Events and their impact on place - towards an international practice-based classification system

Events and festivals have been shown to be catalysts for place making, particularly in terms of community engagement, pride of place and even place branding, though the latter remains a contested topic. Whilst a substantial and growing body of literature exists on the impact of events and festivals on town and city centres, much of the focus of past research has been on economic and social issues. Yet, as the focus of event impact evaluation begins to shift towards their longer term legacy - the London Olympic Games have been a prime example of this -, this paper argues that the environmental impact research agenda will grow in importance and summarises some of the early findings of a pan-European research study led by the University of East London with project partners in ten different countries and funding from the European Regional Development Fund’s INTERREG IVC programme. In line with this and building on earlier work on town centre management and urban revitalisation schemes across Europe, this paper argues the case for the development of an international classification system for events and festivals that helps funders and local policy makers to compare international practice and improve decision making with regards to event planning, funding and implementation with particular emphasis on sustainability

Micro-Festival: An Informal Structure Can Create a Social Innovation Process. Towards a Preliminary Investigation

This research project will examine the relationship between cultural festivals and the territories on which they insist, with a particular attention to marginal and deprived areas, in order to analyze the positive and negative effects of this relationship, and to identify some Good Practices. As a preliminary step, we need to examine the state of the art, circumscribing the festivals' action field and defining the territories that this research wants to analyze. Festivals, through the creation of a ritual dimension, can play a relevant role in the creation of a collective identity, therefore becoming a tool for integration. Festivals are a moment of social aggregation, bringing common needs back into shared spaces. Therefore we see more and more events that explore different and alternative formats, widening the usual dynamics of established festivals. In doing so, they try to attract new audiences and widen their usual target, in an innovative audience engagement process. A particularly interesting trend is the development of the micro-festival format, a small event, with a short duration. Thanks to their informal structure and their ability to interact with the local population, micro-festivals can attract new audiences and start a social innovation process, in order to produce desirable outcomes in terms of improving economic competitiveness, environmental sustainability and social solidarity. The starting point to identify the case studies will be Trovafestival, an online portal active since 2017. Trovafestival is the only tool nowadays available for mapping cultural festival in Italy in different disciplines. The identification of Good Practices in the context of micro-festivals will be the last step of the research, which has the broadest objective of monitoring and analyzing the liveliness of the territories hosting cultural events