Festival Spaces / Festival Places: Ephemerality, Continuity and a Sense of Place

Music festivals may become intimately associated with the locations which host them. For a few days each year, these sites take on a life of their own, with their own accommodation, entertainments, social experience, retail opportunities and policing. They form temporary villages or towns that are constructed and annually re-constructed in their own image by festival organizers and attendees, and increasingly mediated through traditional and online media by organizers, sponsors, broadcasters and festivalgoers. Drawing primarily on British examples and theoretical developments presented in Music Festivals in the UK. Beyond the Carnivalesque (Anderton, 2019), this presentation examines the spaces and places of such events in terms of their ephemerality and continuity, and of the distinctions made by cultural geographers between space and place. It also introduces the new concepts of ‘cyclic place’ and ‘meta-sociality’ which emerged from the research and, it is argued, can be applied to a wide range of outdoor festivals.