DISQUIET ON THE WATERFRONT: REFLECTIONS ON NOSTALGIA AND UTOPIA IN THE URBAN ARCHETYPES OF FESTIVAL MARKETPLACES

Abstract

Festival marketplaces have been developed in many cities of the United States under public-private partnerships as a means to promote urban revitalization in historic downtowns, and especially on waterfronts. While some critics have welcomed the return of public life and collective narratives in these new retail landscapes, others have lamented their exclusionary nature, ideological manipulations, and formulaic aesthetics. This paper critically examines these claims and argues that festival marketplaces are profoundly ambivalent places, which in their rhetorical commitment to Utopian values of urbanism open up opportunities for urban politics that both critiques ignore. This is demonstrated through a review of four archetypes of ideal urbanness that are reproduced in these forms, namely public space, the marketplace, street theater, and the waterfront. The archetypes are articulated through powerful narratives of nostalgia, and I draw on Walter Benjamin to argue that the festival marketplace is a dream-house of contemporary consumer capitalism.