In 1961, French geographer Jean Gottmann described the suburban-dream pop-up of the American East Coast as one of the wonders of the world, a “megalopolis” stretching 400 miles from Boston to Washington, D.C., where 32 million people lived in peace, with a higher standard of living than ever before. Subsequent urban riots and pop-up political events of the late 1960s made Jane Jacobs’s The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961)—a call for an alternative to urban renewal and the demolition of inner cities—seem the more prescient vision. Jacobs wrote as artists’ studios popped into the vacant industrial loft spaces of SoHo, in the path of Robert Moses’s proposed Lower Manhattan Expressway. Hidden behind darkened windows to conceal illegal living, a new culture popped up with love-ins, be-ins, performance artists, and Beat poets, only to be commercialized in Andy Warhol’s Factory, a shrine to another meaning of “Pop.” Developers soon learned to capitalize on this arts-led pop-up development trend, following urban pioneers as they opened new galleries, restaurants, or bars in declining low-rent industrial areas.
With the malling and fragmentation of the U.S. in carefully regulated new public spaces, a new kind of official, commercial pop-up has become the norm. Boston’s Faneuil Hall Marketplace (1976) showed the way, with its populist historic preservation and lively mix of licensed carts and stands. The same logic is seen in temporary street closures and pop-up festivals in major cities. This movement is also evident in the resurgence of pop-up farmers’ markets in American streets and suburban parking lots. When the country’s drive-in cinemas were decimated by the growth of television in the 1980s and 1990s, pop-ups again provided an alternative use for these swaths of asphalt—as massive flea markets. More recently, in cities like Austin, Texas, Los Angeles, and Portland, Ore., the combination of youth culture and underused inner-city parking lots has produced more trendy swap shops and hipster bazaars, as well as the gourmet food-truck craze.
As American personal mobility slowly declines due to the rising cost of gasoline, once frowned-upon inner-city locations have become attractive venues easily accessible for pedestrians, cyclists, and riders of public transportation. Public space that was once occupied by the car has become available for other citizens, as in New York, where transportation commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan realized that eliminating parking spaces, widening sidewalks, designating bike lanes, planting trees, and issuing licenses for pop-up cafés could radically alter the street culture.
The beauty of American pop-ups is their immediacy and apparent spontaneity. But usually they are complex phenomena operating at a variety of levels, involving many participants with varied short-term and long-term strategic goals. The reallocation of public space in Times Square from vehicles to pedestrians began with temporary beach furniture and folding chairs before more permanent landscaping and benches were installed. A pop-up food park in a parking lot in Austin or Portland may serve in a mutually beneficial relationship with the bar next door; it affects the character of the city itself, every bit as does new zoning that encourages storefronts, cafés, and street life in general, or a light-rail line that supports clusters of apartment buildings, services, and workplaces around each stop. Pop-up culture offers a very different, often pedestrian- and bicycle-based vision of the American urban future.