Composing Festival Timescapes

Jamieson, Kirstie

Abstract

Composing Festival Timescapes is as the title suggests, a way of approaching the city as a space of composition. The paper develops the subject of urban atmosphere and affective urban planning through an analysis of two discourses that mine the temporalisation of space and administratively imagine the curation of affect. Through a historicist reading of ambiance-centric planning, the paper identifies a distinct sensory turn in the cultural planning and promotion of cities during the nineties. This period it is argued, marked a newly refined emphasis upon the intangible, embodied and sensory potential of urban space. Sensitized to the temporalized embodied dispositions of the Creative Class this period saw the advancement of a distinctly curatorial somatic-planning relation to the city. After tracing the sensory turn in planning to the nineties I suggest a further development in the cultivation and composition of felt space. Where once the Creative City paradigm charged urban space with a transformative appeal that fetishized bohemian street life, today the language of urban atmosphere finds legitimacy through two other discourses that feed into the somatic economy. In their temporal optimizing of urban space The Sensory Landscape of Cities (Landry 2012) and the Convention for the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage (Unesco 2003) elevate the city as a Timescape; a place of sensory revision and durationally composed eventness.

• Presentation Conference Type: Conference Paper (unpublished)
• Conference Name: Association of American Geographers Annual Meeting
• Start Date: Apr 29, 2016
• End Date: May 2, 2016
• Deposit Date: Jul 19, 2023