Cultural heritage entanglements: festivals as integrative sites for sustainable urban development

ABSTRACT

Whilst the importance of cultural heritage in sustainable urban development has been increasingly recognised in policy frameworks at multiple levels, there remains a lack of understanding about how global and international goals land in different places. This paper specifically addresses this question through a study of 18 festivals across the Global North and South. We argue that festivals are integrative sites in which tangible and intangible heritage properties are entangled: bi-directional, co-dependent and non-linear. Given the critical role in linking urban contexts and histories with immaterial experience and meaning in the city, we argue that festivals can illuminate wider concerns. Specifically, this means seeing festivals as part of the ‘new heritage paradigm’ and assessing their contribution to processes of just urban transformations.

KEYWORDS:

• Cultural heritage
• sustainable urban development
• festivals
• urban justice
• Sustainable Development Goals

Introduction

Cultural heritage has been narrowly interpreted in urban agendas across multiple scales of action. Scholars and advocates have long argued the need to pay more attention to culture and social capital in developing sustainable places (Duxbury, Gillette, and Pepper 2007). Cultural heritage is a social and cultural process that has much to add to the concept and practice of sustainable development (Harrison 2015). International frameworks for action, such as the New Urban Agenda or Sustainable Development Goals, increasingly recognise that the role of heritage in urban sustainability needs to be better valued.

Festival studies is now an established academic field (see, for example, Bennett, Taylor, and Woodward 2014; Newbold et al. 2015; McKay 2015) in which festivals are often analysed in the context of place-making and place marketing strategies (Prentice and Andersen 2003) or in terms of geopolitical cultural positioning (see, for example, De Valck 2007). Indeed a review by Getz of over 400 festival studies in 2010 identified a set of under-explored discourses concerning festivals’ social and cultural impacts and roles in establishing place or group identity (Getz 2010). This raises the question: what is the value of festivals in relation to cultural heritage and sustainable urban development?

This article contributes to this agenda through an analysis of 18 festivals across the Global South and North. The festivals examined differ in scale, scope and geography. Whilst there may be dominant drivers – for instance, in relation to economic development, socio-cultural cohesion or political awareness – festivals have multiple meanings in relation to the places and spaces they occupy. We argue that festivals should be recognised for their intrinsic value to urban populations, rather than simply for their use in place-making strategies. We introduce a framework for examining cultural heritage, sustainable development and place through the idea of entanglement (Nutall 2009). We are specifically interested in tangible-intangible entanglements and how these two properties of cultural heritage are intertwined. ‘Tangible’ refers to physical sites, buildings and artefacts and ‘intangible’ to practices, representations and expressions that individuals and communities recognise themselves as heritage (Ahmad 2006; Vecco 2010). Drawing on our data, we elaborate these entanglements as bidirectional, non-linear and co-dependent and set forth the idea of festivals as integrative sites, where the tangible and intangible properties of cultural heritage cohere and collide, with both positive and negative consequences. By integrative sites, we mean festivals where the relationship between context and content is dynamic, where place, meaning and cultural expression combine. The logic of integrative sites further implies plural levels of meaning within festivals themselves, resisting narrow typological differentiations.

The paper begins by reviewing the academic and policy literature around cultural economy and cultural heritage and developing the concept of cultural heritage entanglements. Section 2 presents the study’s focus, methodology and approach and includes a table of the 18 festivals examined. This is followed by an overview of the data and analysis based on breadth rather than depth of the cases examined. We conclude by setting out future research propositions focussed on recasting the debate on cultural heritage from its role in sustainable urban development, to a wider mission of realising just cities (Agyeman and Evans 2004; Campbell and Marshall 2006).

Cultural heritage and urban development

Practices of urban development tend to marginalise cultural heritage and intangible forms of cultural expression. On the one hand, with the disappearance of local manufacturing industries, culture has been viewed as a core ‘business of cities – the basis of their tourist attractions and their unique, competitive edge’ (Zukin 1995, 1). Culture has been absorbed into an economic discourse focussed on growth and the rapid capitalisation of the production of value (Leadbeater 1999). This has been operationalised through creative industries strategies, cultural entrepreneurship and the production of creative precincts that have become prevalent the world over. The development of the ‘creative cities’ discourse reflects the dominance of techno-economic urbanisation processes in the context of economic growth, in which theories of place-based competitiveness have become dominant (Florida 2002, 2004). Landry and Bianchini noted that the competitive advantage of cities would increasingly be based on ‘the ability to develop attractive images and symbols and project these effectively’ (Landry and Bianchini 1995, 12) and Pratt called this the ‘role of culture to differentiate competing localities’ (Pratt 1997, 7).

In this mainstream political discourse, an increasingly instrumentalist view of culture is dominant, with culture framed as an indispensable tool for the redevelopment of urban environments (Landry 2000). Traditionally, economic growth and technological advancement have been the pillars on which governments around the globe have based their policies, investments and interventions. Culture has been valued to the extent that it fosters these aims, often indicated by responsibility for ‘cultural strategy’ lying within economic development departments in local authorities. Where focussed on the narrow concerns of mainstream economics, cultural economy initiatives at multiple scales often are under-represented or overlook the importance of more plural and contested understandings of heritage (Harrison 2013). In Western European contexts, for instance, heritage is implicated in the drive for knowledge-based economic growth, as cities embrace the promise of the knowledge economy (Graham 2002; May and Perry 2018). Flagship projects, investments in large cultural organisations and the provision of cultural opportunities take precedence over historic spaces, everyday leisure or community assets (Gilmore 2017). Natural heritage and urban nature often now feature in urban revitalisation strategies, both within cultural strategies and wider environmental policies. However, the designation of natural heritage as ‘natural capital’, along with its wider relationship to economic development, remain contested, particularly within the Global North. An example includes the framing of heritage as green infrastructure or ecosystems services in order to make nature investable (Sullivan, 2018), which is seen to instrumentalise natural heritage in service of mainstream economic growth agendas (Schroter et al. 2014).

Where heritage does form a coherent part of urban strategies, tangible properties tends to trump the intangible. Tangible and visible cultural assets are easier to identify, manage and value; cities choose to regenerate the same kinds of areas, e.g. waterfronts, in the hope of reproducing the gains seen in other places (Bianchini and Parkinson 1993). In some contexts, this has resulted in the preservation of colonial architecture and institutions. Democratic access to arts, a plurality of cultural institutions, cultural participation and leisure pursuits are frequently subjugated in the search for competitive advantage (Sharp, Pollock, and Paddison 2005; May and Perry 2018). As cultural meanings risk being eroded, distorted or commodified by strategies of place-based competition, public participation is increasingly pivotal to the preservation and regeneration of forms of intangible heritage. Yet nurturing intangible forms of expression, cultural practices and the processes through which people make meaning in their everyday lives requires fundamentally different approaches (Harrison 2015; Perry 2019).

Cultural heritage in policy and practice

There is emerging evidence that these concerns are impacting on international sustainable development agendas. The 1964 Venice Charter focussed exclusively on the physical tangible heritage of the built environment via the protection of sites and monuments. UNESCO did not develop its ‘Convention on Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage’ until 2003. However, this was finally significant because it increased debate about the nature, value, meaning and character of heritage (Ahmad 2006). The Convention recognised that heritage protection must involve local communities and communities of interest. It was therefore welcomed as an attempt to acknowledge and privilege non-western practices and manifestations of heritage (Smith and Akagawa 2009, 1–9). In 2004 the United Cities and Local Governments started work on their ‘Agenda 21 for Culture’ and in November 2010 produced a policy statement recommending that culture be seen as a fourth pillar of sustainable development, alongside social, environmental and economic sustainability:

Cultural heritage, tangible and intangible, testifies to human creativity and forms the bedrock underlying the identity of peoples. Cultural life contains both the wealth of being able to appreciate and treasure traditions of all peoples and an opportunity to enable the creation and innovation of endogenous cultural forms. (UCLG 2008, 8)

The four conceptual threads which underpin claims for culture as a fourth pillar of sustainable development are that: culture must be seen as intangible and tangible capital; culture is a process and a way of life; culture is value-binding; and culture is creative expression (Duxbury, Cullen, and Pascual 2012). This has translated into coherent efforts to ensure that culture is recognised in the post-2015 review of the former Millennium Development Goals. In this, it seems that success has been achieved. In 2016, the New Urban Agenda, signed in Quito, Ecuador, appeared to correct a cultural-blindness in sustainable development policies and practices by insisting on the importance of cultural diversity in efforts to promote more progressive urban transitions. In particular, it notes the important contribution of culture to addressing impacts of climate change, promoting equitable and affordable access and developing peaceful, inclusive and participatory cities. A UNESCO (2016) report on Culture Urban Futures suggests a three-fold approach to build on the power of culture to promote human and inclusive cities; improve the quality of the built and natural environment through culture, and integrate culture in urban policies to foster sustainable urban development.

Grand statements have been translated into action through the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs): 17 commitments, goals and targets adopted by the international community to end poverty, fight inequality and injustice and foster environmental sustainability by 2030. Culture appears across multiple SDGs, including those that commit to quality education, economic growth, sustainable consumption and production patterns and peaceful and inclusive societies. Significantly, culture is directly addressed in Goal 11, which aims to ‘make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable’. A specific target commits signatories to ‘strengthen efforts to protect and safeguard the world’s cultural and natural heritage’.

Such international commitments are both encouraging and problematic. On the one hand, frameworks provide a more integrated approach to recognising intangible and tangible heritage and challenge dominant approaches to the cultural economy within a wider and more holistic approach to sustainable development. What is notable in the way that mainstream international agendas have dealt with tangible and intangible cultural heritage is its embedding in place, and particularly in relation to the aspiration of sustainable cities and communities. However, there is limited evidence that grand goals and targets are being taken on board in local strategies and approaches. Despite its laudable content, the New Urban Agenda has gained little traction and there remain issues in the extent to which local governments have the capacity and capability to respond to international agendas (Simon et al. 2015).

Cities in the global South, and in particular on the African continent, are least likely to be able to deliver on the SDGs and, where they are being considered, the focus is often being strategically aligned with existing urban development strategies. There remains much distance to be travelled. For instance, measuring progress on the implementation of the goals is through indicators relating to the percentage of budget provided for maintaining cultural and natural heritage, and the percentage of urban areas and historical and cultural sites accorded protected status. This is problematic because, like heritage lists, ‘cultural heritage should be regarded as an ongoing movement and not as an immutable body which is the outcome of reference points to which rigid delimitation criteria have been applied’ (Smith and Akagawa 2009, 59). The need to rethink heritage policy and practice is pressing. As Harrison (2015) notes:

Heritage is rarely deployed innocently, in the absence of some form of claim toward a self-evident truth that is often divisive or exclusionary, defining the forms of difference it specifies as a function of the past. In doing so, heritage functions to normalize and historicize inequalities of many kinds.

As a result, scholars are advocating a ‘new heritage’ paradigm which acknowledges the unfixed, malleable and permutating nature of heritage (Holtorf and Fairclough 2013).

Cultural heritage entanglements

The new heritage paradigm requires conceptual development to explore how it manifests locally in different contexts. We propose that an expansion and development of the idea of ‘entanglement’ is useful here. Entanglement is a concept that cuts across sustainability, urban and cultural heritage agendas, though is often deployed in passing rather than as a coherent analytical lens. Its increasing prevalence stems from wider debates about the erosion of boundaries between discrete spheres of social and political action, between the self and society and between nature and culture (Ingold 2008; May and Bauman 2018). Latour (2011, 1) notes that:

Many issues are too intractable and too enmeshed in contradictory interests. We have problems, but we don’t have the publics that go with them. How could we imagine agreements amid so many entangled interests?

In the context of these wider entanglements, sustainability is said to be a ‘wicked’ issue defined as the absence of clear boundaries and a lack of consensus around the nature of problems and potential solutions. Such issues are core concerns for cities as sites of entanglement, whether conceptualised as complex assemblages made up of multiple networks and flows between human and non-human elements or as defined territories governed by the local state. In the context of globalisation and the spread of technologies which shrink time and space, the urban represents an entanglement between different agendas in one space (Peck and Theodore 2012). Others have written about entanglements between rural and urban lives (Saunders 2011) and in the complex public systems that run through cities and the leadership challenges that arise (Murphy et al. 2017).

There are some specific examples where the notion of entanglement has already been deployed within heritage studies. In cultural studies and in relation to heritage practices and meanings, entanglement denotes relationships between heritage with the law (Gnecco 2015), between different meanings of heritage inscribed in a site (Apaydin 2017) and between heritage, entitlement, resources and property (Geismer 2015). At a conceptual level, Falser and Juneja (2013) emphasise how cultural heritage entangles the social, mental and material aspects of culture between local social practices and global virtual realities. These themes are taken up by Haldrup and Boerenholdt (2015, 55, 56), who note how the performance of heritage ‘emerges through the combination of social interaction, relational entanglements with material artefacts, and finally, but not least, the sharing of the heritage experiences performed’.

Whilst not directly using the term, Harrison (2015) highlights ‘the folding together of nature and culture, the human and other-than-human’ and the need to ‘build connections between a range of different domains and fields of practice that we had previously assumed were completely separate from one another’. Similarly, Holtorf and Fairclough (2013) focus on how heritage emerges in dialogue among individuals, communities, practices, places, and things. This highlights the dynamic relationship between tangible and intangible heritage properties. The concept of entanglement offers value in helping to conceptualise and understand how these properties of heritage combine, collide, conflict and cohere. However, as a large, messy, connected set of practices, a relevant question is how entanglements can be seen, analysed and understood? It is here that we turn to the study of festivals.

Festivals as heritage entanglements

Festivals offer the possibility of an empirical lens to enrich our understanding of this question. The term ‘festival’ is not without its issues in terms of scope and definition. Festival is a word that can be used to describe everything from large-scale geopolitical spectacles such as ‘The Festival of Britain’ or ‘Expo 2010 Shanghai China’ to traditional feasts, folk customs and special days with religious or social origins, such as Christmas or May Day. Festival can refer to a day of outdoor activities in a single, damp field, or ‘Burning Man’ where participants build a temporary city in the Nevada desert, as well as metropolitan events such as the Venice Biennale and the Cannes and Berlin film festivals. The field is known for its ambiguity, changeability, transience and ephemerality. However, broadly speaking, a ‘festival’ is thought to be distinguishable from other cultural programmes by an intensity of event frequency that would be considered unsustainable year-round, particularly when held across a range of venues (Ager 2016, 104).

Within some of the earlier discourses on culture-led regeneration, the cross-sectoral role of festivals was noted as a way for cities to project a vibrant metropolitan atmosphere (Landry et al. 1996). In terms of urban cultural production, O’Connor recommended to local decision-makers that festivals should be encouraged as they provide platforms in the city for new original work (O’Connor 1998). Festivals are an international phenomena, a cultural practice that takes plural forms and expressions across the world. Studies of festivals are often found in sociology, anthropology, and other literature as social practices constituting meaningful, even oppositional, forms of human behaviour. Getz believes that the historical study of festivals is well-established within these disciplines because ‘festivals occupy a special place in almost all cultures’ (Getz 2010, 1). They belong to an ancient human culture as fixed points around which to structure time, behaviour and the pursuit of pleasure.

Whilst Del Barrio et al. describe festivals as ‘a characteristic example of immaterial cultural heritage’ (2012, 236), festivals are also inherently linked to physical spaces and forms of tangible heritage. Festivals are spatially as well as temporally bounded composites of different realities; they are a symbolic, contingent and situated set of events and understandings, usually only comprehensible in context. Waterman (1998, 53) notes that place identity and the valuation of place endowed by the festival matter, but so to do the locations, spaces and sites as these are used and potentially transformed by festival happenings. By accepting an expanded set of practices into festival scholarship, and examining festivals for their social, cultural and place-based significance, understandings of and approaches to culture and heritage can surface in very different contexts.

Studying festivals in the comparative and contextualised turn

Our study uses festivals as a lens to shine a light on cultural heritage entanglements in the context of wider sustainable urban development challenges. Our approach is framed as a response to two methodological challenges. First, the turn towards comparative urbanism highlights the limits of the strict comparative method, due to its inability to break free of the boundedness and fixity of urban space (Ward 2012). Robinson (2014) calls for a set of tactics and practices equal to contemporary urban challenges, and a different comparative imagination to stretch existing urban theories. For others, this means comparison as a strategy (McFarlane 2011) for unlocking urban potential in a process of ‘unlearning’ (McEwan 2003, 384). This approach is particularly relevant as there is a dearth of small-scale and localised festival studies (Willems-Braun 1994), but an even greater gap in understanding these in a comparative context. Surfacing localised practices can only be undertaken by geographically embedded researchers with situated place-based knowledge. However, funding is highly limited for in-depth ethnographic work, of the kind likely to reveal the practices and meanings attributed to heritage, or for broad comparison across the Global North and South. The challenge is how to unlearn assumptions and generate new comparative understandings whilst preserving the authenticity of deep locally grounded work. Second, tangible and intangible heritage are categories, or properties, of heritage, rather than discrete objects. Like festivals themselves, they are composed of multiple elements and interpretations. They cannot, therefore, be objectively or exhaustively catalogued. Given the emphasis of the new heritage paradigm on the social construction of heritage, new approaches are needed which reveal plurality, contestation and polyvalence, rather than force closure on specific approaches. The challenge is to understand what we see and represent when we think of heritage, based on concrete cases placed in context.

Our response to these challenges was first to construct a space for dialogue between scholars and practitioners in the Global North and South at the intersections of two already funded cultural heritage projects where there was participant cross-over. The first, Cultural Heritage and the Just City, was supported by Mistra Urban Futures with partners in South Africa, Kenya, Sweden and UK (2016 – ongoing). The second, Cultural Heritage and Improvised Music in Europe, was funded by the Joint Planning Initiative Heritage Plus, with European partners in the UK, Netherlands and Sweden (2016–2018). The team members of these projects represented a transdisciplinary network of scholars and practitioners, including social and natural scientists, arts and humanities scholars and cultural practitioners. All had direct experience of studying and/or organising festivals – most of both. Such transdisciplinarity is seen to have a positive influence on knowledge production and innovation (Gibbons, Nowotny, and Scott 1994) but it is rare that networks span both across Global South and North, across sectors and disciplines.

The coordination of this comparative learning space at the intersection of these projects brought distinct advantages. It enabled less visible or prestigious ‘under-the-radar’ festivals to be identified and it allowed for both the experiential and analytical dimensions of multiple festivals to be surfaced. By pooling resources, a core group formed to discuss and learn from primary research undertaken and coproduce a set of questions to identify comparative learning from these cases. A literature review identified additional cases for secondary analysis, and a common form was developed to surface the relationship between tangible and intangible heritage as illustrated through the programmes and practices of the festivals, drawing on festival data, representations, websites, artefacts and prior research. The form included basic information about the festival’s development, background, audience and stated purpose; governance, funding and partnership arrangements; recent programme content and special commissions; named persons and roles especially in relation to curation; extent and nature of involvement of local people; the location and use of sites during the festival; extent of place-based marketing and promotion; and evaluation reports detailing claims made about impact (economic, social, political, environmental). We were particularly interested in thinking about the relationship between the content and place-based context for the festivals as a way of understanding tangible and intangible heritage and sustainable urban development. Free text answers were also included about how the concept of cultural heritage was deployed and understood through the materiality and experience of the festival. A separate section on methods and sources was completed to enable claims to be verified. The form was completed by all those across the projects networks, generating 18 useable cases for subsequent analysis. This took place within the core team of researchers at a workshop held in Kisumu, Kenya in November 2017, where the data were reviewed, coded and analysed and the key themes of entanglement and integrative sites identified.

It is not possible to present all the data from the festivals here. The strength of our approach and study is in its combined breadth and depth; however, space excludes a detailed analysis here. A companion report (Perry, Ager, and Sitas 2017) is available which profiles each case in more detail. Instead we set out the festivals in Table 1, and present selective data and analysis below which draws on the breadth of our study in order to set a wider agenda around heritage entanglements and festivals as integrative sites.

Table 1. Festivals in the analysis. Authors’ own.

Africa Week Yeoville, Johannesburg South Africa	On the anniversary of the founding of the Organisation of African Unity, precursor to the African Union, the annual street festival celebrates Yeoville as a space of pan-African diversity, inclusion and coexistence in Post-Apartheid Johannesburg.
Bristol Radical Film Festival Bristol United Kingdom	A non-hierarchical group of film specialists screening socially and politically engaged documentary and fiction films in non-cinema spaces, drawing attention to other progressive community based initiatives in the city.
Curacao North Sea Jazz Festival Willemstad, Curaçao Caribbean	An internationally renowned jazz festival set on an island known for its designated UNESCO World Heritage site, but the study of the festival reveals a complexity arising from the island’s post-colonial context.
Dunga Fish Night & Got Ramogi Kisumu Kenya	A festival that was established to preserve cultural sites, biodiversity and the ecology of the banks of Lake Victoria; a strategic intervention, organised with the local community and supported by university researchers, the Ministry of Tourism and social services.
Edinburgh Festivals Edinburgh Scotland	Edinburgh is home to many established festivals that promote Scottish heritage and culture to international audiences and simultaneously celebrate the city’s architecture and champion community organising.
Electric Castle Cluj Napoca, Transylvania Romania	Unique in Romania, Electric Castle music festival generates funds urgently to restore a 14th century castle, but also maintains a strong emphasis on environmental sustainability and the preservation of natural heritage.
Fietas Festival Johannesburg South Africa	A post-segregation festival aimed at healing community relations and reclaiming physical and cultural space, it commemorates the forcible removal of specific groups of residents in the 1970s.
Gamlestaden Jazz Festival Gothenburg Sweden	A popular and modern jazz festival attracting international touring artists that also makes room for a wide range of locally produced jazz styles and artists in its programme, embedded in the city’s music scene.
Infecting the City Cape Town South Africa	An urban and outdoors performance arts festival, set within the streets of a city marked by its history of exclusions and segregations; dancers infect the city, disrupting the everyday.
Into the Great Wide Open Vlieland Netherlands	A festival spread out across beaches and dunes, offering new forms of engagement between culture and natural heritage, a leader in the field of responsible, sustainable production.
Kaapse Klopse Cape Town South Africa	Dating back to the 17^th century and with links to slavery, this controversial parade follows a contested traditional carnival route around the city’s streets, reclaiming them as historic spaces that belong to everyone.
Manchester Histories Festival Manchester United Kingdom	Sharing and celebrating the lesser known histories and heritage in a festival focussed on memories and narratives of change, the festival offers free events in museums, galleries, streets, communities, universities, theatres and neighbourhood settings.
Manchester International Festival Manchester United Kingdom	A high-profile biennial festival of original commissions, new work and special events with a range of stakeholders and funders, the festival has an ambition to be recognised internationally and often reclaims unusual sites to create spectacles in its host city.
Musica Sulla Bocche Santa Teresa Gallura, Sardinia Italy	A jazz festival set in venues surrounding a marine reserve, with performances timed to coincide with sunrise and sunset to emphasise the artistic vision of a relationship between music, nature and landscape.
Ordsall Festival Ordsall Greater Manchester	A one-day community festival celebrating, promoting and inspiring local cultural activities in the everyday space of Ordsall Park, this case highlights the way working class communities can be overlooked and undervalued in city narratives.
Pohoda Festival Trenčín Slovakia	With its origins in the Czech and Slovak music scenes of the 1980s, this festival now takes place within a former military airport, showing how popular music still connects with the political heritage of Slovakia.
Still Walking Birmingham United Kingdom	Challenging the stereotypes associated with a large industrial city, this festival of guided tours is co-produced with residents and focuses on the hidden, overlooked or secret places of the city.
Zomer Jazz Bicycle Tour Groningen The Netherlands	Cycling around a rural area to see jazz and world music played in medieval churches and old barns engages visitors with ‘real Dutch cultural heritage’ in a creative way.

Entanglements in practice: data and analysis

The festivals in our study exemplify entanglements between tangible and intangible cultural heritage properties. Common across all the festivals examined is their location in space, making use of a variety of urban settings from doorsteps (Fietas Festival), houses (Manchester International Festival), streets (Kaapse Klopse), industrial (Manchester Histories Festival) or sacred sites (Still Walking & Got Ramogi), cafes and bars (Bristol Film Festival & Gamlestaden Jazz Festival), parks (Ordsall Community Festival), nature reserves (Into the Great Wide Open & Dunga Fish Night) and informal or formal cultural venues (Edinburgh Festival). Some take place in a single setting whilst others are notable for their innovative use of multiple sites, producing a dislocation that adds to the dispersion and footprint of the festival in its occupation of space. In certain cases, mobility through space is central to the festival experience, in walking through industrial (Still Walking) or cycling through rural (Zomer Jazz Bicycle Tour) landscapes. Natural heritage is increasingly important as in the Dunga Beach festival in Kisumu, which seeks to preserve and reclaim environmental sites around the shores of Lake Victoria (Odede et al. 2013). Definitions of tangible heritage may be sanctioned by official processes or classifications – the sites for the Edinburgh Festivals and North Sea Jazz Festival (Curacao) have been designated as official World Heritage sites by UNESCO, whilst Banffy Castle (Electric Castle Festival) is on the World Monuments Watch List. Yet the festivals in our study also demand an alternative reading of tangible heritage properties, one that is not formally prescribed, but resides in the values and meanings of everyday urban and rural settings and sites.

The festivals value and celebrate different forms of intangible heritage, understood as diverse cultural forms, expressions, meanings, histories and identities. Music is a central example and jazz in particular, as a marginalised form of cultural expression within mainstream music circuits. Four of the cases in the study are of jazz festivals (Musica Sulla Boche, Gamlestaden Jazz Festival, North Sea Jazz Festival and Zomer Jazz Bicycle Tour) whilst the Kaapse Klopse festival also seeks to revalue and preserve musical heritage through its celebration of Ghoema music. Festivals transcend high and low culture, margins and mainstreams – we also see craft, food and fishing as important cultural expressions through the medium of festival in both the Global North (Ordsall Festival) and South (Dunga Fish Night).

Intangible heritage is inscribed through the reassertion of political and cultural identities. Heritage, power and ideology are entangled; instead, there is no neat ‘dominant versus marginal positionalities’ which are rather contingent and shifting (Schramm 2015, 449). Bristol Radical Film Festival rescues and exhibits films which are under-represented in mainstream cinema circuits and are distinctive for their content, format or style. The festival challenges mainstream views of what culture matters and the politics of film production and consumption (Ager 2016). Pohoda Festival is an example of how intangible cultural heritage can build value systems to tie together arts, culture, creativity, free expression, ecological sustainability and care for the environment, building on political history to create a contemporary framework of ideas and experiences. Vulliamy (2009) cites Vaclav Havel’s 1978 insight that an attack on the Czech musical underground was simultaneously an attack on democracy, that the freedom to play rock music was a human freedom equal to the freedom to engage in philosophical and political reflection. After the split between the Czech Republic and Slovakia, the festival positions Slovakia’s growing and flourishing music with a focus on free exchange of cultural expressions and ideas.

Seeing the festival as a symbolic domain of cultural practices, researchers have examined their social role as sites of articulation of transnational and diasporic identifications (Iordanova and Cheung 2010; Kaushal and Newbold 2015) and have drawn on Benedict Anderson’s ideas about ‘imagined communities’ (Fu, Long, and Thomas 2015) where communities form through shared cultural practices. Memory and history, linked to identity and belonging, are therefore essential forms of intangible heritage rendered visible through the festival form. Manchester Histories is one example providing engagements with industrial and political histories, through for instance, the centenary commemorations of the Peterloo Massacre in Manchester planned for 2019. In Johannesburg and Cape Town, the festival has become a way of coping with traumatic experiences of slavery, apartheid and displacement, or as an activist tool for visibility and belonging, in a context where xenophobic violence is widespread. In such contexts, entanglement is a way to deal with contradictions of the present, of loss and inertia as well as experimentation and desegregation (Nutall 2009).

Critically, it is in the entanglement between tangible and intangible heritage properties, mediated in and through space and place, that the essence of the festival experience can be grasped. Heritage is mobilised in different ways in relation to physical and expressive cultural sites, signs and symbols. In this way, spatial practices and places of ‘publicness’ are constitutive of relations, meanings and identities (Qian 2014). In each case, the use and reuse of tangible heritage is inextricably linked to the forms of intangible heritage that are invoked. Each draws meaning and significance only with and through the other. From Fietas Festival we see how intangible memories of urban place can be reclaimed when the physical environment is destroyed. The repurposing of remnants of destroyed neighbourhoods makes ordinary spaces in the city repositories for memory in a city that is constantly overwriting itself. Gamlestaden Jazz Festival creates its own understandings of jazz heritage through the selection of partner venues and acts. In this way, a coherent identity to a marginalised cultural form is provided through the use of urban space. Africa Week draws attention to the importance of everyday spaces as venues in the making of heritage and place. The festival draws on the tangible heritage of everyday street settings to support cultural cohesion and diversity and overcome xenophobia. Beyond the physical, the transformation of streets enables Yeoville to be recognised as a valuable space of diversity and inclusion in the face of continual threats of violence. Musica Sulla Boche suggests the inseparability of natural and cultural heritage. Like other festivals, it is driven by an awareness of the distinctiveness of its location and need to minimise its impact and promote wider environmental conservation values.

Across the different cases we see how natural heritage is mobilised to showcase, enhance and transform cultural practices; how physical sites are used as dramatic backdrops to politically and cultural significant representations of memory, trauma and conflict; how festivals enable an engagement with locations in ways that challenge traditional binaries between performer and spectator and how the cultural content of festivals can be imbued with deep layers of political and social meaning. Common across the festivals examined in this study is a deep consideration of place, where context and content are in constant conversation. Places are not just backdrops – but constitutive in themselves. The spaces of the city are vital to the performances; they are not mere vessels for human interaction, but demonstrate agency within the tangible-intangible relations. Venues provide a way of connecting physical space to the stories being told, reinforcing sense of place and identity. They carry meaning as much as the content of what is discussed.

Drawing on our festival study, we can refine our understanding of tangible-intangible entanglements as bidirectional, non-linear and co-dependent. Bidirectional refers to the two-way reciprocal and reinforcing impacts between tangible and intangible heritage properties within the festival setting. Non-linear refers to the dynamic, interactive and often unintentional mutualities between tangible and intangible heritage properties that are produced. By co-dependent, we mean that the very meaning and experience of different forms of heritage are shaped and transformed through each other. In this way, we contend, the festival acts as an integrative site through which we can reinterpret wider cultural debates.

Integrative sites beyond the fourth pillar

The campaign to mainstream culture, and cultural heritage in particular, within debates on sustainable urban development, has focussed on the idea of culture as a fourth pillar (UCLG 2006a, 2006b). However, the cases in our study suggest that, rather than seeing culture as a discrete sphere of activity, festivals integrate across social, economic and environmental dimensions of sustainability, precisely because of their entangled nature. Some festivals appear to fit neatly into categories – those that emphasis social cohesion and cultural diversity; those that appear to be part of an economic place-based tourism agenda; those that focus on the celebration of particular forms of expression and cultural practices, whether music or film; those that are the bearers for wider environmental or political messages. However, a more granular consideration of the processes and practices of festivals reveals the limits to reducing the impacts of festivals to any single category (see Webster and McKay 2015). By integrative sites, we mean festivals where the relationship between context and content is dynamic, where place, meaning and cultural expression combine. The logic of integrative sites further implies plural levels of meaning within festivals themselves, resisting narrow typological differentiations. Festivals are more than intangible cultural heritage (cf. Del Barrio, Devesa, and Herrero 2012) implicated in the integration of different and plural forms of heritage. Festivals can be seen as ‘translation spaces’ (Giorgi, Sassatelli, and Delanty 2011, 8), sites of exchange and debate that can emphasise both the local and the international together, tangible and intangible, at the same time. These authors productively re-imagine the festival as a kind of communicative public sphere (Giorgi, Sassatelli, and Delanty 2011).

Entanglement is largely framed as positive: heritage can become relevant through being ‘coupled with other concerns’ (Hutson, Herrera, and Chi 2012, 376). The Got Ramogi and Dunga Fish Night Festivals, in Kisumu, Kenya are inspired by the desire not to lose myths and legends to future generations through the protection of sacred sites and cultural practices. They are platforms for branding and marketing the rich cultural and natural heritage of the site as well as the practices, beliefs and values of the traditional African way of life in the advent of modernization and urbanization. However, the festivals are also part of a wider ecotourism strategy, which raises inherent tensions related to the essentialisation and marketisation of culture, but also conversely creates opportunities to support sustainable livelihoods for excluded groups around the Lake and generates revenue. Community groups are fundamental to the delivery of the festival, exhibiting their artefacts, narrating stories and becoming tourist guides themselves. The festivals also provide an opportunity to integrate priorities around broader social issues, specifically in relation to the marginalisation of young people and women, for instance providing alternative revenue opportunities for women instead of ‘sex for fish’ along the river and Lakeside. There is no easy resolution for developing contexts in wrestling between the instrumentalisation of culture and its mobilisation for other means, dealing with a colonial past and the necessity of meeting the needs of the urban poor in the present.

Similarly, festivals in the Global North are sites of uneasy tension, integrating between different agendas in ways that resist simple distinctions. From its roots within an entrepreneurial discourse, Manchester International Festival (MIF) continues to evoke both high praise and criticism. In meeting its aim of showcasing international ‘firsts’, it is widely acknowledged as a success whilst the process of embedding locally has been longer in the making. Successive editions of the festival have strengthened this, with notable efforts in the sector in relation to the environmental impact and tapping into a visceral sense of civic pride in 2017, in the wake of the Manchester Arena bombing. With a wide audience spanning cultures and generations, MIF is inscribed in the physical and cultural fabric of Greater Manchester, speaking to industrial, place-based, classic and intangible heritages with innovative verve and style.

The sites of these festivals provide important integrative spaces that are not only geared towards more cohesive human interaction, but foster more engaged relationships between the human and material, where the significance and power of place can be explored through temporary, transient and transitional meeting points. Linking a cultural event with natural and/or built heritage can build people’s sense of belonging and pride, especially if focused at a local or regional audience. This in turn can have positive impacts on citizens’ approach to stewardship of their environment over the longer term. What each festival has in common is a dynamic relationship and co-dependence between content and context, as physical venues and sites give value to cultural expressions and vice versa. As temporal, cyclical and evanescent events, festivals play a central, yet often undervalued, role in the exploration of cultural heritage.

The festivals in this study begin to explore an alternative pathway and role for festivals that mediates between instrumentalisation and sustainability. Festivals have become ubiquitous with the expression of diverse cultural practices across the world. Festivals have also been imagined as a kind of safety-valve for society, or a temporary freeing from conventional bonds, a moment of sociable respite from the frustration of everyday routine. Festivalisation has its dark side, when, for instance, carnivals are carbon copied and exported into unfamiliar contexts, often working to erase more subversive, critical or counter-culture practices. However, at their best, festivals perform a transformative role in society; they can celebrate traditions and powerfully express the meanings places hold for people. Yet they also have the ability to disrupt established ways of thinking about heritage: when festivals occupy particular spaces, they can provide a means of exploring a range of cultural identities, of re-engaging with the past and imagining alternative futures. Festivals encourage renewed perspectives on particular locations and social groups, and raise questions about the role of culture in a sustainable and just society. This is in part because they open the imagination, creating spaces for playfully constructive behaviour, as part of ‘cultural repertoires through which individuals engage in critical boundary work’ (Bennett, Taylor, and Woodward 2014, 22).

Just festivals?

Our paper argues that festivals should be valued and regarded as intrinsically important to resident urban populations, rather than simply for their use in place-making strategies. Through the concepts of entanglements and integrative sites, we argue that festivals provide mechanisms through which plural heritage meanings can be surfaced and valued in the search for more sustainable urban transformations. Festivals can be studied for their subjective and historic meanings of place and culture, as well as their contribution to local economies and tourism strategies. Indeed, the festivals examined here suggest promising avenues for integrating holistic values about cultural heritage into understandings and practices of urban development. Creative city discourses tend to ignore the intangible and immeasurable aspects of the cultural development of cities that are less clearly related to urban boosterist strategies and economic development priorities (Jones, Perry, and Long 2019). Inequality is rife in all cities, everywhere. The role of culture in urban development has been critiqued for displacing poorer urban residents through processes of gentrification; through foregrounding specific groups iconography in old (monuments) and new (public sculpture) forms; and through using culture as a way to soften the blow of development. Whilst the marginalisation of culture within mainstream urban policy debates has motivated a range of processes to argue for alternative imaginaries for the role and value of culture in development, it is unsurprising that cultural economics follows a similar pattern to the formal economy. This begs the question: whose culture, whose heritage matters? International frameworks are beginning to show greater sensitivity to a wider interpretation of both sustainable development and cultural heritage, increasing emphasising the role of cities and local communities as sites where grand challenges need to be met. However, our study points to two critical areas for continued work around festivals as integrative sites.

First, drawing on the lens of festivals, we need a greater understanding of how wider cultural heritage agendas land differently in cities in the Global South and North (Appadurai 1990; Winter 2014). Leveraging culture from marginality to the mainstream involves deeper engagement with, interrogation of, the intersection of cultural heritage and urban development. Global assumptions that underpin academia, activism and policy alike, can only be challenged through an empirical project of exploring how global aspirations land in everyday life. Festivals, we suggest, offer an important empirical lens for this wider project. Global agendas around sustainable development have increasingly recognised the importance of place – evident in international frameworks such as the Sustainable Development Goals, New Urban Agenda, Agenda 21 and Agenda 2063. In particular, the urban has become vital for economic growth, social development, and ecological sustainability, but cultural heritage has been systematically marginalised from many urban discussions. Despite global assertions that cultural heritage matters, how cultural heritage is activated in different contexts varies. A wide range of assumptions temper how policies are interpreted and actioned on the ground.

In contexts with limited funding dedicated to cultural activities, those with resources can leverage agendas that may not be in the greater interest of building more inclusive and just cities. For example, in many African contexts, despite the best intentions of UNESCO Conventions, frameworks are used to protect and preserve tangible heritage in the form of colonial institutions and architecture. Although cultural heritage has captured the imagination of tourism economists, many attempts, particularly in the global South can run the risk of essentialising culture for external audiences rather than supporting heterogenous practices rooted in everyday cultural practices (Sitas 2017). How these instruments land may, therefore, result in the greater marginalisation of intangible cultural practices. There is a dearth of research on the impact of festivals and other cultural activities, despite broad claims about their relevance. This paper has provided an overview and starting point, identifying some critique and opportunity through the lens of festivals, but a more comprehensive South-North/South-South engagement is essential to build new urban narratives to underpin sustainable and just cities.

Second, in the context of the new heritage paradigm, we need to see festivals not only as a viewpoint on, but as a process of transformation. Our study suggests that festivals can play a role within ‘an expanded field for heritage, one in which the open question of what and how heritage could be has radical and transformative potential if actively addressed’ (Harrison 2015, 34, italics added). The approach to heritage is important. Essentialised notions of cultural heritage, particularly if dictated from above, may result in perpetuating unhelpful and divisive stereotypes, marginalising people who feel they do not belong. There is, therefore, a need for people, their interests and choices of cultural participation to be put at the centre of activity planning (Perry and Symons 2019). Organisers should seek to strike an ongoing balance between seeing heritage as something that needs to be conserved and protected from change, and flexibility to understand and recognise cultural heritage as active and shifting. Centrally this means that the new heritage paradigm needs to go beyond the sustainability paradigm and engage with the politics and practice of the just city (Fainstein 2000). Seeking just cities should require ‘a distribution of both material and nonmaterial benefits derived from public policy that does not favor those who are already better off at the beginning’ (Fainstein 2000, 36). Engaging with this notion of just cities is helpful as it rationalises the consideration of what is normally assumed to be marginal, and considers how redress can pull radical practices into the mainstream. This means paying much more attention to heritage ‘from below’ (Robertson 2012, 2015).

Further research is needed on how festivals can be more than integrative but transformative sites in light of the need for social, spatial and environmental justice. From this perspective, the practice and process of developing festivals is important. The more plural, participatory and collective a process, the greater the potential for unpacking the power of people in place in the festival context. Essential to realising more just cities is recognising whose voices and practices are being foregrounded and whose are being silenced or erased. In order to rebalance problematic power relations in the quest for just cities, festivals as critical creative practice should be aiming to trouble, tease or tamper with, rather than perpetuate the status quo. When festival organisers build in routes to participation in the activities they offer, barriers between spectators and performers can be eroded as they interact and become immersed in the temporal space of the festival: ‘festival-goers engaging in relational performance become co-authors of their own festival experience rather than merely consumers of a prepackaged product’ (O’Grady and Kill 2013, 279). This opens up the possibility of a different kind of cultural politics. Festivals belong to ‘those sites in society where the performance dimension of culture is emphasised more directly than in other situations’ (Giorgi, Sassatelli, and Delanty 2011, 6). This is widely recognised, but has yet to be implemented with broad success. As cities in the global South urbanise at rapid rates and cities in the North face their own challenges, it is timely to think and experiment with new ways of thinking and acting in the cultural heritage and urban development sphere.

Acknowledgments

We would like to acknowledge: guest editor, Professors Tony Whyton, Birmingham City University, for comments on early drafts on this paper; two anonymous reviewers for constructive feedback and advice; and contributors to the survey. We acknowledge funding from the JPI Heritage Plus programme, via the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) and funding from the Mistra Foundation for Strategic Environmental Research, via Mistra Urban Futures.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council [AH/N504373/1]; Stiftelsen för Miljöstrategisk Forskning [Mistra Urban Futures].

Notes on contributors

Beth Perry

Beth Perry is a Professorial Fellow at the Urban Institute, University of Sheffield. She leads a programme called Realising Just Cities which includes a focus on cultural democracy, heritage and the just city. She has recently co-authored and edited books on Cultural Intermediation Connecting Communities (2019, Policy Press), Reflexivity: An Essential Guide (2017, Sage) and Cities and the Knowledge Economy: Promise, Politics and Possibility (Routledge).

L. Ager

L. Ager is an independent researcher, freelance event organiser and film programmer, based in Leeds, UK. She programmes films and documentaries for cinemas and film festivals and curates and organises screenings under the name Film Fringe. She recently completed her PhD in festivals presented by UK universities at University of Salford and she teaches part-time on the MA course in Culture, Creativity and Entrepreneurship at University of Leeds.

R. Sitas

R. Sitas is a researcher at the African Centre for Cities, and is the co-founder of public arts organisation, dala. Straddling the academic world of urban studies and creative practice, Rike is fascinated by the intersection of culture and cities, and more specifically on the role of art in urban life. A large part of this focus means unpacking the notions of public space and public life in Southern cityness.