Meanwhile Uses in Urban Transformations: Context-Sensitive Social Impact Assessment of Temporary Interventions Within Long-Term Regeneration Processes

Meanwhile Uses (MwUs) are increasingly adopted within long-term urban regeneration processes to activate vacant or underused spaces while wider transformations unfold. However, their operational characteristics remain weakly systematized, and their social value is difficult to assess over time. This study combines literature and policy review, fieldwork, interviews, stakeholder roundtables and comparative analysis of six London-based cases. The first part analyses project trajectories, stakeholders’ relationships and recurrent functions to develop a generalized cross-functional MwU process model. The second compares seven social impact assessment approaches and, integrating stakeholder perspectives, identifies Theory of Change (ToC) as the approach most closely aligned with the adaptive and context-dependent nature of MwUs. The ToC structure is applied to the Ebury Edge case through a retrospectively reconstructed “ex-ante” configuration and an “in-progress” configuration. The method is further integrated with a set of project-specific indicators to allow monitoring of social impacts over time. Findings highlight that the MwU model can be represented as a process with key recurring functions, and it can be performed by various actors according to governance structure, vacancy conditions and the wider regeneration process. Besides, the study provides a multi-step procedure to map social transformations over time, capturing the complexity of transformative processes. The integration of the two proposals (process model and social impact assessment) represents a support for decision makers in planning and monitoring MwU interventions within longer-term regeneration processes, in alignment with UN SDG 11 “Sustainable cities and communities”.