Underway: Sites as Places Becoming

This paper shows that sites in relation to time – understood as places of becoming – provide a useful frame for understanding the way “temporary use” acts as a transformative tool in urban design. This argument is presented in three points: one, that existing ways of describing and understanding temporary uses via the dichotomy of temporary versus permanent give a false impression of their long-term potential; two, that a static understanding of the site of intervention falls short in describing real-life processes; and three, that a foregrounding of time and temporality resulting in a dynamic understanding of site and place as becoming is useful when unfolding how these processes create difference at a site spanned out between past, present, and potential futures.