edinburgh: the festival gaze and its boundaries

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2004 7: 64Space and CultureKirstie Jamieson

Edinburgh: The Festival Gaze and Its Boundaries

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The Festival Gaze and Its Boundaries

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This article examines the temporal and spatial boundaries of Edinburgh’s festival identity. It un-ravels Edinburgh’s festivals in terms of the spaces and identities they produce and their functions.Although there is no one definitive standpoint from which a festival city such as Edinburgh can beobjectively mapped, the bounded appeal of live performance, outdoor reveling, and alternativeways of using the city during festival time reveal how the festival gaze manipulates urban identity,public space, and play. By engaging with the spatiality of Edinburgh’s festival culture, the festivalidentity upon which the city self-consciously relies is explored through the concepts of carniva-lesque, play, and the transformation of identity.

Keywords: festival gaze; Bakhtin; urban identity; spectacle; revelry; cosmopolitan

Festival time signals jostling crowds, overspilling bars, and cacophonies of multi-lingual conversations. The scale and chaotic feel of “Edinburgh the Festival City”comes alive at the end of July with The Edinburgh International Jazz and Blues Festivalfollowed by The Edinburgh Festival Fringe, The Edinburgh International Book Festival,The Edinburgh International Film Festival, The Edinburgh Tattoo, The Edinburgh Inter-national Festival, and The Guardian Edinburgh International Television Festival. For 6weeks, a thriving street life brings tourists, performers, and residents into proximitywhere difference in appearance, language, and behavior becomes the norm of city cen-ter public life.

As thousands of professional festival performers in lavish costumes shout bombas-tically into the crowds, the decorum that usually characterizes this city dissolves and

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E d i n b u r g h 65

Edinburgh self-consciously adopts the identity of “The Festival City.” A framed spon-taneous play which contrasts routine everyday life is observably squandered in thededicated time and place of Edinburgh’s festival season. Colorful photocopied flyersthat promise exciting new theatrical shows decorate the cobbled historic High Street.The medieval old quarter of the city center becomes a stage where professional streetperformers shout over layers of cheers and laughter, inscribing their presence on thecity through movement and performance. Festival programs are thrust into the laps oftourists as they sit in street cafes to watch the politely bohemian festival culture unveilitself. For most visitors, this will be the first introduction to the city’s festival gaze.

However, behind the animated street scenes, the gaze is influenced by stakeholders,institutions of local government, and an expanding service economy, which benefitfrom the promotion of the festivals’ playfulness and liminality. The success of the fes-tival season’s unbounded creative expression is bounded by the topography of festi-valized spaces. Although spaces appear as though spontaneously formed by the com-pany of strangers and the collective experience of performances, the city en fête is alsothe result of painstaking planning by acity administration that seeks to controlthe ways in which public spaces change.The city is nonetheless redefined by thealtered energy and velocity of strategi-cally planned festivalized spaces. An es-tablished tradition of festival culture andthe more illusory qualities of play andspontaneity produce identities and iden-tification with this festival city. Festivalsgenerate regulated and liminal spaces inthe city’s cultural calendar and insinuateEdinburgh’s cultural ambience, sociabil-ity, and prestige in the global hierarchy ofcelebrated cultural cities.

Reveling Through Time

Festivals and spectacular events serve discourses of “city branding” and the “cre-ative industries” in a competitive global context where “culture” provides the discur-sive linchpin linking creative practices, formerly regarded as “the arts,” with economic-led, postindustrial, globalized urban repertoires (Jayne, 2000). Theming and placemarketing of cities has become a central feature of the political economy of tourism,urban regeneration, and gentrification projects (O’Connor & Wynne, 1996; Zukin,1982, 1996). In the race to win investment and tourism, Edinburgh mines its culturalresources and charismatic urban images, defining itself visually by either images of thecastle or the city during its festival season. Defined by the imposed order of urbanstakeholders, Edinburgh constitutes what de Certeau (1984) regards as a “conceptcity” that simplifies the contingencies and multiplicities of city life to convey an ap-pealing unified impression. Within today’s competitive urban context, Edinburgh’sculture, heritage, and public spaces are regarded as assets that add rich social refer-ences to the lexicon of city marketing campaigns.

FFiigg.. 11.. Street Entertainer in the midst of busyfestival crowd 2002.




66 s p a c e a n d c u l t u r e / f e b r u a r y 2 0 0 4

In this sense, culture is used to articulate cultivated cultural activities that are di-rected and developed according to social and economic objectives. Just as culture hasbeen discursively reconfigured according to economic and managerialist logic(McGuigan, 1996), so now festivals are increasingly written into civic cultural policiesas both product and framework, designed to attract a wealthy target market and fur-nish the city with a competitive image. In cultural planning discourse, the promo-tional use of urban festivals serves the consumer demands of a “tourist city” (Evans,2001). As a site of tourist consumption, Edinburgh promotes its festivities and liberalapproach to street entertainment, alcohol, and late licenses as inducements designedto attract mobile capital (Harvey, 1994).

The origins of Edinburgh’s festivalized disposition are embedded in a set of dis-tinctive economic and political relations quite dissimilar to the promotional and com-modified status of Edinburgh’s more recent festival additions.1 Edinburgh’s “culturaldisposition” provides it with its sense of place and is the result of a distinct “constella-tion of relations,” articulated together at “a particular locus” (Massey, 1993, p. 66). Therelations of Edinburgh’s festival identity can be traced to the particular locus of 1947when many European cities that had formerly been known for their impressive archi-tecture and high cultural exports were in ruins. The Scotsman newspaper told of how“Salzburg, Munich and other pre-war festival centres on the continent of Europe arelikely to be out of action for an indefinite period” (“Festival News,” 1945). Edinburghhad escaped the devastation of bombs, and unscathed by mortar, it proudly clung toits Enlightenment aspirations of being internationally recognized as the “Athens of theNorth.” In that year, Edinburgh hosted the first “Edinburgh International Festival ofMusic and Drama.” The first program of high cultural performances codified culturalalliances and affinities of taste that symbolically transcended the geographies of war.Postwar, Edinburgh’s first international festival reestablished communities of high cul-ture and conferred legitimacy to the spatial and temporal structure of arts festivals inthe city.

Edinburgh’s celebration of European high culture provided the opportunity for theVienna Philharmonic to publicly reunite for the first time since 1938, performing foran elite and supportive audience. The “International” culture to which the ViennaPhilharmonic belonged was a canonized European cultural sphere to which access wasreserved for those with a social background comfortable with the conventions of highculture and “the arts.” The political change of the 1940s and the introduction of wel-fare capitalism with the associated desire to extend “good” culture to everyone en-dorsed the culture of Edinburgh’s International Festival and validated the grounds forfuture state funding. This specific context supplied the justification for the first festi-val, which relied upon a belief in the inherent value of high culture and which the statewould support only a few years later, on the basis that a civilizing and ennobling cul-ture was for everybody (Sinfield, 1989).

From the outset, The Edinburgh International Festival mapped itself beyond theboundaries of the national image of Scotland’s capital city, situating itself within ashifting geography of European cultural traditions. Festival culture paraded elitepleasures and a humanizing body of values along city center streets and in the fash-ionable tearooms of the time. For those with elite pleasures, the first of Edinburgh’sfestivals provided refinement and resistance to the looming Americanized “culture in-dustry” (Adorno, 1991), symbolically securing closer ties with a more exclusive andedifying European high culture. Edinburgh’s International Festival demonstrated and




celebrated the survival and significance of European high culture while at the sametime insinuating Edinburgh’s elite European cultural tastes.

Within the shifting cultural landscape of postwar Britain, it soon emerged that Ed-inburgh’s festival space was a contested terrain, where cultural expression and repre-sentation would have to vie for a fragmenting and more youthful audience. The seri-ousness of the official festival culture was soon challenged by the young, playful, andirreverent “Edinburgh Festival Fringe.” The Fringe’s initial unauthorized status addedto its rebellious and provocatively playful character and pitted it against the legitimateand civilizing International Festival. Notorious for anarchic genre-flouting perform-ances, the performers of the early Festival Fringe arrived in the city uninvited, hopingto appear somewhere in the festival’s borrowed spaces. As a fringe to the InternationalFestival, it operated unofficially until 1958 when the Festival Fringe Society acquiredauthorized status. The Edinburgh Festival Fringe continues to attract an avant-gardeculture to the city where professional and nonprofessional performing artists stagetheir productions in halls, disused churches, reappropriated university spaces, and citycenter streets. From the outset, experimental formats and satirical material furnishedthis festival with a reputation as a radical alternative to the elite cultural content of TheEdinburgh International Festival.

It is the Fringe Festival rather than the International Festival that continues to ap-propriate city spaces, license street performance, and so transform the city’s atmos-phere. The city’s relationship with its festival identity has shifted from a postwar em-phasis upon symbolic humanized gestures of international alliance to what has nowbecome the city’s hottest tourist attraction. During late July and August, the bohemianand intellectual qualities of the city’s festivals are observable in the altered pace of acrowded street life. Images of the flamboyant crowded streets promote and celebratethe festival city as a tourist destination, and the combination of ritual and con-sumerism has elevated Edinburgh as a site and a subject of consumption. To make aspectacle of the animated crowds is to impose a certain way of looking at the proteanspaces of the city (Edensor, 2000) and the elaborately adorned bodies that jostle andweave between performances and spectators. This way of looking is best described asa festival gaze that magnifies the humanized festival streets obscuring the commodi-fied and tourist-oriented nature of Edinburgh’s festivals.

In his account of the present “self-conscious frenzy of cultural events,” Evans(2001) distinguishes between festivals that have retained their original sacred or pro-fane principles and those festivals which are more commercially tied to tourism andeconomic development. It is a distinction that is persistently presented by those theo-rists interested in the cultural politics of carnival and festival behavior. Although thedistinction between “authentic” carnivals and contemporary official festivals does notunveil the specific relations between place and festival, it does begin to reveal thosespontaneous behaviors and performed identities that are exaggerated or overlooked inthe festival gaze.

The Dense Weave of Festival Culture

Critical attention is given to the authentic (grassroots) carnival because of theopinion that it could be mobilized against the capitalist system and provide an “alter-native cultural formation” (Highmore, 2002). Theoretical engagement with the carni-






val is most commonly informed by Bakhtin’s (1984) account of the “carnivalesque”through which he expresses carnival themes that satirically invert and parody societalstructures and traditions. His account is of an empowered riotous proletariat bodythat spontaneously dances, ridicules, and creatively flouts conventions of power. At theheart of Bakhtin’s (1984) descriptions of the carnival is the breaking down of socialdistance and hierarchy, which permits empowering reconnections between people. Itis these “transformative potentials” produced by the temporary suspension of every-day life and order of power that provide instances for redefining meanings and socialorder.

Critical interest in the carnival is not reserved for those who celebrate its tempo-rary deliverance from the confines of the dominant order; contrastingly, it is also cri-tiqued as a naive belief in the liberating power of its capacity to subvert and redefinesociety (Eagleton, 1981; Eco, 1984) on the basis that carnival is precisely an authorizeddomain in time and space. Therefore, whereas some attribute the ideal of the carnivalwith revolutionary powers of transgression, others level criticism at its “licensed” sta-tus, which relegates its value of disruption to “a permissible rupture of hegemony”(Eagleton, 1981, p. 148). When licensed, as most events are today, the festival isbounded to a specific time and space where spontaneity and bodily encounters areguided by bureaucratic structures that are believed to disempower the disordering andreordering potential of the carnivalesque spirit.

Mined instead for the hedonistic appeal of revelry, masked identities, and outdoorpublic performance, Edinburgh’s licensed festivals are better understood as “profitablepseudo-transgressions” (Lefebvre, 1991). The ambience produced through the festivalseason creates a “nostalgic simulacrum of urban living” (Edensor, 2000), which playswith disorder rather than through disorder. The “ordered disorder” (Featherstone,1991, p. 82) of the licensed festivals shapes Edinburgh’s city center spaces and simu-lates the rhythms of the carnival’s bodily gestures. Those festival ruptures to whichBakhtin (1984) refers, on the other hand,signify a contemptuous and riotousbreach from those quotidian structuresthat define the existence and status ofwork and workers.

Although the classification of festivalsinto authentic, spontaneous, licensed,and regulated articulates the changing re-lations of urban freedom, playful resist-ance, and embodied space, it does notprovide insight into the spaces andmeanings that are brought about throughthe temporal cultural and social transfor-mations of place. The constellation of re-lations between the city and the festival creates an altered sense of place, and it is thistransformative union of place and festival that can be explained by way of the “redef-initions” to which Bakhtin (1984) refers. Those spaces and meanings produced withinthe temporary world of festivals offer a palimpsest of re-imagined identities and somake identification problematic. Appearances are played with in Edinburgh as the citytricks its visitors with colorful facades and sensory stimulation that disorient and re-orient the perambulating body to a state of playful discovery amid regulated com-plexities and ambiguities.

FFiigg.. 22.. Performers play with the crowds ofonlookers, looking and being looked at be-comes a game in the streets.





Play and its modalities of participation are necessary features of the subversive andre-ordering powers of the carnival, but equally, the modality of play informs the waysof seeing and being seen in Edinburgh during the festival season. Understood as sym-bolic action, play articulates cultural and political meanings2 and is bounded by agreedpractices and limits. To play necessitates a lack of restrictions from the self and the en-vironment, but the freedom to play is dependent upon rules that establish the illusionof trust and power between players (Sennett, 2002). In play and festivals alike, the re-lations and regulations of time and space differentiate embodied meanings from other“realities” in order to secure a safe temporal space.

The safe space for play that is represented in the images of Edinburgh’s bustlingpedestrianized streets and public performances is consumed through the printed me-dia, television, and the Internet by the gaze of prospective tourists captivated by a newurban velocity and relaxed roaming about (Kracauer, 1995). Inscribed through thefestival gaze, wandering inquisitive bodies play and discover the city according to therules that define Edinburgh’s temporary spaces and subjectivities. But there are sub-jectivities that are not acknowledged by the customs and playful rhythms that seem-ingly contrast, adorn, and intensify (Huizinga, 1955) the life of the city. How are thesetemporal freedoms from the mundane pattern and constraints of working hours un-derstood and who is it that shares the illusion of trust and power in the playful streets?Moreover, if the festival gaze is a modality that eludes responsibilities of adult timeand, instead, is swollen by a playful subjectivity and possibility that dreams couldshape a liberated reality (Vaneigem, 2001), whose dreams are glimpsed in the festival-ized streets?

The City of the Cultural Pilgrim

Although spontaneity and play are discredited by critics of the carnival’s potentialto invert societal norms, both play and spontaneity are in a more pseudo-transgressiveform, integral features of the re-articulation of Edinburgh’s urban spaces. Despitetheir commercial and licensed nature, Edinburgh’s festivals still “point to the possibil-ity of life lived differently (to another tempo, a different logic)” (Highmore, 2002, p.29). During the summer festival season, the city’s Old Town streets are given over to aprivileged tempo and logic that produces a distinct way of looking at the city, a gazethat romanticizes the playfully different pace and simulated carnival surroundings.

The apparently real and seemingly spontaneous spaces of the festival season are rec-ognized as the charms of the city en fête by The City of Edinburgh Council (2001),which carefully plans and insinuates the freedom of the festivalized streets. The Edin-burgh Festivals Strategy (2001) suggests that certain areas of the city given over to fes-tival activities are “made safer” thus promote the opportunity for risk-free “liminalzones” (Lash & Urry, 1994) sought by cultural tourists. These liminal zones providespaces “appropriate to being in the company of strangers” and offer the opportunityfor new, safe, and “exciting forms of sociability” (Lash & Urry, 1994, p. 235). Withinthe company of leisurely visitors and re-articulated spaces, an exhilarating paceproduces sociable urban conditions where those accustomed to the rules andpleasures of an exhibitionary public life can meet (Sennett, 2002) and play. How-ever, pivotal to the freedom to meet strangers and play in the festival city are assur-ances that spontaneity is directed, supervised, and accountable, and that the “fiction




of initial equality in power between players” (Sennett, 2002, p. 319) is established.Only once these assurances are in place can the framed revelry specific to Edinburghbegin. These assurances of safe sociability define the cultural boundaries of festivalplay and distance the cultural atmosphere from that of the carnival’s inflammatoryand irreverent disposition.

Tied together in the bounded freedom of carnivalesque rhythms, security and lim-inality simultaneously police and blur the boundaries between crowds and perform-ances. Those social worlds that are not neatly assimilated to a festival gaze and existbeyond the boundaries of Edinburgh’s spontaneous festival atmosphere are eclipsedby the dominant order of seeing the city. During late July and August, the city is sig-nified by the overpresence of its own image; festival visitors are knowingly inscribedinto the festival gaze as they look and are looked at in the orchestrated chaos of thecity’s historic Old Town streets. The festival season is produced with “the visible inmind: the visibility of people and things, of spaces and of whatever is contained bythem” (Lefebvre, 1991, p. 75). The pronounced visualization of a city preoccupiedwith its promotional image imposes a festival gaze that shapes the identity and iden-tification with the city’s festival streets. Globally circulated, Edinburgh’s festival gazesimplifies the city and glosses over the contradictions that the resident drunk and thedispossessed bring to the festival spaces of the Old Town. The gaze imposes order onthe events and identities in the festival city3 through a visual language that makes senseof people and spaces in accordance with the dominant logic that celebrates and pro-motes commodified cultural achievement and a performed orderly sociability.

However, the visual order of the festival repertoire produces ambiguous relationswhen tourists, eager to consume the unpredictable moment, watch resident drunksmimic street performers in a guileful ruse. Unsure of the status of the spontaneousspectacle, crowds of expectant tourists dutifully applaud the impromptu gesture. In asocial context that signals the expectation of a performed and playful self, both thedrunk and the street performer offer his cap for any spare change the tourist may wishto liberate. To avoid contradictions in the festival city, the gaze imputes theatricality ineach and every thing.4 Mediated through the festival gaze, the city’s social differencesare framed as nonthreatening and playful.

In part, the festival gaze is based upon the constructed rhythms and conventionsimposed by the city’s governing institutions, but it is also based upon distinct modal-ities that conform to particular spaces of social agency, an employee in one place, a cit-izen or a tourist in another (Lloyd & Thomas, 1998). Appearances are ostentatiouslyperformed during Edinburgh’s festival season, and the uncertainty of masked identi-ties beckons a certain mode of participation that is reflexive and attentive to the con-ventions of the city’s temporary spaces. Specifically, the mode of subjectivity elicitedthrough the space and time of Edinburgh’s summer festivals facilitates a gaze morecomplicit than that ascribed to contemporary tourists (Urry, 1990). Urry’s (1990)“tourist gaze” is rounded by the specific historical conventions of commercializedtourism and does not adequately account for the festival gaze that seeks out “the un-expected, not the extraordinary”; this gaze solicits a desire to glimpse the authenticcultural act (MacCannell, 2001, p. 36).

A glimpse of the unexpected act is implied in the framed liminality and intrigue ofsuch large-scale urban festivals. The immediate velocity of performances in doorways,alleyways, and public gardens fuels the choreographed surprise element and organizesthe gaze around capricious transitory events. Exploitation of the desire to escape the






predictable (Edensor, 2000) has resulted in the effort to construct carnivalesque at-mospheres and manufactured heterotopias in the guise of contemporary festivals suchas those hosted in Edinburgh. The appetite for safe yet unexpected encounters neces-sitates complicity with the city’s dominant visual logic of bounded flamboyanceand spontaneous street activities. To participate in the city’s festivals is also to par-ticipate in the city’s public relations, which necessarily guarantees protection fromthe socially incompatible and visually irreconcilable and solicits complicity from theurbane visitor.

The festival gaze belongs to a leisured modality experienced in the company ofstrangers. It belongs to those comfortable and skilled in looking and being looked atin an urban environment where emotional distance and acceptance of “strangeness”communicate educated good manners (Bauman, 2001; Sennett, 2002) and the prac-ticed art of looking. These crowds of cultural pilgrims and performers furnish the citywith an air of polite bohemianism and civility, but this temporary and overtly visiblesociability is a manifestation of the festival gaze, which has both geographic and socialboundaries.

Boundaries of Branded Revelry

Edinburgh’s festival spaces have both social and geographic boundaries, which ifabsent, would discourage the visitor sought by the service economy stakeholders andcity marketing consortiums. The spatiality of Edinburgh’s festival events serves theconcentrated city center service economy5 far from the city’s housing estates and so-cially deprived areas. The bounded central location reassures the cultural tourists of asafe encounter with a city that has mapped its celebrated cultural activities on to thecity center’s medieval Old Town, a World Heritage Site popular with tourists all yearround.

The temporary structures of stages and stalls that hallmark the seasonally pedestri-anized streets choreograph visitors along “the city’s most historic axis” (Lorimer, 2002,p. 105), “The Royal Mile,” which runs from the historic fort of Edinburgh Castle to theofficial Scottish residence of the British royal family, namely, Hollyrood Palace. Be-tween these two landmarks, the Old Town’s historic alleyways, which usually providesocial gathering territories for the city center’s homeless community, are re-claimedduring the festival season by the authorities and re-configured as performance andmarket stall spaces. Policed and licensed, these formerly ignored spaces become eco-nomically productive and embodied by performances, thus sustaining the preferredfestival gaze.

Here, those who are “other” to the festival gaze, whose lives revolve around the city’schthonic rhythms and do not have the choice to escape the enforced flamboyance ofthe streets, are forced to appropriate what is potentially of use, whether it be a crowdof disoriented tourists or a discarded jacket. Those who are other or excluded from thecultural values and economy of Edinburgh’s festival culture are either rendered a fea-ture of the spectacle or rendered invisible by the geographical and social boundariesof festival spaces.

Although difference and diversity are celebrated in the city’s arts festivals (City ofEdinburgh Council, 2001) where performers represent and tackle issues of gender,race, sexual orientation, and age, the difference of Edinburgh’s social classes and cul-




tural tastes is circumvented. Identity and difference are creatively addressed by thosetraveling performers who are foreign to Edinburgh’s social climate and the politics ofdifference that makes it a “city of contrasts.”6 The cultural differences that are cele-brated during Edinburgh’s festivals privilege the dominant interests of the wealthycultural pilgrims who seek the palatable and traditional otherness “supported by thestereotypical images of consumerism and advertising” (Miles, 1997, p. 176). The festi-val city orders appearances and cultivates the appearance of differences (Lefebvre,1991). This manufacturing of difference (Crang, 1988) obscures those differences thatlie beyond the tourist image of the city en fête.

It is the differences of artistic expression rather than the expression of social dif-ference that justifies the festival’s existence and so delineates the aesthetic and historictopography of Edinburgh’s festival spaces. Those communities identified by their pe-ripheral housing estate rather than their cultural tastes are written off the map of theCity of Festivals. The choice of historic landmarks and tourist centers as performancesites leaves the contrasts of the city “invisible; or rather, prevented from being seen”(Bauman, 2001, p. 26). Performed difference is staged during the festival season to bepromoted, recognized, and celebrated, whereas those differences that would genuinelychallenge and re-order social meaning are beyond the limits of the festival map. Theway of looking at differences in the City of Festivals is theatrical and self-importantand belongs to a gaze that is itself gazed upon in a complicit parade of leisuredfreedom.

Festival culture provides symbols of cultural capital, cosmopolitan interculturalscenes, sociability, and an extensive range of signature hotels, restaurants, and bars. Itsglobal appeal elevates the significance of this national capital city to one of interna-tional importance. Self-conscious of the symbolic and economic value of festivals, TheCity of Edinburgh Council claims that Edinburgh is “the cultural capital of Europe, ifnot the world” during the month of August, and all year round, the city is identifiedwith the festival: “The city is the Festival; the Festival is the city . . . that image bringswith it associations of sophistication, modernity, civilization and attractiveness” (Cityof Edinburgh Council, 2001, p. 4).

Edinburgh’s preferred pseudonym, City of Festivals, operates within the discourseof generic urbanism and constitutes the city as a branded destination, a functionallynamed place. In the name of its festival culture, which relies upon a long chain of serv-ices, the shape and texture of the city continue to change. Whether the festival culturesupports a growing service economy or a now expansive service economy supports agrowing calendar of festivals is debatable. As local stakeholders prepare to extend thecity’s events and therefore ensure that Edinburgh is branded with the identity of itsfestivals, it is evident that Edinburgh the festival brand is a tourist destination. Thisview of a themed Edinburgh is developed in the city’s cultural policy documents,which identify the city’s quiet tourist months as empty spaces apt for festival activities.“Suggestions have been made by Council and other sources for a number of new fes-tivals which might be created to fill festival-free parts of the Edinburgh year” (City ofEdinburgh Council, 2001, p. i).

The first official cultural planning document specifically related to festivals, the“Festival Strategy” for the city, was published in 2001 and sets out the City of Edin-burgh Council’s visions and objectives to develop the success of the city’s festival iden-tity to attract more visitors7 throughout the year. The cultural planning of Edinburgh’sfestivals is a process that connects the city’s services with markets in a global network






of tourists and cultural performers. With suggestions of how to fill what is perceivedas empty space to bring tourists and profit to the city, the festivals are fast becomingthe means to support the city’s tourism industry, which in turn sustains the contained“purified space” (Cresswell, 1996) of the city’s festival topography.

Performers and tourists come to Ed-inburgh to congregate with like-mindedcultural pilgrims in a city that is pro-moted as a time and place designed forthe appearance of liminality and free-dom. These travelers and tourists gatherin the invented and idealized City of Fes-tivals, the hub of cultural expression,where their presence sustains the myth ofthe brand. One of the main concerns ex-pressed in the Festival Strategy (2001) iswhether the branded name should eitherappear as “City of Festivals” or, as is cur-rently used by the Edinburgh and Lothian Tourist Board, “Europe’s Festival Capital.”8

Solipsistic in its assumed identity and topography, Edinburgh the City of Festivals re-veals less than the sum of its parts through a bounded gaze of seemingly unboundedcultural expression.

Conclusion

Interestingly, the identity “City of Festivals,” which Edinburgh self-consciouslyadopts, relies upon bustling festival streets, which are identified as festive not becauseof the “concept city” brand name but because of the production of a festival gaze. Thisgaze choreographs different forms of identification and interaction with the city. Con-sequently, connections with the city’s diverse social worlds are bounded by the topog-raphy of festival spaces. Edinburgh is mediated through the gaze as a site for and anobject of cultural consumption for tourists and service sector investment.

The temporary freedoms of festive play are carefully choreographed and limited bythe boundaries of a privileged and protected world. A season of summer festivals me-diates safe and civilized encounters with the city and allows a temporary glance at ahumanized city quarter. While extravagant cultural expression fills the Old Town’sstreets, other cultures and spaces are rendered invisible by the topography of festivalattractions; difference in Edinburgh’s class, taste, and environment is not re-imaginedand re-ordered but ignored in the production of an aesthetic tourist experience.

Edinburgh acquires worldwide significance and acclaim through the temporalstructure of its festivals. Those claims that are made in the name of its Festival Cityidentity attract visitors gripped by romanticism and nostalgia for a more sociable andpublic mode of urban living. More practically, the Festival City is an asset of the city’seconomic development task forces, which produce spaces that continue to reproduceelite pleasures and segregate festival culture from the other realities that are lived be-yond the idealized image of a “City of Festivals.”

Finally, Edinburgh’s festivals are both a celebration of cultural expression andcommercial enterprise, and they are thus more concerned with display than inversionand revolt. Their position as ritual or tradition is tied to the specific historical rela-

FFiigg.. 33.. The bounded revelry in the city’s his-toric Royal Mile.




tionship with the city and is articulated through the production and social boundariesof festivalized spaces. Although playful and hedonistic in cultural terms, symbolicallythe festival provides images and values that support Edinburgh’s bid in the globalgame of city competition for tourism and investment. Economically, the festival citystructure supports a thriving service economy, which offers temporary contracts, longhours, and low wages.9 Hell is usually someone else’s playground.

Notes

1. The Hogmany Street Party at New Year in the main city centre thoroughfare and The Fes-tival of The Sea in April, which takes place at the recently developed port area of the city.

2. Lash and Urry (1994) expand upon what was initially recognized and politicized in thework of Stallybrass and White (1986) in their study of the containment of popular spaces in thenineteenth century.

3. The gaze here describes the way the visible is mediated. It is a function of interpretation,which transcends, or exceeds “perspectival optics,” and through which meaning emergesthrough its operation in the relational structure of subjectivity. (Grosz, 1990).

4. The festival gaze is more engaged than that of Simmel’s blasé individual and less aloof anddistant from the crowds than Benjamin’s flâneur; it is the festival crowds’ complicity which dis-tinguishes the gaze from the latter.

5. The service economy is the city’s largest growth sector, representing 80% of its GDP.6. The National Community Learning Training Programme (2003) is a voluntary sector in-

stitution with less to gain from the promotional discourse of city branding; itdescribes Edin-burgh as a “City of Contrasts” with extreme differences between wealth and poverty, health anddisease.

7. Overseas tourism in the Edinburgh area is worth an estimated £325m, about one third ofthe Scottish total.

8. “In developing its international brand, the city of Edinburgh should emphasise the signif-icance of the festivals. The brand should, accordingly, explicitly link the city’s name with theword ‘festivals’” (CEC, 2001, p. 38).

9. A survey of advertised vacancies in 1997 revealed that 47% of Edinburgh’s jobs were part-time, a proportion which exceeded Scotland’s own average. Two thirds of the vacancies were inretail and hotel/catering, and here average wages were lower than the Scottish average, with 84%vacancies paying below the Low Pay Unit’s then minimum wage target of £4.61 per hour. Sowhile some sections of Edinburgh’s working community are well-paid, thus increasing the av-erage earnings per person, other groups are more likely to have part-time and/or seasonal em-ployment, be paid less and may be more at risk from poverty.

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Kirstie Jamieson is a Ph.D. research student at Napier University, Edinburgh, and a formercultural worker for many of Edinburgh’s festivals. Her research focuses upon issues of urbanpolitics, representation, identity, and the regulation of culture and the creative industries at aEuropean and local level. Her thesis title: “Reveling in Policy” is a cultural interrogation of con-temporary cultural festivals and their space within and beyond the traditional rhetoric of “cul-ture” and the new discourse of “creative city” policy. The case studies are currently Edinburgh,Helsinki, and Barcelona, which are researched through ethnographic interviews and analysis ofcultural policy.





edinburgh: the festival gaze and its boundaries

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