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This book explores how festivals and events affect urban places and public spaces, with a particular focus on their role in fostering inclusion. The ‘festivalisation’ of culture, politics and space in cities is often regarded as problematic, but this book examines the positive and negative ways that festivals affect cities by examining festive spaces as contested spaces. The book focuses on Western European cities, a particularly interesting context given the social and cultural pressures associated with high levels of in-migration and concerns over the commercialisation and privatisation of public spaces. The key themes of this book are the quest for more inclusive urban spaces and the contested geographies of festival spaces and places. Festivals are often used by municipal authorities to break down symbolic barriers that restrict who uses public spaces and what those spaces are used for. However, the rise of commercial festivals and ticketed events means that they are also responsible for imposing physical and financial obstacles that reduce the accessibility of city parks, streets and squares. Alongside addressing the contested effects of urban festivals on the character and inclusivity of public spaces, the book addresses more general themes including the role of festivals in culture-led regeneration. Several chapters analyse festivals and events as economic development tools, and the book also covers contested representations of festival cities and the ways related images and stories are used in place marketing. A range of cases from Western Europe are used to explore these issues, including chapters on some of the world’s most significant and contested festival cities: Venice, Edinburgh, London and Barcelona. The book covers a wide range of festivals, including those dedicated to music and the arts, but also events celebrating particular histories, identities and pastimes. A series of fascinating cases are discussed - from the Venice Biennale and Dublin Festival of History, to Rotterdam’s music festivals and craft beer festivals in Manchester. The diverse and innovative qualities of the book are also evident in the range of urban spaces covered: obvious examples of public spaces – such as parks, streets, squares and piazzas – are addressed, but the book includes chapters on enclosed public spaces (e.g., libraries) and urban blue spaces (waterways) too. This reflects the interpretation of public spaces as socio-material entities: they are produced informally through their use (including for festivals and events), as well as through their formal design and management.

Arts festivals are in the ascendant. Framed within an array of neo-liberal, culture-led urban regeneration strategies, they are now a mainstay of urban tourism and urban policy-making. As such, they face growing competitive pressures and competing agendas, and the need for a set of coherent goals and policy frameworks is vital. While a review of the literature clearly shows that arts festivals can deliver a series of benefits that separately meet the cultural policy and urban tourism policy objectives, there is little to suggest that cities normatively engage in comprehensive, integrated policy-making for urban arts festivals. This paper critically reviews a range of literature that investigates how arts festivals further cultural policy and tourism policy objectives in urban contexts, with a particular focus on recent developments inIreland. Overall, it argues that current conceptualisations of arts festivals within urban policy frameworks are imbalanced. While the proliferation of arts festivals signals expansion for the sector, the ready transferability of arts festivals into tourist attractions and city image-makers raises the prospect of a new dichotomy within a city’s supply of artistic offerings, with the visible and instantly appealing, e.g. festivals, being more likely to prosper through a variety of public funding, public-private ventures and private sponsorship arrangements, than other cultural organisations with less potential for spectacle. It concludes by arguing that common bases for collaboration need to be identified between the arts festivals and tourism sectors, and that these common bases need to be conceptualised within the broader cultural and urban policy arenas in which arts festival are now firmly implicated. Keywords: arts festivals; urban tourism; cultural policy; collaboration;Ireland

As Alderman (2010: 90) has recently written, the potential struggle to determine what conception of the past will prevail constitutes the politics of memory. This paper aims to investigate the politics of memory at play in determining how Dublin’s colonial heritage is constructed and represented to tourists. Dublin’s profile as a tourism destination has grown recently. It attracted 5.4 million visitors in 2009 (Fáilte Ireland 2010). Culture and heritage underpin both its touristic appeal and the city’s official efforts to represent itself as a destination. Much of Dublin’s most iconic built heritage is strongly associated with its development as a colonial capital. Many decades after independence, contemporary Ireland is a vastly changed place. Yet the process of dealing with colonial heritage in tourism contexts is not unproblematic. This paper begins to unravel both the construction and the representation of the city as a tourism destination to investigate how the city is remembering/forgetting its colonial heritage. Its approach is interpretivist, and methodologically, its efforts focus on one hugely important site: Dublin Castle, the seat of English administration in Ireland for 700 years. Centrally located in a prime tourist area to the south of the city centre Dublin Castle is the 6th most visited fee-paying attraction in the state (Fáilte Ireland 2010). Data are gathered through: In-depth interviewing with key personnel involved in the multiple sites operating as distinct tourist ventures within the Castle Discourse analysis of the Castle’s promotional and informational literature Analysis of the tour guiding narratives offered to tourists. The findings point to a selective narration of history in various aspects of the Castle’s operation as a tourist attraction. They lend support to the argument that tourism constitutes a mechanism through which places can actively seek to reclaim and recast historically important places of memory.

This research investigated how access to an annual holiday can benefit children living in poverty and their families. It studied children who had the opportunity to avail of a child-centred, structured group holiday provided by three NGOs. Study participants were drawn from a cross-section of disadvantaged areas in Dublin, comprising two inner-city and four suburban areas. Data collection involved 75 children and 35 guardians in the first stage, and 27 children and 16 guardians in subsequent stages. In total, 16 families participated in all stages of the research process, which used qualitative methods, including focus groups, in-depth interviews and observation. The research found that the children studied clearly benefited from the opportunity to go on holiday. The most obvious benefit lay in being able to get a break from the routine home environment. The break has many effects: it is restorative and it creates opportunities to rest and relax, to be at ease and to harness renewed energies to meet the challenges routinely felt at home.

In the contemporary era local places seem exposed to more and faster change than ever before. The difference between places seems to be diminishing and debates as to whether ‘cultural homogenisation’ or ‘reconstituted difference’ best describes the changes affecting place feature prominently in recent social science and humanities literatures. Local places are linked to regional, national and supra-national spheres through multiple connections. Tourism is one important globalising force, linking places into the wider world and influencing the changing meanings of place. This chapter is broadly concerned with examining how tourism is implicated in changing the meanings of place. The type of tourism places selected for enquiry is arts festivals turned tourist attractions. The arguments draw on doctoral research conducted into the Wexford Festival Opera and the Galway Arts Festival. It construes tourism places as phenomena forged through local – extra-local interactions, explores the complicated roles played by both place-based actors and tourists, and analyses the tourism places ultimately reproduced.