Mapping community engagement with the festival city through creative and participative methods

Todd, Louise

Abstract

I will present details of two interdisciplinary and collaborative research studies that used creative and participative methods within a public engagement methodology. Both aimed to gain an understanding of community stakeholders’ engagement with Edinburgh as the self-named world’s leading festival city (Gold & Gold, 2020). The festival city title is a recognised destination branding strategy (Richards 2017), pointing to a lively urban setting where collective and experiential consumption of events are encouraged (Dooghe, 2005). With its first festivals emerging in 1947, Edinburgh has a long and recognised history of staging cultural internationalism through its festivals (Jamieson & Todd, 2022). Today, eleven city-based festivals take place annually, to the point of eternal festivalisation (Smith, 2016), and collectively these form the Festivals Edinburgh strategic brand umbrella. Framed by recent media and community narratives around inclusion, access, and use of urban space in Edinburgh (McGillivray, Guillard & Reid 2020), both of my studies attempted to ‘map’ how secondary community stakeholder groups (Todd, Leask & Ensor, 2017) engage with the city’s festivals sector. Firstly, I will discuss a study that explored visual digital and analogue mapping produced by management and community stakeholders to reveal semiotics of Edinburgh’s festival city place-myth (Todd, 2022). I will then discuss aspects of an online peripatetic mapping study undertaken with Edinburgh residents. Outcomes from this were the development of a geolocated sonic map and online walking event. I will conclude by reflecting upon the potential of participative and creative methods in engaging communities and other actors in festival city settings.

• Presentation Conference Type: Presentation / Talk
• Conference Name: Festival Sustainability Symposium: Facing the Sector's Headwinds
• Start Date: Jun 29, 2023
• End Date: Jun 29, 2023
• Deposit Date: Jul 6, 2023
• Publisher URL: https://www.napier.ac.uk/about-us/our-schools/the-business-school/our-research/tourism-research-centre/events/festivals-sustainability-symposium-event