Paper short abstract:

Generally interpreted only as a transition in space, urban displacement has an important temporal dimension. Examples from Southern Europe illustrate the conflict between the planners' narrative of development as a linear progress, and the lived experience of displacement as a breach in time.

Paper long abstract:

Similarly to transnational migrations, displacement caused by urban renewal, gentrification or infrastructural development is generally read as a geographic phenomenon, a forced movement in space from one place to another. Old neighborhoods, demolished or gentrified, are compared to new houses, blocks, or estates, as if the two poles were coeval and synchronic. But the timing of this transition is often overlooked: temporality plays a crucial part in the experience of the evicted, and its effects can be both subtle and influential.

Drawing from ethnographic data collected from fieldwork on evictions in Barcelona and Rome, I reflect on the temporality of urban displacement, as an underestimated aspect of spatial transformations. For residents, the waiting years of the transition, when the old space is no longer as was and the new one not yet as will be, influence both how the new spaces are interpreted and how the old ones are remembered. As in the lefebvrian difference between conceived and lived urban spaces, a subjective temporality conflicts with the linear narrative of planners. Like sympathetic magic, that makes the desirable happen by connecting it to natural phenomena,

urban planning is justified by linking it to the inevitable passage of time, from the obsolete to modernity.

Beyond being spatially alienated, the displaced find themselves “unstuck in time”. To cope with this double disconnection, while investing the new spaces of meaning and legibility, they create periodic celebrations, invent rites of passage, create shared calendars, to reintegrate their experience in their personal flow of temporality.