Dr Louise Todd L.Todd@napier.ac.uk
Associate Professor
Dr Louise Todd L.Todd@napier.ac.uk
Associate Professor
Andrew Smith
Editor
Guy Osborn
Editor
Bernadette Quinn
Editor
This chapter explores how two distinct strategic management and local community stakeholder groups engage with a festival city through their visual portrayals of spaces. Informed by festival city discourses and a hallmark event tourism stakeholder typology, it considers the semiotics of Edinburgh’s place-myth, as the ‘world’s leading festival city’. Today, eleven annual city-based festivals form the Festivals Edinburgh strategic umbrella organisation; they attract 4.5 million attendances from 70 countries worldwide; and they generate £313 million for Scotland’s economy. Edinburgh’s evolution as the festival city has seen destination managers’ leveraging its festivals to drive event tourism. Indeed, recent strategies recommend sustaining Edinburgh’s festival city status and promotion of its brand worldwide. Nevertheless, contemporary discourses have witnessed residents and media criticise commercial agendas of staging year-round festivals in Edinburgh’s historic centre; with accusations of destination managers’ commodification of these, marking Edinburgh as ‘the city for sale’. Semiotics uncovers layers of meaning and myth through studying systems of ‘signs’. This chapter applies a semiotic lens to stakeholders’ perspectives of Edinburgh as the festival city. It draws from digital images shared by destination management stakeholders, then from a participative visual map of the festival city. The map was co-created by community members of Wester Hailes, which is in South West Edinburgh, outside the central festival area. In terms of findings, projected and portrayed imagery from both stakeholder groups displayed shared semiotic characteristics of the festival city construct. Nevertheless, the distribution of imagery across urban space in the city varied between the groups. In exploring management and community stakeholders’ images of signs, and spaces, the chapter reflects upon the idealised view of the festival city, alongside its socio-cultural environment of inclusion and accessibility. Furthermore, it uncovers the semiotic narratives that sustain the visual culture, consumption, and place-myth of the festival city.
Todd, L. (2022). Semiotics of Edinburgh’s Festival City Place-Myth: Management and Community Stakeholders’ Visual Representations of Festival Spaces. In A. Smith, G. Osborn, & B. Quinn (Eds.), Festivals and the City: The Contested Geographies of Urban Events (187-208). University of Westminster Press. https://doi.org/10.16997/book64.k
Online Publication Date | Aug 23, 2022 |
---|---|
Publication Date | Aug 23, 2022 |
Deposit Date | Sep 6, 2022 |
Publicly Available Date | Sep 7, 2022 |
Publisher | University of Westminster Press |
Pages | 187-208 |
Book Title | Festivals and the City: The Contested Geographies of Urban Events |
Chapter Number | 11 |
ISBN | 978-1-915445-01-8 |
DOI | https://doi.org/10.16997/book64.k |
Keywords | stakeholders, place-myth, semiotics, festival city, Edinburgh |
Public URL | http://researchrepository.napier.ac.uk/Output/2912746 |
Publisher URL | https://www.uwestminsterpress.co.uk/site/books/e/10.16997/book64/ |
Semiotics Of Edinburgh’s Festival City Place-Myth: Management And Community Stakeholders’ Visual Representations Of Festival Spaces
(1.7 Mb)
PDF
Publisher Licence URL
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
A view from the street: Children’s visual expressions of tourism imaginaries
(2025)
Presentation / Conference Contribution
Artademic: Art practice as research
(2025)
Digital Artefact
Overtourism, localisation, community, and placemaking: Edinburgh’s tourism and festivals
(2024)
Presentation / Conference Contribution
Engaging secondary stakeholders with Edinburgh’s festivals and tourism sectors: Staycations, localisation, community, and placemaking.
(2024)
Presentation / Conference Contribution
About Edinburgh Napier Research Repository
Administrator e-mail: repository@napier.ac.uk
This application uses the following open-source libraries:
Apache License Version 2.0 (http://www.apache.org/licenses/)
Apache License Version 2.0 (http://www.apache.org/licenses/)
SIL OFL 1.1 (http://scripts.sil.org/OFL)
MIT License (http://opensource.org/licenses/mit-license.html)
CC BY 3.0 ( http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/)
Powered by Worktribe © 2025
Advanced Search