Every Day's A Festival!

festivals has long been neglected. The burgeoning festivals industry is,

however, firmly embedded in both the arts funding and weekly calendar

of European cities, and there is no doubt that festivals are fast becoming a

defining feature of urban life in the twenty-first century. An assessment of

their nature and impact is more pressing than ever before.

The contributors to this volume explore the modern urban festival and

the difference it makes to the experience and management of diversity in

the city. Their research reveals an unsettling coupling of the celebration of

local diversity with institutional amnesia, in which the memory of a festival

hardly ever outlasts its funding. This book documents a key phenomenon

of our time, the supplanting of community-based remembering with the

repetitive structures of events whose historic and interpretative depth is

lost amid a spiraling velocity of 'festivalization'.