Private Events in a Public Park: Contested Music Festivals and Environmental Justice in Finsbury Park, London

Abstract

City parks have long been understood as contested spaces. But creeping privatisation and commercialisation in an era of neoliberal austerity have heightened tensions between different user groups, and between local communities and park authorities. This chapter provides an in-depth case study of a contested green space in a global city. Finsbury Park in London opened in 1869 as the people’s park with the aim of improving the living conditions for the working classes. However, it is now a highly commercialised park, regularly hosting private events which are justified by the local authority as necessary to finance the maintenance of the park. The chapter focuses on the dispute between the local Friends group and Haringey Borough Council over music festivals staged in Finsbury Park. The Friends of Finsbury Park have challenged the legality of these events in the UK courts as they affect the accessibility of public space. Wireless—billed as the UK’s biggest and most famous urban music festival—is particularly controversial. This is an expensive and disruptive event, but one that celebrates urban and youth cultures, suggesting it may have positive as well as negative effects on park accessibility. Based on field work conducted from 2017 to 2020, and the analysis of documents covering the dispute, this case study assesses the ways that music festivals affect the status of Finsbury Park as a people’s park. The chapter highlights the wider implications of this local dispute and outlines the socio-spatial impacts of the shift in London towards parks financed by commercial income.

Contested Urban Green Spaces and Environmental Justice in Northern Europe

“…Pellow (2016) and Anguelovski et al (2020) have called for an advancement of critical environmental justice studies that pay close attention to the "invisible or situated experiences and everyday practices of urban green injustices" (ibid., p. 1744). This is what the chapters in this book aim to do (see Table 1) by studying environmental justice issues through the eyes of those with limited green space access (Collier 2022;Dahlberg and Borgström 2022;Smith et al 2022). Moreover, they seek to shed light on hitherto understudied aspects of procedural and interactional justice (Berglund 2022;Loewen et al 2022;Pikner 2022;Smith et al 2022) by uncovering the knowledges, testimonies and practices that are legitimated and/or pushed aside.…”

“…This is what the chapters in this book aim to do (see Table 1) by studying environmental justice issues through the eyes of those with limited green space access (Collier 2022;Dahlberg and Borgström 2022;Smith et al 2022). Moreover, they seek to shed light on hitherto understudied aspects of procedural and interactional justice (Berglund 2022;Loewen et al 2022;Pikner 2022;Smith et al 2022) by uncovering the knowledges, testimonies and practices that are legitimated and/or pushed aside. And finally, they discuss the underlying dynamics of environmental justice concerns, i.e.…”

“…In line with this definition, the array of green spaces studied in this volume is wide. They range from public parks (Loewen et al 2022;Smith et al 2022), over urban gardens (Pungas et al 2022) and green-blue spaces (Berglund 2022;Pikner 2022) to window-view, nearby and informal green spaces (Dahlberg and Borgström 2022;Pikner 2022;Sechi et al 2022). Green spaces at a macro-scale, i.e.…”

“…And finally, they discuss the underlying dynamics of environmental justice concerns, i.e. their social, economic, political and cultural contexts (Berglund 2022;Collier 2022;Pungas et al 2022;Sechi et al 2022;Smith et al 2022).…”

“…By studying environmental justice issues through the eyes of those with limited green space access, the contributions of Collier (2022), Dahlberg and Borgström (2022) and Smith et al (2022) fine-tune the concept of access and accessibility in multiple ways. Going beyond more common conceptualisations of physical and social access, in the case of people with impaired mobility in Sweden and people of colour in the UK, Dahlberg and Borgström (2022) and Collier (2022) emphasise psychological barriers to green space use that have hitherto received less attention (for an exception, see Park 2017).…”