T-Factor White Paper

10 Recommendations for Temporary Use, Urban Regeneration, and Just Transitions

After four years of work exploring and testing the role and potential of temporary use in urban regeneration, the T-Factor White Paper summarises and proposes 10 key recommendations for endorsing and enabling these practices as integral components of sustainable, inclusive, and dynamic urban development strategies.

The recommendations not only build on practical experience and learning across the pilot cities, but also leverage and integrate the insights stemming from the ten Roadshow events organised in Florence, Milan, Bilbao, Shanghai, Dortmund, Amsterdam, Kaunas, Lisbon, London, and Lodz.

Significant research and discussion have already been dedicated to temporary uses, with many arguments (and critics) focusing on civic participation, reactivation of spaces, and agile and flexible placemaking. Much less deliberately inquires into the role that temporary uses can play within macro level strategies of ‘just transitions’ and advance climate and social justice objectives through novel forms of civic engagement and collective experimentation. Our ultimate intent with the White Paper is a call for bold policies and institutional agendas that can embrace temporary uses within bold visions and approaches to city-making, realising three major shifts:

  • SHIFT IN PURPOSE: endorsing, aligning, and infusing temporary uses with principles and strategic objectives of just urban transitions.
  • SHIFT IN TIME: understanding and positioning temporary uses as time-bounded yet long-term steered practices of change.
  • SHIFT IN SCALE: leveraging and harnessing temporary uses as distributed experiments at the whole city scale.