Whilst the importance of cultural heritage in sustainable urban development has been increasingly recognised in policy frameworks at multiple levels, there remains a lack of understanding about how global and international goals land in different places. This paper specifically addresses this question through a study of 18 festivals across the Global North and South. We argue that festivals are integrative sites in which tangible and intangible heritage properties are entangled: bidirectional, co-dependent and non-linear. Given the critical role in linking urban contexts and histories with immaterial experience and meaning in the city, we argue that festivals can illuminate wider concerns. Specifically, this means seeing festivals as part of the 'new heritage paradigm' and assessing their contribution to processes of just urban transformations.
ARTICLE HISTORY
Festivals have tremendous power to engage diverse audiences with new forms of cultural consumption, but also provide opportunities for enlightening debate and encouraging action for social change. The Bristol Radical Film Festival (BRFF) takes place annually in venues throughout the city of Bristol, in the South West of England, presenting a curated programme of ‘radical’ films and documentaries which are screened in non-traditional venues. Drawing on ideas of Latin American radical film making, the organisers explicitly sought to use the festival to connect community activists within the city. This chapter examines how festival organisers used the cultural capital of their association with the University of the West of England to help legitimise their activities, under the radar of university managers to create a novel form of societal impact.
Hiding in Plain Sight is an illustrated history of the former and present cinemas in the city of Leeds and an interactive website that engages Leeds residents in a participatory reminiscence project about cinemas and cinema-going. Launched in the summer of 2020, it is the most recent output of an ongoing cinema history research project at the Hyde Park Picture House, a much-loved 106 year-old Grade 2 listed independent cinema. The Hiding in Plain Sight project was one of a series of activities hosted by the organisation in line with their objective to engage as many people as possible with the cinema’s valuable heritage. The author of this paper, Dr Laura Ager, was employed by the Hyde Park Picture House as their Creative Engagement Officer between 2019 and 2020 and in this role she developed project’s framework and its research strategy. In this article she outlines the project’s origins and stages of development and considers how the methods used in the research phase have interacted with the design and production of the Hiding in Plain Sight website to give unexpected insights. She also reflects on some essential stages of project re-negotiation during the extraordinary and turbulent summer of 2020.
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