Management of the Meantime: The Senses, Attachments, and Time in the Aesthetic City

In this dissertation, I study the aestheticization of the city through the temporary use of space and culture, a strategy known as temporary urbanism. The study takes place in Refshaleøen, a post-industrial site in Copenhagen that has been on hold for 28 years since the bankruptcy of a shipyard in 1996. Often, these post-industrial spaces are experienced as an alternative to the planned, regulated, and neoliberal city. They look and feel like spatial and temporal exceptions; meantime spaces that make room for different ways of shaping and inhabiting the city. With this study, I explore affects such as loss and nostalgia but also hope, which surround the gradual incorporation of these spatial and temporal exceptions into the ‘city as we know it’. The city as we know it here refers to a city influenced by an aesthetic economy that propels Refshaleøen’s transition from a post-industrial, dormant, self-organized place to a cultural, aestheticized, and curated neigh-bourhood.
The case study took place at a particularly significant point in this long, but now accelerating, meantime: the point at which nothing had really changed, but everything started to feel different. It is in this feeling that I locate and study aestheticization. This point in the development of Refshaleøen therefore sets the scene for my exploration of the sensory conditions of everyday life in the city: how change is felt before it is seen, and how sensory reorganizations take place in the aestheticization of the city. The research question driving the study is:
How does aestheticization work through people’s sense of time and their attachments?
Pursuing this research question, I develop conceptual and empirical insights on temporality and attachments as aspects of the sensory ordering of spatial and other forms of change. I argue that temporality and attachments, as aspects of the conditions of everyday life in the city, are important to how people participate in, or withdraw from, the environments in which they live or work. I develop an interdisciplinary theoretical framework that combines organization studies, urban cultural theory, and sociology. Across these fields, I form a novel approach to urban transformation in the aesthetic economy. First, by drawing on and advancing theories on place attachment, I shed light on how attachments become implicated in spatial politics. And second, by drawing on and contributing to theories on future-making, I shed light on how urban transformation takes place not just through material and sensory reorganizations, but also through temporal orders.
This novel approach to urban transformation is developed across four research papers. The first paper lays the methodological basis for the dissertation by developing an ‘analytical sensorisation’ as a starting point for the study of sensory orders as social phenomena. The second paper elaborates this methodological basis of the dissertation through French pragmatic sociology. Through this sociology, the paper develops an ethnographic sensitivity towards the study of, among other things, actors’ engagement in their close material environments and their shaping and shifting of personal attachments. The third paper presents a conceptual understanding of place attachments and their relation to spatial politics in organization studies and human geography. Intervening in these debates, the paper advances a feminist concept of attachment to shed new light on a well-established critique of place attachments. Moving beyond this critique, the paper explores how place attachments work affectively. Finally, the fourth empirical paper studies actors’ daily navigation in temporary urbanism through an analysis of how the future is felt under temporary conditions.
The dissertation’s concluding discussion unfolds the implications for the conceptualisation of the senses, time, and attachment. It also extends insights from the study to phenomena that are related to, and can learn from, the study of temporary urbanism and aestheticization, such as: affective labour in the aesthetic economy, temporary forms of organizing, organizational atmospheres, and the making and negotiation of community in co-working spaces and other commons. These implications are, in brief, captured by the notion of the ‘management of the meantime’. The dissertation proposes the management of the meantime as a way to understand how aestheticization works through people’s sense of time and their attachments. Attachments are here understood as the feeling of what matters and what is possible. The management of the meantime is the process by which people’s attachments are balanced, and their sense of time is recalibrated to a temporal order that sustains the temporary as an open promise of an alternative.