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The theme of this issue of Architecture and Culture is “Architecture, Festival and the City.” Our aim has been to posit and to explore the relationship between festivals and their settings, in order to ask what constitutes festival in the contemporary city - what allows a traditional festival to endure, and how can a new festival become meaningful?

This book examines how festivals can be used as a lens to examine the relationship between city and citizen and questions whether this is fixed through time, or has been transformed as a response to changes in the modern urban condition.

The urban festival has always served as an occasion for affirming shared convictions and identities in the life of the city. Whether religious or civic in nature, these events provided tangible expressions of social, cultural, political, and religious cohesion, often reaffirming a particular shared ethos within very diverse urban landscapes. The enactment of a festival is often a symbolic representation of the political and social relationships that are played out within the everyday agon of civic life. The term agon in this context derives from the classical Greek word meaning ‘struggle’ or ‘contest’ often used particularly in relation to sport or debate. Turner argues for the interconnectedness between ritual or sacred action and the more banal stuff of life. This is crucial to understand festivals as a kind of hyper- ordinariness which can establish the social paradigm for the city on an annual basis.

Indoor Positioning has been an active research area in the last decade, but so far, commercial Indoor Positioning Systems (IPSs) have been sparse. The main obstacle towards widely available IPSs has been the lack of appropriate, low cost technologies, that enable indoor positioning. While Wi-Fi infrastructures are ubiquitous, consumer-oriented Wi- Fi enabled mobile phones have been missing. Conversely, while Bluetooth technology is present in the vastmajority of consumermobile phones,Bluetooth infrastructures have been missing. Bluetooth infrastructures have typically been installed as part of complete hardware-/software IPSs that often incur a substantial hardware cost. Furthermore, Bluetooth has low power consumption compared to Wi-Fi devices, which promotes longer battery life-time on mobile phones. In this paper, we present a Bluetooth IPS based entirely on commodity-grade products. The positioning accuracy is evaluated by using the so-called location fingerprinting technique which is well-known from Wi-Fi positioning literature. The results show that 2 meters median accuracy is achievable - a result that compares favourably to results for Wi-Fi based systems.

We present a novel tool for statically determining the Worst Case Execution Time (WCET) of Java Bytecode-based programs called Tool for Execution Time Analysis of Java bytecode (TetaJ). This tool differentiates itself from existing tools by separating the individual constituents of the execution environment into independent components. The prime benefit is that it can be used for execution environments featuring common embedded processors and software implementations of the JVM.TetaJ employs a model checking approach for statically determining WCET where the Java program, the JVM, and the hardware are modelled as Networks of Timed Automata (NTA) and given as input to the state-of-the-art UPPAAL model checking tool. The tool is evaluated through a case study based on the classic text-book example of a hard real-time control system in a mine pump. The system is hosted on an execution environment featuring an interpretation-based JVM, called Hardware near Virtual Machine (HVM) that runs on an Atmel AVR ATmega2560 processor.

Certain sectors of the heritage and tourist industry argue that cities with art historical significance should be re-categorized as ‘museum cities’ because visitors intent on acquiring particular limited ‘consumer’ experiences outnumber the local population. Using the Feast Day of San Giovanni in Florence, Italy, as a focus this article questions this assumption. By evaluating the form of the fest day events and their relationship to the urban landscape, some of the historical conditions that have shaped the city are revealed. These conditions, understood as civic praxis, are accessible to everyone (to different degrees) and suggest Florence is anything but a museum.