Instant urbanism and the politics of mobile architecture

Demands to mobilise architecture and urban space have become increasingly common in recent years, as part of discourses and practices of temporary use and instant urbanism. These approaches put an accent on mobility, flexibility, spontaneity and improvisation. Contemporary commentators and practitioners often acknowledge the influence in this regard of earlier avant-garde architectural experimentation from the 1960s, involving among others Archigram, Yona Friedman, Constant and the situationists. This paper returns to such earlier projects to explore further the implications of their emphasis on mobility and flexibility, and to consider the ways in which their visions of mobile architecture and cities were opposed to dominant spatial structures and imbued with emancipatory intent. However, through engaging with critical debates at the time, including those involving Henri Lefebvre and the group Utopie, it is particularly concerned with problematising the celebration of mobility, flux and flow that some of these visions entail, along with their abstract and universal invocations of the nomadic. The paper asserts the need to attend to the power relations through which mobilities are produced, and to a deeper sense of the contested politics of mobile architecture. Doing so is especially significant in the current era when mobility, flexibility, adaptability and creativity have become central to ideologies of neoliberal urbanism, and when calls for their extension can easily become complicit with processes of neoliberalisation. Rethinking the legacies of earlier avant-garde visions may, in this way, help to sharpen senses of both threats and possibilities within fields of temporary or instant urbanism.