Zombie Places? Pop Up Leisure and Re-Animated Urban Landscapes

Abstract

This chapter focuses on a temporary, site-specific ‘pop up’ cinema held in May 2012 at Marshall’s Mill, Leeds (UK), as a case study of changing urban leisure landscapes. In contrast to the Cineplex, pop up cinema has been described a ‘grassroots movement, where audiences get to participate and experience films communally in unique locations’ (Bennett, 2010, para. 1). The case study of pop up cinema is framed more broadly through theo-rizations of urban regeneration and re-use of ‘dead’ city spaces; fittingly, the chapter links the pop up cinema event and re-animated places together through the metaphor of ‘zombies’. Zombies are approached in two conceptual ways: to theorize and critique dead zones in cities but also to celebrate their resourceful, and often playful, re-animation through pop up events. Cities often have dead spaces wherever semi-abandoned or disused;¹ they are also sites of the ‘living dead’, people who frequent featureless strip malls, ubiquitous fast food restaurants, carbon-copy big box stores, corporatized entertainment attractions and theme parks and monolithic sports stadia. These sites offer standardized, simulated or ‘inauthentic’ leisure and lifestyle experiences — places Ritzer (2003) has named ‘islands of the living dead’ and Harvey (1988) called ‘voodoo cities’. In this chapter, I draw these concepts together and build upon them, as ‘zombie places’.