The festivalization of the creative citya study of two creative quarters in Barcelona and Berlin

Abstract

In recent decades, the concepts of 'creative city', 'creative class' and 'experience economy' have gained growing attention by scholars and city administrations, bringing fundamental changes to the character of urban space in contemporary cities. These concepts and strategies emphasize the importance of 'soft' location factors and the experiential and cultural characteristics of a place to create prerequisites for culture-led regeneration. In this sense, one of the most popular instruments of cultural planning implementation is focusing cultural development on art festivals, which have become a 'must-have' policy for creative city urban planners attempting to galvanize local cultural life, build continuity of 'happening' and thus attract creative individuals. These factors turn urban space into a constant festival; a phenomenon called festivalization. However, besides the top-down 'creative' initiatives by city councils, the process of festivalization is also produced and contested by interventions stemming from the grassroots level of cultural and community stakeholders, reflecting the peculiarities and aims of creative city strategies in different contexts. Therefore, considering festivalization and creative city development as tightly coupled processes, the research aims to bridge a gap between the two by addressing how festivalization is being produced within the experience economy paradigm. In order to do so, the research aims to analyze the organizational issues of festivalization in the case studies of El Raval in Barcelona and northern Neukölln in Berlin, two quarters facing a process of economic and social regeneration based on the experience economy and cultural activities.