Cities around the world are increasingly using events as a tool to generate a wide range of effects, including image enhancement, income generation, and social cohesion. However, the use of events as an urban policy tool is hampered by the fact that events themselves also have their own objectives, such as making a profit or advancing the agenda of national and international organizations. In some cases, the objectives of the events and the city may coincide, but in other cases, they may not. Therefore, for cities there is a growing challenge in coordinating their events program in order to maximize the benefits for the city as a whole, while also supporting individual events. Many cities have already developed specific events policies and support mechanisms, but these tend to treat events as individual occurrences, rather than as an integral part of the urban ecology. Richards and Palmer have argued that the "eventful city" needs to take a strategic, holistic view of its events portfolio in order to move from being a city full of events to developing "eventfulness." This article considers how some cities are developing more holistic approaches to event policy and eventfulness. In reviewing the events policies of cities worldwide, it identifies three emerging policy models: event-centric policy, sector-centric policy, and network-centric policy. The article further considers the implications of these different models for events and events policies in cities.
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Vertical urbanisation is perceived as necessary to accommodate a growing population but is associated with severe risks for human well-being. It requires a profound understanding of how archi-tectural designs can ensure visually readable and liveable environments before it has been built. How-ever, current digital representation techniques fail to address the diverse interests of non-experts. Emerging biometric technologies may deliver the missing user information to involve (future) inhabit-ants at different stages of the planning process. The study aims to gain insight into how non-experts (visually) experience 3D city visualizations of designed urban areas. In two laboratory studies, univer-sity students were randomly assigned to view a set of the same level of detail images from one of two planned urban area developments in the Netherlands. Using eye-tracking technology, the visual behav-iour metrics of fixation count and duration and general eye-movement patterns were recorded for each image, followed by a short survey. The results show how visual behaviour and perception are remark-ably similar across different detail levels, implying that 3D visualizations of planned urban develop-ments can be examined by non-experts much earlier in the design process than previously thought.
