Events in the City

Using public spaces as event venues

Andrew Smith

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781138559097
• eBook ISBN: 9781317656340
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Hospitality, Travel & Tourism Industry
• Index: Business

Cities are staging more events than ever. Within this macro-trend, there is another less acknowledged trend: more events are being staged in public spaces. Some events have always been staged in parks, streets and squares, but in recent years events have been taken out of traditional venues and staged in prominent urban spaces. This is favoured by organisers seeking more memorable and more spectacular events, but also by authorities who want to animate urban space and make it more visible.

This book explains these trends and outlines the implications for public spaces. Events play a positive role in our cities, but turning public spaces into venues is often controversial. Events can denigrate as well as animate city space; they are part of the commercialisation, privatisation and securitisation of public space noted by commentators in recent years. The book focuses on examples from London in particular, but it also covers a range of other cities from the developed world. Events at different scales are addressed and, there is dedicated coverage of sports events and cultural events.

This topical and timely volume provides valuable material for higher level students, researchers and academics from events studies, urban studies and development studies.

1 Introduction

The established geography of events is shifting. More organised events are being staged in public spaces: in our parks, streets and squares. Public spaces in cities have always been used for events, but they are increasingly being used as venues for commercial and ticketed occasions. Events that were once confined to purpose built arenas are now being staged in public spaces. These trends provide the focus for this book.

The main aim of this book is to explore the use of public spaces as event venues. The book will explain this trend, explore the debates that surround it and, perhaps most importantly, it will examine the outcomes for public spaces. Parks, streets and squares change when they are used for events; they are reconfigured temporarily and in more enduring ways. In the urban design literature events are often regarded as valuable tools to animate cities: to revive them and make them feel more alive. Others argue that events are part of wider processes that are undermining our public spaces. For example, Spracklen et al. (2013: 167) worry about ‘blind obedience to the belief in events as transformative’ − something that ignores the way some events contribute to more problematic processes: of commercialisation, privatisation and securitisation. These contrasting interpretations are introduced and explained in this book.

From the city as stage, to the city as staged

In a book about using urban spaces as event venues, it is impossible to ignore the idea of the city as a stage. This is a very established notion and one that is commonly used without referring directly to the role of cities as event venues. For example, Atkinson and Laurier (1998: 200) cite the idea that our increasingly sanitised, historicised cities are ‘three dimensional stage sets for tourism’. Every stage needs actors and analysing city users as performers on a stage is an increasingly common perspective within urban studies. Other theatrical metaphors are also used to understand the production and consumption of urban experiences. This book illustrates that, rather than merely an apt metaphor or analogy, the idea of our cities as stages is now a reality. Urban parks, squares and streets are used as stages for a variety of commercially-, community- and politically-oriented events. As Richards and Palmer (2010: 27) state, cities have become ‘a stage across which a succession of events is paraded’. References to stages suggest cities are merely platforms or backdrops for events, but this underestimates the role of the city in urban events. When these events are staged in public spaces, the city is as important as any other content. Public space is ‘performed’ (Thörn, 2006; Merx, 2011) and the contemporary city is not just a stage; it is staged (Colomb, 2012).

In this book the process through which events affect the urban spaces they occupy is referred to using the term ‘eventisation’. It is worth emphasising that city space is not the only phenomenon that has been ‘eventised’. There has been a more fundamental eventisation of society (Žižek, 2014) and an associated eventisation of history – with times past reduced to a series of supposedly pivotal events. As Pine and Gilmore (1999) emphasise, there has also been an eventisation of our economy. To add value in contemporary capitalism, products are now staged – rather than merely manufactured or promoted. These complex processes provide the context for this book. However, the intention is not to explore them in depth. Instead, the aim is to explore the way urban public spaces have been eventised by staging official events in them.

The focus of this book

Events come in various forms. The focus in this book is official events that are pre-planned and sanctioned by urban authorities. Belghazi (2006: 105) suggests these ‘rigorously planned events’ provide entertainment, but are designed to achieve important objectives – hence they represent ‘serious fun’. Unplanned events and those which are work oriented (conferences, meeting etc.) are not addressed directly in this book. This focus on planned, leisure events does not mean other types of events are deemed to be less important. The critical urban studies literature is already replete with texts that address unofficial, radical, spontaneous events. Events that challenge the status quo and established interests are particularly associated with the situationists (Pløger, 2010). Protest events are not addressed directly in this book, but are covered by other texts (e.g. see Lamond and Spracklen, 2015).

There are certain advantages of the purposeful focus on official events. Focusing on pre-planned, sanctioned events helps to explore the way recent trends are driven by official urban policy and event management objectives. It also helps to avoid a drift into a more general analysis of urban activities and trends. In any case, having official events as the focus does not mean looser, unsanctioned events are completely ignored. As several authors point out, official events provide the framework or inspiration for unofficial happenings (Stevens and Shin, 2014), something that is discussed further in Chapter 4. And just because events are ‘official’ does not mean they are experienced in the manner intended: authorised meanings are negotiated and resisted in ways not necessarily envisaged by organisers (see Chapter 8).

Focusing on official events doesn’t entirely resolve definitional problems as it is difficult to define what we really mean by an event. Events are themed occasions which are ultimately defined by their limited time frame and their spatial focus. Urban events are defined by their contrast to the everyday – they are deliberately designed to be different from the normal functioning of a city. The implicit objective is to create a differentiated space and time: a time ‘out of sync’ with clock time and an ‘out of place’ space. How well this is achieved determines the event experience. Planned events are perhaps best defined by Jakob (2013: 448) who deems them to be the: ‘deliberate organisation of a heightened emotional and aesthetic experience at a designated time and space’. Despite these specifications, it is still sometimes difficult to distinguish between events and other time limited phenomena. For example, it seems artificial to separate events from public art, street markets or pop-up installations.

To examine the urbanisation of events, this book addresses events staged in public spaces that might have previously been confined to more conventional arenas or non-urban locations. Good examples include sport events and music festivals. Unlike other key texts on events and cities (Richards and Palmer, 2010), this book addresses both cultural events and sport events. This is important because sport events are increasingly being staged in urban public spaces and these events are neglected in the existing literature which is skewed towards cultural festivals. This book examines a wide range of events both in terms of their theme and in terms of their scale – from small-scale events to mega-events.

Alongside clarifying the types of events covered by this book, it is also worth emphasising the types of spaces addressed. The focus is events staged in urban public spaces: but public space is a complex and contested concept. Chapter 2 examines different interpretations and explains how the term is defined and used in the rest of the text. This book not only examines urban public space in general, but centrally located urban public spaces in particular. Indeed, one of the main themes addressed in Chapter 3 is the way events have relocated to city centres in recent years. This is part of a wider trend in which the modern project to establish separate reservations for leisure and play in cities has been undermined (Stevens, 2007).

In addition to the spatial focus, there is also a focus on certain types of places. The text examines large cities in developed countries particularly those in the UK, US, Australia and Canada. There is a specific emphasis on capital cities (Berlin, Canberra, Edinburgh, Helsinki, London, Paris, New York, Singapore, Valletta) as these are very good examples with which to illustrate some of the difficulties reconciling global (external) objectives and local (internal) priorities. Other global cities in Canada and Australia also feature: Melbourne, Montreal, Toronto, Sydney and Vancouver. Inevitably there is a UK focus and several large British cities are covered: Belfast, Birmingham, Bristol, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Leeds, Manchester and Newcastle. At the site level, various examples of streets, squares and parks are cited, including some which will be familiar to many readers; the Champs-Elysées (Paris), Trafalgar Square (London), and Central Park (New York).

For various reasons, the book focuses particularly on London. The author lives and works in London and this is where much of his events research has been conducted. There are more objective reasons for this spatial focus too. London is one of the world’s great events cities. Many events staged here have a long history, but the authorities have made specific efforts in recent years to bring new events to London and to use events strategically. Since 2005, events strategy has been dominated by attempts to optimise the legacies of the 2012 Olympic Games. During this period there has also been a concerted attempt to use London’s public spaces as event venues. The city’s parks, squares and streets have always been used for events, but this practice has intensified in recent years. Since 2000, London has elected a Mayor with executive powers in various public policy domains which govern how events are staged in public spaces: e.g. tourism, city marketing, policing, transport and emergency services. Accordingly, various organisations linked to the Mayor’s Office have led efforts to use events more strategically. Famous public spaces like Trafalgar Square, Hyde Park and Regent Street have been programmed as venues, but this approach has also been adopted in lesser known spaces: for example, in Gillett Square, Finsbury Park and Berwick Street. This provides a fascinating context within which to study the use of public spaces as events venues.

Staging events in urban public spaces: a brief history

This book examines recent trends – in particular the increasing use of public spaces as event venues. However, it is important to note that centrally located, public spaces in cities have always acted as venues for events. Indeed, some parks, streets and squares were specifically conceived as arenas. In other instances, events were always intended as one function that influenced the design of public spaces (Foley et al., 2012). Historians have noted the way some urban spaces were developed for mass rituals (Hobsbawn, 1983), with Red Square in Moscow cited by Roche (2000) as a good example. Therefore, to provide context – and to allow an evaluation of whether we are seeing anything genuinely new – a brief review of the history of staging events in public spaces is included below. This review also provides an opportunity to introduce some of the themes addressed in the rest of the book.

Carnivals and fairs

Many participatory events such as carnival are essentially street events which have long inhabited the public realm of our cities. Although there are clear parallels with Saturnalia (a Roman festival), carnival was inadvertently created in the eleventh century via the insistence by religious authorities that worship should be more formal and less exuberant. This pushed religious festivity into the streets (Ehrenreich, 2007). Other religious occasions provide historical examples of the close connection between events and public spaces. Many city squares originated as extensions of churches – these were places for people to gather before and after worship, but also sites for religious ceremonies when churches could not accommodate everyone (Giddings et al., 2011). St. Peters Square in Rome remains the best example of where a city square still performs this function.

During the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, civic elites were fearful of carnival events because of the likelihood of disorder and disobedience. In Northern Europe, the rise of Protestantism and industrialisation meant carnival became unpalatable for ruling authorities (Ehrenreich, 2007). Accordingly, events were shut down or shifted to the edges of towns and cities. Interestingly, some of these discontinued events have been revived in recent years and the Venice Carnival is a very good example. This hedonistic event reached its peak in the 1600s when people travelled long distances to engage in a debauched and elongated celebration that featured various illicit activities permitted for carnival (e.g. masking, gambling and prostitution) alongside more formal entertainment that was invented for the event (e.g. opera). The Venice Carnival fitted awkwardly with the new political landscape of the eighteenth century and disappeared when the Republic of Venice fell in 1797. Hopes of a revival dissolved when the event was banned during the Austrian occupation in the nineteenth century (Davis and Marvin, 2004).

Like many other cultural events the Venice Carnival was re-established in the latter part of the twentieth century. The event was revived in 1979 and twenty five years later it was attracting over 100,000 visitors a day (Davis and Marvin, 2004). However, Davis and Marvin (2004) suggest that corporate involvement means Venice’s event is now a ‘privatised carnival’. This reflects more general concerns discussed later in this book about the privatisation and commercialisation associated with contemporary events (see Chapter 5). One of the problems with the revived Carnival, apart from its over-commercialisation, is the unsuitability of Venice’s public realm for large public events: Davis and Marvin (2004) suggest the complex topography is unsuited to grand processions. Nevertheless, the Venice Carnival provides a good example of the way in which urban street events flourished in pre-modern societies and then disappeared, before being revived in the post-modern era.

In the UK, the fair and the fairground perhaps represent the most significant events staged in urban public spaces during the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. These events were staged in the public realm: on a city’s streets, squares or common land. Fairs were originally staged to coincide with Saints days, but they evolved into something removed from religious celebrations. It is hard to represent their diversity in the small amount of space available here, but they usually involved a wide variety of attractions including music, plays, processions, jousting, archery, wrestling, cock fighting, duck hunting, juggling, tumbling, fire-eating, pole climbing and dancing (Harcup, 2000). Fairs were raucous events, but it would be a mistake to see them as unregulated festivity: men at arms were present in case things got out of control (Harcup, 2000). This is sometimes ignored by commentators who tend to eulogise about the liberating qualities of historical fairs and bemoan the securitised nature of contemporary events.

The Nottingham Goose Fair is regarded as the UK’s oldest surviving example of a Fair. Its long history is illustrated by the fact it already existed before it was awarded a Royal Charter in 1284. Charters were granted to ensure that the Crown benefitted from the revenues earned; highlighting that there has always been a financial imperative for staging events in public spaces. This links to the discussion in Chapter 3 that explores why contemporary urban governments want to hire their spaces to event organisers. Nottingham’s Goose Fair was staged in the city’s Market Square, but like many other fairs it was eventually moved from its central location to the edge of the city (in 1929). The Goose Fair has since grown in size; and is still staged every year, albeit for a ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Events in the City
• Routledge Advances in Event Research Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Boxes
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Acronyms and Abbreviations
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Urban Public Space
• 3 The Urbanisation of Events
• 4 Eventalisation: Events and the Production of Urban Public Space
• 5 Eventification: Events and the Denigration of Urban Public Space
• 6 Using Public Spaces as Events Venues: Greenwich Park becomes an Olympic Park
• 7 Enclosing Open Space: Event Legacies in the Royal Borough of Greenwich
• 8 Regulation and Resistance
• 9 Conclusions
• References
• Index