also seen by the LLDC as a pilot and a prototype for more permanent community facilities. As an organisation tasked with administering and delivery the legacy of the Games, the question of the legacy of grass-root interim uses is something that “is becoming more important, and people are realizing that interim uses are all very well, but it is so disappointing when they finish” (Interview, 15 July 2014). Interim uses are therefore “also about using these sites as opportunities for seeding long term uses” (Ibid) within the Legacy Community Scheme.6 In this logic, the justification for building a temporary rather than a permanent community youth facility is given by LLDC officers through a stress on building social infrastructure in advance of the construction of actual permanent facilities:

What we don’t want to do is to build a community place, a youth club, a community hall, [which] then just sits empty because there isn't anyone who identifies with it, or knows it’s there, or feels any ownership of it (Ibid).

In the language of the Learning from Others report, interim uses enable the LLDC to pilot approaches that can be taken on in the “long term strategies to specific areas for a specific purpose and group of people” (2013: 7) The ‘piloting’ nature of interim uses projects is here understood in relation to the specific purpose of delivering a new neighbourhood on the QEOP, where it is understood these facilities will be transferred after an ‘incubation’ period. The LLDC narrates this ‘seeding’ through the metaphor of the ‘stepping stone’ towards longer-term facilities in the Park:

[Hub67] is meant to be a place or a facility that people feel ownership of and then could hopefully transfer, like a pop-up.. we can't carry lock stock and barrel into the park, but at least, whoever is running it, and the user groups, can transfer in. (Ibid).

Stepping on the interim uses, user groups and the hub managers are meant to symbolically and materially cross over the canal, to bridge and connect the old with the new neighbourhoods. The idea that the social infrastructure of the hub could so easily transfer, however, has been described as ‘really unrealistic’ by Ms Trimmer:

6 The LLDC has been promoting this through direct investment as well as through negotiations with the developers of the new residential schemes along Hackney Wick and Fish Island, East Wick and Sweet Water, in the pre-bidding phase.


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I think if you are creating a community hub you are creating a community hub, and you don't just shift it to another community. I know we should all be part of the same community but actually in real terms, you know, it's really hard work to get a community to work together like that […] It's not as easy as lifting it up and taking it somewhere else. And it also isn't the same thing. You can create a model of it, in there, but it's not going to be the same" (Interview, 17 July 2014).

As evidenced by the experience of trying to set up a pop-up youth club, young people, and especially those who might find themselves marginalised by a shift towards the ‘creative industries’, by their housing situation and by their relative spatial isolation in the northern part of the Hackney Wick Ward, are unlikely to be able to transfer their activities elsewhere. For Ms Trimmer, the scenario of transferring the social infrastructure over to the new neighbourhoods could be seen as an indication of a lack of understanding about the human investment and commitment required to build a youth community facility “it's not as simple as just picking something up and moving it somewhere else" (Ibid).

Concerns have also been raised about the challenges that a temporary project poses to local, long-term workers, residents and community groups, particularly given that the LLDC’s local involvement is in itself relatively temporary.

"From a political point of view, with a small p, I think it can be quite challenging for people like the Hackney Youth Service, like the [local] councillors … not for the Legacy Company because I genuinely don't think that they need to have that on-going investment in it. You know, they do their bit, it's a pop-up and they go away again. […] other people, the community, people who are likely to invest in it and want to make it more long term, it's a bit of a challenge for them. I am guessing that maintaining relationships with these kind of projects is difficult as they are involved in so many – however, it would be great if they were involved for the long term. (Ibid).

In addition to being a challenge, the ‘pop-up’ imaginary of a test project can foreclose involvement as “it can be a bit of a get out. If something is not permanent, it could mean it's not needed. It's not relevant” (Ibid.) Asked about the impact of knowing that the hub will be short-lived, she concluded that it is something worrisome and unusual, and that "making a temporary provision for young people is actually quite irresponsible" (Ibid).


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Conclusion: learning from grass-root interim uses The role of interim uses in urban development scheme is becoming increasingly important in the planning and decision-making processes of public and private actors in London. The example of the range of interim uses directly and indirectly encouraged by the London Legacy Development Corporation in the context of the redevelopment of the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park and adjacent areas in East London is testament to the significance of temporary uses for longer term and more permanent urban transformation. In this paper we have discussed the different and at times competing values expressed by a range of institutional, professional and community actors involved in community and grass-root interim uses. We focused on the case study of Hub67 as an example of a project that originated in the work of local community groups to address the needs of the most overlooked communities in Hackney Wick. At the same time, the stated aim of LLDC officers of ‘learning from others’ and from community groups makes Hub67 a particularly valued project for piloting, testing and experimenting at the level of design and community engage. Hub67 can therefore be seen as an instance of multiple value processes translated between the different positions and agendas of landowners and commissioners, architectural professionals and community groups. The processes of value translation that have accompanied the inception, planning and realization – and that will most likely inform future negotiations of the uses of the community youth hub and over its eventual end – are not, however, to be considered neutral dynamics of negotiation and dialogue among peers. The critical study of the intentions, the languages and the potential frictions between the positions of the actors reveal the articulation of power differentials over the learning and the lessons to be learnt. In other words, if community interim uses can be seen as a learning device, who is learning what from whom? In answer to this question we have identified three main values of grass-root interim uses. The first is the value of ‘activating’ the fringes of the QEOP, and particularly the routes that physically, and to a certain degree symbolically, connect the re-opened site of the Olympic Games to its surrounding neighbourhoods. In this sense, grass-root interim uses in the ‘fringes’ of the QEOP are valuable place-marketing devices, raising the profile of vacant site in view of future developments and ensuring widespread local, national and international support for and consensus on the on-going delivery of the Olympic legacy. The auspicated connectivity produced by interim uses is understood as acting at the level of promotion of the LLDC for the benefit of consensus building.


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The second value of learning, experimenting, piloting, is predicated on the idea of interim uses as recycled, repurposed, reused; in other words, in the development of new approaches in design/architecture. As seen in the case of Hub67, however, under the open mantra of ‘trying things out’, ‘piloting’, ‘taking risks’ and ‘experimenting’, however, lies the fundamental mode of operation of large development schemes in the ‘era of regulatory capitalism’ (Raco, 2014). The lessons taught by the LLDC to its regeneration ‘suppliers’ such as architects and community groups, is one of risk aversion (for the LLDC) and risk externalisation. It could be argued, however, that the emerging trend of risk externalisation through (mimicked) grass-root process is worrying, particularly in the context of large-scale redevelopment schemes, as reproducing the emerging trend of replacing local demands through democratic political structure with increasingly technocratic and complex contractual negotiations (Raco, 2014:195). Thirdly, grass-root interim uses as a valuable learning devices in the context of a regeneration scheme. Particularly in terms of the relationship between resident communities and promises of local regeneration, the case of Hub67 evidences shifts in the provision of social benefits through jointly-delivered community infrastructures. The experience Hub67 outlines a situation in which the social benefits of the interim use are firmly rooted into community-led identification of needs and desires. Local community groups demonstrated to be proactive and entrepreneurial in seeking independent funding to improve their area. The main hurdle in the autonomous establishment of a community youth facility had been access to land, and here the collaboration with the LLDC as an important landowner in the area has proven beneficial. The possibility of delivering the hub through an interim project, moreover, has been argued to bring the additional value of ‘excitement’ and of ‘looking ahead’, of generating new ideas and aspirations for further development

Most places, you get into, and that's it. There's sort of nothing further. If you could view it in relation to what you might want the space to ideally be, you can start thinking about it (Interview with Ms Trimmer, 17 July 2014).

The flipside of the openness and experimentation is that there is “no genuine guarantee that it's going to be anything other than that” (Ibid), raising expectations that will may not be fulfilled in the long term. With several vacant plots around Hackney Wick and Fish Island poised to be redeveloped into new residential and mixed-use buildings, the future permanency of Hub67 is most certainly dependent upon the capability of the user groups to uproot and transfer their activities into the new residential areas on the QEOP.


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We conclude by raising the question of the role of interim uses in a wider urban pedagogy of contingent citizenship which local communities and individuals are encouraged and pushed to deploy increasingly entrepreneurial and flexible tactics in order to enter negotiations with land-owners and private-public territorial governance structures in order to gain long-expected community facilities with an expiry date. The values of experimenting with new design and community-led delivery of social infrastructures is however perceived by architectural studios and community groups as worth the risk. Yet, negotiating community benefits through interim uses risks to reproduce imaginaries of ‘drag and drop’ temporary urbanism (Ferreri, forthcoming) predicated on a fantasy of spatial mobility and temporal flexibility that is unlikely inclusive of large sections of the urban population, particularly in long-term disinvested in East London. While the ‘pop-up’ model might prove beneficial to experimenting, in the short term, with alterative marketing of the Legacy vision and with the technical piloting of more sustainable forms of recycled building processes, the long term regeneration benefit for local communities appears more uncertain. There therefore remains a need for further critical analysis of the implications of interim uses in contexts of the delivery of regeneration through regulatory capitalism, and for drawing attention to “wider questions over how public ‘benefit’ should be defined and who it is that should be responsible for its delivery” (Raco, 2012: 458-9). In the negotiation of translation and mediation of the values of interim uses, lies the potential for a reinvention of the relationship between grass-root urban practices and urban development. To assess and understand the many facets of such a potential requires a situated critical engagement with the specific social and spatial conditions of the emerging field of temporary use practice, and with the complex, negotiated and contingent values it aspires to embody.


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Meanwhile Space (2010). No Time to Waste... The Meanwhile Use of Assets for Community Benefit report. London: Meanwhile Space. Norman, P., (2012). LTGDC confirms Hackney Wick buys from Kemsley's Rock, Estates Gazette, 1 July 2010. Novy, J., and Colomb, C. (2013). Struggling for the right to the (creative) city in Berlin and Hamburg: new urban social movements, new ‘spaces of hope’?. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 37(5), 1816-1838. Oswalt P et al. (2013). Urban Catalyst: The Power of Temporary Use. Berlin: Jovis Verlag. Peck, J. (2011). Recreative City: Amsterdam, Vehicular Ideas and the Adaptive Spaces of Creativity Policy. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 36(3), 462-485. Poynter, G. (2009). ‘The 2012 Olympic Games and the reshaping of East London’, in Imrie, R., Lees, L., & Raco, M. (Eds.) Regenerating London: governance, sustainability and community in a global city. London: Routledge. Raco, M. (2014). Delivering Flagship Projects in an Era of Regulatory Capitalism: State‐led Privatization and the London Olympics 2012. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 38(1), 176-197. Raco, M. (2012). The privatisation of urban development and the London Olympics 2012. City, 16(4), 452-460. Urban Space Management (2014). ‘Starters Orders, a call for interim uses in the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park (QEOP)’, 6 January 2014.

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Learning from Temporary Use: Translating Values in the .../file/FerreriLang.pdf · Over the last fifteen years interim use projects in vacant urban spaces have come to the foreground