There has been a remarkable rise in the number of urban arts festivals in recent decades. The outcomes of cities' engagement with arts festivals, however, remain little understood, particularly in social and cultural terms. This article reviews existing literature on urban festivals and argues that city authorities tend to disregard the social value of festivals and to construe them simply as vehicles of economic generation or as 'quick fix' solutions to city image problems. While such an approach renders certain benefits, it is ultimately quite limiting. If arts festivals are to achieve their undoubted potential in animating communities, celebrating diversity and improving quality of life, then they must be conceived of in a more holistic way by urban managers. Currently, the tasks of conceptualising the problems at issue and devising appropriate policies are hampered by the scarcity of empirical research conducted in the area.
This paper utilises and extends Henri Lefebvre's ideas about rhythmanalysis to explore the rhythmic qualities of taking a coach tour. The paper investigates the Ring of Kerry tour in the West of Ireland and reveals both the reproduction and disturbance, through itinerary and narratives of the coach drivers, of anticipated discourses and visual indexes of commodified Irishness. Central to the paper is the ordering of different rhythmic assemblages, which connect and disconnect in multiple ways. It is argued that the rhythmic multiplicity of coach tours involve entanglements of embodiment, affective registers, technologies and materialities. The paper reveals how the myriad tempos and rhythms of the tour take on different consistencies and intensities at different stages of the journey, and investigates the capacities of these rhythms to affect and be affected by the pulse of the spaces moved through and stopped at. In so doing, a supplemented rhythmanalysis is suggested as a productive approach for apprehending tourist spaces, practices and landscapes.
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 in Ireland. 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, publicprivate 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.
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