Gihan Karunaratne

Transitory Urbanism

Transitory Urbanism explores how cities are continuously formed and reformed through movement, negotiation, and uncertainty. Rather than viewing transience as an anomaly, it positions instability, mobility, and variation as fundamental to urban life, forces that actively shape cities rather than disrupt them.The volume explores temporary architectures, mobile infrastructures, and adaptive practices that emerge in response to regeneration, environmental pressures, migration, and precarity. It pays particular attention to small, short-lived interventions, improvised shelters, shifting spatial uses, and informal forms of organisation that can evolve into more enduring transformations.Drawing on interdisciplinary perspectives, the publication brings together theoretical insights and grounded accounts spanning colonial infrastructures, peripheral regions, refugee settlements, informal housing, and post-disaster contexts. Across these settings, communities adapt, reorganise, and persist despite conditions of inequality and insecurity.Contributions from architecture, urban studies, anthropology, sociology, politics, and the arts combine conceptual reflection with close attention to places where urban space is actively contested and negotiated. The book further engages themes of inherited systems, diasporic and maritime urbanisms, and everyday strategies for navigating displacement, redevelopment, and environmental change.Focusing on informal networks, collective organisation, and small-scale practices that sustain urban life, Transitory Urbanism offers a nuanced lens on cities shaped by time, movement, and continual adjustment. It will be of interest to architects, city planners, urban designers, economists, students, and politicians, as well as anyone interested in the current social, cultural, and political issues on a global scale.