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What is a pop-up store and how can it be used for organisational counterspacing? The pop-up can be interpreted as a fashionable and hypermodern platform focusing on the needs of a younger generation of consumers that searches for new experiences and is prone to ad hoc decision-making. From this perspective, the pop-up is a typical expression of the experience economy. But it is more. The ephemeral pop-up store, usually lasting from one day to six months, is also a spatial practice on the boundary between place as something stable/univocal and space as something transitory/polyphonic. Organizational theory has criticized the idea of a stable place and proposed the concept of spacing with a focus on the becoming of space. In this article, the pop-up store is introduced as a fashionable intervention into organizational spacing. It suggests a complementary perspective to non-representational theory and frames the pop-up as co-actor engaging everyday users in appropriating space. Drawing on Lefebvre’s notions of differential space, festival and evental moment, theory is revisited and then operationalized in two pop-up store experiments. Apart from contributing to the ongoing theoretical exploration of the spacing concept, this article aims to inspire differential pop-up practices in organisations. https://www.linkedin.com/in/overdiek12345/
Urban farming projects often involve the (temporarily) redevelopment of urban space by local co-productions of citizens and/or entrepreneurs. To realize their ambitions these coalitions often need support of public (government) resources such as time, money, space and regulation (Green Deal Stadslandbouw, 2013). This paper asks the question to what extent the development of urban farming projects can be understood as an example of planning through direct citizen participation/ participatory governance (e.g. Cornwall, 2004; Roberts, 2004) and what this means for the role of the municipal planning professional or civil servant in making these projects successful. Literature on the role of the municipal planner or civil servant in urban farming projects mainly concerns the role as enabler of projects given the many difficulties for projects. However, when looked at the development of urban farming as an example of citizen participation/ participatory governance and the transfer of social functions towards society other roles and tasks of planners seem to be important to make urban farming successful. This discussion paper looks to the role of planners and civil servants in some related government domains such as landscape (e.g. Van Dam et al. 2008, 2010, 2011) and neighbourhood development (e.g. Frieling et al., 2014) to complement our understanding of the role of planners in making urban farming projects successful. With this analysis the paper sets the scene for further research into tools for the planning professional or civil servant to support urban farming. In the paper the situation in Amsterdam serves as an example.
In on editorialization: structuring space and authority in the digital age, Marcello Vitali-Rosati examines how authority changes in the digital era. Authority seems to have vanished in the age of the web, since the spatial relationships that authority depends on are thought to have levelled out: there are no limits or boundaries, no hierarchies or organized structures anymore. Vitali-Rosati claims the opposite to be the case: digital space is well-structured and material and has specific forms of authority. Editorialization is one key process that organizes this space and thus brings into being digital authority. Investigating this process of editorialization, Vitali-Rosati reveals how politics can be reconceived in the digital age.
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