Creative responses to an informal space: the affordances of Pomona Island

Kaaristo, Maarja ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2803-0418, Edensor, Tim ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4715-6024 and Warnaby, Gary ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6696-6671 (2025) Creative responses to an informal space: the affordances of Pomona Island. Urban Geography. pp. 1-21. ISSN 0272-3638

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Abstract

Many former manufacturing locations have become sites of regeneration, dominated by the service economy. However, resulting developments are often criticized for homogenizing places. Focusing on Pomona Island, a current regeneration site in Greater Manchester, UK, this paper reveals how a range of specific place-based affordances have successively emerged over time, through periods of leisure, industrialization, dereliction, regeneration, planning (re)assignations and property development. The paper considers the main affordances – possibilities for action offered by the environment – of Pomona. We identify the key meta-affordance of islandness, and subsequently, the historical, recreational, sensory, and ecological affordances of the site. These, we argue, have stimulated a plenitude of creative forms and practices that highlight the value of such sites for city-dwellers and propose fertile resources for thinking about more progressive forms of urban regeneration. We contend that more attention should be paid to the potential that inheres in the multiple affordances of such interstitial spaces for urban planning and place management.