The eventification of place: Urban development and experience consumption in Berlin and New York City

Abstract

Recent urban and economic development policies put much emphasis on the promotion of experiences. Within the experience economy, the production and consumption of products and places is transformed into “theater.” The organization of international festivals highlights that trend. However, festivalization has also infiltrated urban and economic development on a much smaller scale and turned into an overall eventification. In addition, producers and marketers of cultural products simultaneously apply this concept to advance their market positions. Hence, eventification provides shared interests for local stakeholders and producers and marketers of cultural products and opportunities to further include the latter in urban growth coalitions. This paper demonstrates how eventification fosters new relationships between local urban developers and individual artists in Berlin-Wedding and the South Bronx, New York City. It explores the benefits and disadvantages of experience planning through eventification including social exclusion and arts-led revitalization. Ultimately, eventification not only embraces an accelerating logic of ever more experience schemes and thus raises questions about its sustainability, but also features a process in which urban space, itself, is transformed into staged experiences of event consumption.

Participation in urban interventions. Meaning-effects and urban citizenship

“…The relevance of urban events is nowadays significant enough to give rise to a new modality of production of space (Lefebvre, 1992): the "eventification of places" (Jakob, 2012) or "eventalisation of urban space" (Pløger, 2010). As whatever production of space, lived ("eventified") spaces result from the intersection between perceived and conceived spaces (Purcell, 2003): the material settings experienced and perceived during events and the variety of representations and narratives by which events are used to valorize the urban space (Pavoni, 2011).…”

“…These features are typical of a variety of events, with different goals, contents and spatial scales: although the relevance of the political-economic interests and actors involved foreground mega-events, scholars increasingly recognize that the diffusion of events has infiltrated urban development on a much smaller scale (Quinn, 2005). The comparative study of Wedding neighborhood in Berlin and South Bronx of New York shows that in both cases urban events organized by local artists and civil society actors directly affect the urban development of these areas, provoking gentrification and the exclusion of the most marginal local population (Jakob, 2012;Zukin, 1995).…”

“…In what follows, the analysis of events' temporality is in particular aimed at exploring a dimension at the core of the discourses accompanying current urban interventions, that is, the possibility that bottom-up participation in them make urban interventions capable of practicing the "right to the city" (Harvey, 1990: 92;Holston, 1999). Dismissing this as rhetoric leading to "efforts to enhance public life with hog roasts, community barbecues and festivals" (Mathew, 2002: 138), means to neglect the role bottom-up participation in events plays in the ongoing eventification of place (Jakob, 2012). Indeed, informal taking part in events is a spreading, though still neglected, urban practice, generally not worth of autonomous attention (Amin and Thrift 2002: 72).…”

Espaços urbanos: entre a cultura, a imagem e a intervenção

“…Falamos, por exemplo, no aumento das rendas e do custo de vida nas áreas das cidades onde proliferam estes eventos, por norma as suas zonas centrais, que ao extremo podem encetar processos de gentrificação, de recomposição sociodemográfica e exclusão socioeconómica, através do afastamento dos segmentos mais frágeis da população destas áreas da cidade. Autores como Jakob (2013), que têm vindo a analisar esta tendência para a "eventificação" ou "eventualização" das cidades, reforçam a necessidade de adopção de estratégias mais equilibradas e orientadas para os actores locais, para que não seja posta em causa a identidade de determinados bairros ou zonas das cidades em prol de tendências homogeneizadoras. Se a população local e os segmentos populacionais mais desfavorecidos continuarem a ser ignorados por estas estratégias, continuarão também a ser excluídos de todos e quaisquer benefícios que delas possam advir.…”

The temporality of territorial production – the case of Stortorget, Malmö

“…The enquiry made by the municipality showed that the three most common statements were that (1) the parking must go, (2) the king must go (the statue), and (3) that the square should be a place of events (Andersson and Göransson, 2008, p. 3). The inhabitants of Malmö as well as the planners seem to agree that Stortorget is a place associated with events, and this territorial association also dominated the directions of the competition program considering the redesign of the square proposed in 2009 (Göransson, 2009;see Pløger, 2010, andJakob, 2013, on the eventification of cities).…”