NEW FESTIVALS, NEW PLACES, NEW SPACES

TOWARDS A GEOGRAPHY OF PARISIAN FESTIVE EVENTS

Abstract

Since forty years, the industrial decline, the competition between territories, the taste for leisure and culture, an increasing mobility, the weakening of social links, and the will of show business to invest in proximity markets transform the festive practices in the Western cities, and open them. The “festive city” displaces progressively the city as a place where punctual feasts were celebrated. The ambiance and aesthetics of the feast transform urban daily life and transcend the conception, planning and management of the city. In this quest of the added symbolic value (either commercially, experientially or politically motivated) brought by the feast, all places are not equivalent. The festive facts and the areas in which they occur constitute a mediating object which enlightens the repositioning of spaces and actors on  the urban scene. The City of Paris offers an emblematic example of the festive positioning of a contemporary European capital city. The festive emergence and effervescence of the ultimate decades, the processes at work, the actors of festivals are reviewed through a critical reading of the places invested (but also deserted) by the feast.