ABSTRACT
This chapter responds to two contemporary symptoms in urban studies. The first is the recourse to the term ‘hacking’ to describe how grass-roots mobilisation might remake cities in the Global North in the thralls of corporate capital. The second is an allied emergent focus on ephemeral architecture and urbanism that attempts to grapple with social-structural changes in contemporary cities. The reiteration and reassertion of the Western classical connection between permanence and durability during the Renaissance provided a working language of sovereignty for the cities of emergent European nations. Rather than durability, permanence in the built environment is about the conferral of property rights in land that produces a distinctive urban order by creating and sustaining a land market that is conducive to capitalist accumulation. At some level, this might sound counter-intuitive. Impermanence signals the absence of property-right protections, even if the structures are made of durable materials.
