This paper conceptualises the way physical and digital spaces associated with festivals are being harnessed to create new spaces of consumption. It focuses on the ways local food businesses leverage opportunities in the tourist-historic city of Cambridge. Data from a survey of 28 food producers (in 2014) followed by 35 in-depth interviews at the EAT Cambridge food festival (in 2015) are used to explain how local producers overcome the challenges of physical peripherality and why they use social media to help support them challenges restrictive political and economic structures. We present a new conceptual framework which suggests the development of place through food festivals in heritage cities can be understood by pulling together the concepts of 'event leveraging', 'liminoid spaces' (physical and digital) and modes of 'creative resistance' which helps the survival of small producers against inner city gentrification and economically-enforced peripherality.
Olympic event zones are characterised as being intensely formally regulated during live staging periods, producing exclusionary environments blamed for side-lining host community interests. Yet, our findings contradict what scholars perceive to be inflexible formal regulations, and, the regulator’s ability to take informal action. By interviewing and drawing on the experience of 17 regulators during London 2012 we identify how regulators simultaneously oscillate between modes of regulatory formality and informality, straddling what is referred to as the ‘formality-informality span’. Our application and theorisation of these concepts critiques existing explanations of how regulation is enacted in mega-sporting events, providing new insights into the way organisers balance regulatory demands and potentially opening up new emancipatory policies and more equitable outcomes for host communities.
Researchers primarily focus on the formal practices used by event organisers to establish temporary spaces like Host Event Zones, characterised as a unilateral process that ignores community interests. Yet little research investigates both the formal and informal interactions between stakeholders. Interviews with London 2012 senior organisers after the ‘fog of organising’ has lifted – and without political pressure to toe-the-line – reveals how two-way dialogue was facilitated through various communicative mechanisms, from ‘road shows’ to more inclusive Olympic Organising Committee meetings. This counters previous arguments and contributes new knowledge by revealing – and more accurately representing - how event zones are co-created through negotiation between the event and community. Consequently, scholars should be wary of extrapolating from formal practices on paper and interrogate the more complex and messy informalities of planning to improve veracity of claim(s).
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.