THE NON-TRAVELLING CIRCUS

摘要

Until a few years ago, a "pop-up" was a book you gave to your children. But since the credit crunch, it has come to mean something else: a pop-up installation, now an increasingly familiar aspect of urban life. While developers navigate planning or wait for land to accrue sufficient value to make it worth building something permanent, coveted city centre sights -particularly in London - have become home to all manner of temporary structures offering a range of commercial or leisure amenities. These "meanwhile" developments are located on prime city-centre land and tend to be characterised by two features. First, while pop-up parks or pop-cinemas are by no means unheard of, most of these temporary operations are retail oriented. Boxpark - which rebrands and repurposes shipping containers into small shopping and eating centres aimed at young people - is arguably the most visible operator, with outlets in Shoreditch, Croydon and Wembley. The second aspect is that these developments are specifically built as temporary structures with no anticipation of any permanent shelf-life. But a new development in White City is out to ambitiously challenge both these perceptions.