This paper provides an introduction to the special issue of the Journal of Policy Research in Tourism, Leisure and Events on Festival Cities and Tourism. It provides a contextualisation of the conversations surrounding the relationship between cities and their festivals during the Covid-19 pandemic. Focussing on the ‘festival city’ of Edinburgh, we examine how festival organisers reacted to the challenges of the pandemic, and how they strove to maintain contact with audiences and other stakeholders. We then review the different contributions to the special issue, ranging from festivalisation and suburban food festivals in Barcelona to an art festival in Dublin, the European Capital of Culture in Hungary and the festival portfolio of Hong Kong.
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As the economy becomes more globalized, a growing number of events are exerting an influence on activity and innovation globally in different fields. Therefore, we argue that "eventful cities" can act as important catalysts for eventfulness in other places as well. This article analyzes the case of the Sónar electronic music festival, an event that originated in Barcelona, Spain, but which now runs different editions in many cities worldwide. This empirical study of the innovation capacity of a cultural event examines how a locally based music festival has transformed itself by using the global "space of flows" to influence the local "space of places." The Sónar Festival has turned itself into a relational hub in a global cultural network, using stylistic innovations to link geographically dispersed nodes in order to create new products, open up new markets, and strengthen its own position as a global source of eventfulness.
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The use of events as policy tools in cities has become widely recognized. However, most studies concerning this topic do not capture the complex interrelationships that underpin the development of an eventful city. This study applies a practice approach, in order to analyze the dynamics of the eventful city practice. It places the urban event practice centrally in the analysis and focuses on the actual "sayings and doings" of the practice. The event practice of the 2015 Incubate festival in Tilburg, the Netherlands, is analyzed by means of ethnographic methods, including participant observation and interviews. Incubate illustrates how both the city and the event are performed within the practice: the event shapes the city and the city shapes the event. However, the integration of the festival into alternative spaces in the city means that it does not increase the visibility of Tilburg, and therefore fails to deliver value to its eventful city policy.
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From June 28 to July 7 the National Arts Festival took place in Grahamstown, South Africa. For the 20th time Cue, a daily print newspaper about the Festival, was produced by Rhodes University journalism students. It was the first time that the newspaper was printed in full color. Cue is at the core of journalistic production during the Festival. But nowadays, what is a newspaper without pictures or without an online edition? Cue Pix, run by the photo department at the School of Journalism and Media Studies in the AMM (African Media Matrix) provides the pictures. Cue Online is run by the NML (New Media Lab) in the same building and is mostly shoveling print content online. Cue Radio and Cue TV take care of the audio and video, and broadcast during the Festival. Up to 2000 copies of Cue newspaper were printed daily with the number of sold copies around 1600. The newspaper was sold in the Grahamstown streets for 3 Rand. The number of pages of Cue ranges from 16 to 20, including advertisements. Cue is produced by students and lecturers of the School of Journalism and consists of about 50 student-reporters, 10 sub-editors, and 2 editors (who are generally University staff). The productions layout is taken care of by a group of design students. Twenty students from the photo department take care of the pictures and rework them with Adobes Photoshop. Cue TV and Cue Radio (with a total of about 10 students) brought their reporting skills to the Festival as well. Reporting about the Festival by Cue is a major happening that has been growing over the years. From print to TV, to radio and online. This is fantastic, but also reflects equal problems in the media industry: each media platform runs their own show. Print, TV, radio and photography: they all have their own targets, content production, and some coordination. In order to take full advantage of the different possibilities of all the media platforms, convergence is the keyword.
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This chapter takes a closer look at the case of Amsterdam as a particular manifestation of a film festival city. Drawing from a new dataset on festivals in the Netherlands, the data supports the view of film festivals as a highly dynamic cultural sector: Internationally acclaimed film festivals exist beside smaller festivals that are more community bound; new festivals emerge annually, and young festivals struggle to survive the three-to-five-year mark.Amsterdam holds a unique position in the Dutch film festival landscape as a third of all film festivals in the Netherlands take place in the capital city. Our data collection helps to bring parts of the city’s film infrastructure to the forefront. On the one hand, Amsterdam’s top five locations for film festival events show clear creative cities logic: The data shows just how powerful the pull of such locations is. On the other hand, we find evidence of placemaking and livable city strategies: Amsterdam’s film festivals extend into the capillaries of the city.Dedicated festival datasets may cast new perspectives on local or national festival landscapes, by revealing patterns that remain hidden in qualitative and case-study based projects. But there are also challenges to address in data-driven research on festival cultures, we name a few such as categorization of data. We conclude that such challenges can be more easily faced if more datasets, of for instance, other cities, are pursued and become available.
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Purpose: This research explores how protest events can change and develop over time, through an analysis of stakeholder perceptions of the EXIT festival in Serbia. In doing this, it builds on previous research into protest events from a critical events studies perspective and has implications for the management and understanding of events linked to social movements. Design/methodology/approach: This research took a neo-institutionalist perspective and is based on 18 stakeholder interviews, which were analysed using reflexive thematic analysis. Purposive sampling in the highly-networked city of Novi Sad, Serbia, allowed for the inclusion of diverse participants from politics, NGOs, media and the festival itself. Findings: The findings reveal that the EXIT festival has departed significantly from its original protest roots. Although it is now perceived as part of the dominant political culture in Serbia, it still has the potential to campaign on issues of relevance to the region, which is unrealised. This research demonstrates that the neo-institutionalist perspective can offer fresh insights for research into protest events. Taking this perspective suggests practical implications for the managers of events with protest roots and for social movements seeking to use protestival-style methods to achieve social change. Originality/value: This paper provides a new theoretical perspective on protest events and proposes a new model that can be used in future research into protest events that persist over time. It also suggests implications for the management and development of protest events within social movements.
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Expos, festivals and events have become increasingly important as tools of urban developmentin recent decades. The competitive drive to put cities on the global map has led many to adoptevent-based strategies, including the creation of ‘eventful cities’, ‘festival cities’ and ‘eventportfolios’. World Expos have taken on a particular significance as ‘pulsar events’ that canshape the host city through urban development, increased tourism and place branding. Eachhost city also uses the event in a different way, and gives it a unique flavour that tempers theeventual effects. This paper reviews the literature on World Expos and their effects, identifyingthemes including Place branding, Tourism flows, Resident attitudes and Architecture and urbandevelopment. It then analyses the experience of Barcelona, twofold Expo host and a‘paradigmatic’ example of a city developed through mega events.
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The World Health Organization (WHO) strives to assist and inspire cities to become more ‘age-friendly’ through the Global Age-Friendly Cities Guide. An age-friendly city offers a supportive environment that enables residents to grow older actively within their families, neighbourhoods and civil society, and offers extensive opportunities for their participation in the community. In the attempts to make cities age-friendly, ageism may interact with these developments. The goal of this study was to investigate the extent to which features of age-friendly cities, both facilitators and hindrances, are visible in the city scape of the Dutch municipalities of The Hague and Zoetermeer and whether or not ageism is manifested explicitly or implicitly. A qualitative photoproduction study based on the Checklist of Essential Features of Age-Friendly Cities was conducted in five neighbourhoods. Both municipalities have a large number of visual age-friendly features, which are manifested in five domains of the WHO model, namely Communication and information; Housing; Transportation; Community support and health services; and Outdoor spaces and buildings. Age-stereotypes, both positive and negative, can be observed in the domain of Communication and information, especially in the depiction of third agers as winners. At the same time, older people and age-friendly features are very visible in the cityscapes of both municipalities, and this is a positive expression of the changing demographics. Original article at Sage: https://doi.org/10.1177/1420326X19857216
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