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Edinburgh: The Festival Gaze and Its Boundaries Kirstie Jamieson Space and Culture 2004; 7; 64 DOI: 10.1177/1206331203256853

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The Festivalsubtitle goesGaze here and Its Boundaries The Author goes here Body text Kirstie Jamieson

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 be objectively mapped, the bounded appeal of live performance, outdoor reveling, and alternative ways 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 festival identity upon which the city self-consciously relies is explored through the concepts of carnivalesque, 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 Festival followed 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 6 weeks, a thriving street life brings tourists, performers, and residents into proximity where difference in appearance, language, and behavior becomes the norm of city center 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

Edinburgh self-consciously adopts the identity of “The Festival City.”A framed spontaneous play which contrasts routine everyday life is observably squandered in the dedicated time and place of Edinburgh’s festival season. Colorful photocopied flyers that promise exciting new theatrical shows decorate the cobbled historic High Street. The medieval old quarter of the city center becomes a stage where professional street performers shout over layers of cheers and laughter, inscribing their presence on the city through movement and performance. Festival programs are thrust into the laps of tourists as they sit in street cafes to watch the politely bohemian festival culture unveil itself. 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 benefit from the promotion of the festivals’ playfulness and liminality. The success of the festival season’s unbounded creative expression is bounded by the topography of festivalized spaces. Although spaces appear as though spontaneously formed by the company of strangers and the collective experience of performances, the city en fête is also the result of painstaking planning by a city administration that seeks to control the ways in which public spaces change. The city is nonetheless redefined by the altered energy and velocity of strategi- cally planned festivalized spaces. An established tradition of festival culture and the more illusory qualities of play and spontaneity produce identities and identification with this festival city. Festivals generate regulated and liminal spaces in the city’s cultural calendar and insinuate Edinburgh’s cultural ambience, sociability, and prestige in the global hierarchy of celebrated cultural cities. Fig. 1. Street Entertainer in the midst of busy festival crowd 2002.

Reveling Through Time

Festivals and spectacular events serve discourses of “city branding” and the “creative 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 place marketing 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 cultural resources and charismatic urban images, defining itself visually by either images of the castle or the city during its festival season. Defined by the imposed order of urban stakeholders, Edinburgh constitutes what de Certeau (1984) regards as a “concept city” that simplifies the contingencies and multiplicities of city life to convey an ap- pealing unified impression. Within today’s competitive urban context, Edinburgh’s culture, heritage, and public spaces are regarded as assets that add rich social references to the lexicon of city marketing campaigns.

In this sense, culture is used to articulate cultivated cultural activities that are directed and developed according to social and economic objectives. Just as culture has been discursively reconfigured according to economic and managerialist logic (McGuigan, 1996), so now festivals are increasingly written into civic cultural policies as both product and framework, designed to attract a wealthy target market and furnish the city with a competitive image. In cultural planning discourse, the promotional 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 liberal approach to street entertainment, alcohol, and late licenses as inducements designed to 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 commodified status of Edinburgh’s more recent festival additions.1 Edinburgh’s “cultural disposition” provides it with its sense of place and is the result of a distinct “constellation of relations,”articulated together at “a particular locus” (Massey, 1993, p. 66). The relations of Edinburgh’s festival identity can be traced to the particular locus of 1947 when many European cities that had formerly been known for their impressive architecture 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 are likely to be out of action for an indefinite period” (“Festival News,” 1945). Edinburgh had escaped the devastation of bombs, and unscathed by mortar, it proudly clung to its Enlightenment aspirations of being internationally recognized as the “Athens of the North.” In that year, Edinburgh hosted the first “Edinburgh International Festival of Music and Drama.” The first program of high cultural performances codified cultural alliances and affinities of taste that symbolically transcended the geographies of war. Postwar, Edinburgh’s first international festival reestablished communities of high culture and conferred legitimacy to the spatial and temporal structure of arts festivals in the city. Edinburgh’s celebration of European high culture provided the opportunity for the Vienna Philharmonic to publicly reunite for the first time since 1938, performing for an elite and supportive audience. The “International” culture to which the Vienna Philharmonic belonged was a canonized European cultural sphere to which access was reserved for those with a social background comfortable with the conventions of high culture 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 for future state funding. This specific context supplied the justification for the first festival, which relied upon a belief in the inherent value of high culture and which the state would support only a few years later, on the basis that a civilizing and ennobling culture was for everybody (Sinfield, 1989). From the outset, The Edinburgh International Festival mapped itself beyond the boundaries of the national image of Scotland’s capital city, situating itself within a shifting geography of European cultural traditions. Festival culture paraded elite pleasures 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’s festivals provided refinement and resistance to the looming Americanized “culture industry” (Adorno, 1991), symbolically securing closer ties with a more exclusive and edifying European high culture. Edinburgh’s International Festival demonstrated and

celebrated the survival and significance of European high culture while at the same time 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 representation 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, and irreverent “Edinburgh Festival Fringe.” The Fringe’s initial unauthorized status added to its rebellious and provocatively playful character and pitted it against the legitimate and civilizing International Festival. Notorious for anarchic genre-flouting performances, the performers of the early Festival Fringe arrived in the city uninvited, hoping to appear somewhere in the festival’s borrowed spaces. As a fringe to the International Festival, it operated unofficially until 1958 when the Festival Fringe Society acquired authorized status. The Edinburgh Festival Fringe continues to attract an avant-garde culture to the city where professional and nonprofessional performing artists stage their productions in halls, disused churches, reappropriated university spaces, and city center streets. From the outset, experimental formats and satirical material furnished this festival with a reputation as a radical alternative to the elite cultural content of The Edinburgh International Festival. It is the Fringe Festival rather than the International Festival that continues to appropriate city spaces, license street performance, and so transform the city’s atmosphere. 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 now become the city’s hottest tourist attraction. During late July and August, the bohemian and intellectual qualities of the city’s festivals are observable in the altered pace of a crowded street life. Images of the flamboyant crowded streets promote and celebrate the festival city as a tourist destination, and the combination of ritual and consumerism has elevated Edinburgh as a site and a subject of consumption. To make a spectacle of the animated crowds is to impose a certain way of looking at the protean spaces of the city (Edensor, 2000) and the elaborately adorned bodies that jostle and weave between performances and spectators. This way of looking is best described as a festival gaze that magnifies the humanized festival streets obscuring the commodified 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 and economic development. It is a distinction that is persistently presented by those theo- rists interested in the cultural politics of carnival and festival behavior. Although the distinction between “authentic” carnivals and contemporary official festivals does not unveil the specific relations between place and festival, it does begin to reveal those spontaneous behaviors and performed identities that are exaggerated or overlooked in the festival gaze.

The Dense Weave of Festival Culture

Critical attention is given to the authentic (grassroots) carnival because of the opinion that it could be mobilized against the capitalist system and provide an “alternative 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 societal structures and traditions. His account is of an empowered riotous proletariat body that spontaneously dances, ridicules, and creatively flouts conventions of power. At the heart of Bakhtin’s (1984) descriptions of the carnival is the breaking down of social distance and hierarchy, which permits empowering reconnections between people. It is these “transformative potentials” produced by the temporary suspension of everyday life and order of power that provide instances for redefining meanings and social order. Critical interest in the carnival is not reserved for those who celebrate its temporary 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 redefine society (Eagleton, 1981; Eco, 1984) on the basis that carnival is precisely an authorized domain in time and space. Therefore, whereas some attribute the ideal of the carnival with revolutionary powers of transgression, others level criticism at its “licensed” status, 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 is bounded to a specific time and space where spontaneity and bodily encounters are guided by bureaucratic structures that are believed to disempower the disordering and reordering potential of the carnivalesque spirit. Mined instead for the hedonistic appeal of revelry, masked identities, and outdoor public performance, Edinburgh’s licensed festivals are better understood as “profitable pseudo-transgressions” (Lefebvre, 1991). The ambience produced through the festival season creates a “nostalgic simulacrum of urban living” (Edensor, 2000), which plays with 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 which Bakhtin (1984) refers, on the other hand, signify a contemptuous and riotous breach from those quotidian structures that define the existence and status of work and workers. Although the classification of festivals into authentic, spontaneous, licensed, and regulated articulates the changing relations of urban freedom, playful resistance, and embodied space, it does not provide insight into the spaces and Fig. 2. Performers play with the crowds of meanings that are brought about through onlookers, looking and being looked at be- the temporal cultural and social transfor- comes a game in the streets. mations of place. The constellation of relations between the city and the festival creates an altered sense of place, and it is this transformative 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 within the temporary world of festivals offer a palimpsest of re-imagined identities and so make identification problematic. Appearances are played with in Edinburgh as the city tricks 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.

Play and its modalities of participation are necessary features of the subversive and re-ordering powers of the carnival, but equally, the modality of play informs the ways of seeing and being seen in Edinburgh during the festival season. Understood as symbolic action, play articulates cultural and political meanings2 and is bounded by agreed practices and limits. To play necessitates a lack of restrictions from the self and the environment, but the freedom to play is dependent upon rules that establish the illusion of trust and power between players (Sennett, 2002). In play and festivals alike, the relations 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 bustling pedestrianized streets and public performances is consumed through the printed me- dia, television, and the Internet by the gaze of prospective tourists captivated by a new urban velocity and relaxed roaming about (Kracauer, 1995). Inscribed through the festival gaze, wandering inquisitive bodies play and discover the city according to the rules that define Edinburgh’s temporary spaces and subjectivities. But there are subjectivities that are not acknowledged by the customs and playful rhythms that seemingly contrast, adorn, and intensify (Huizinga, 1955) the life of the city. How are these temporal freedoms from the mundane pattern and constraints of working hours understood 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 time and, instead, is swollen by a playful subjectivity and possibility that dreams could shape a liberated reality (Vaneigem, 2001), whose dreams are glimpsed in the festivalized streets?

The City of the Cultural Pilgrim

Although spontaneity and play are discredited by critics of the carnival’s potential to invert societal norms, both play and spontaneity are in a more pseudo-transgressive form, integral features of the re-articulation of Edinburgh’s urban spaces. Despite their commercial and licensed nature, Edinburgh’s festivals still “point to the possibility 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 a privileged tempo and logic that produces a distinct way of looking at the city, a gaze that romanticizes the playfully different pace and simulated carnival surroundings. The apparently real and seemingly spontaneous spaces of the festival season are recognized 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 festival activities are “made safer” thus promote the opportunity for risk-free “liminal zones” (Lash & Urry, 1994) sought by cultural tourists. These liminal zones provide spaces “appropriate to being in the company of strangers” and offer the opportunity for new, safe, and “exciting forms of sociability” (Lash & Urry, 1994, p. 235). Within the company of leisurely visitors and re-articulated spaces, an exhilarating pace produces sociable urban conditions where those accustomed to the rules and pleasures 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 assurances 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 Edinburgh begin. These assurances of safe sociability define the cultural boundaries of festival play and distance the cultural atmosphere from that of the carnival’s inflammatory and irreverent disposition. Tied together in the bounded freedom of carnivalesque rhythms, security and liminality simultaneously police and blur the boundaries between crowds and performances. Those social worlds that are not neatly assimilated to a festival gaze and exist beyond the boundaries of Edinburgh’s spontaneous festival atmosphere are eclipsed by 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 inscribed into the festival gaze as they look and are looked at in the orchestrated chaos of the city’s historic Old Town streets. The festival season is produced with “the visible in mind: the visibility of people and things, of spaces and of whatever is contained by them” (Lefebvre, 1991, p. 75). The pronounced visualization of a city preoccupied with its promotional image imposes a festival gaze that shapes the identity and identification with the city’s festival streets. Globally circulated, Edinburgh’s festival gaze simplifies the city and glosses over the contradictions that the resident drunk and the dispossessed bring to the festival spaces of the Old Town. The gaze imposes order on the events and identities in the festival city3 through a visual language that makes sense of people and spaces in accordance with the dominant logic that celebrates and promotes commodified cultural achievement and a performed orderly sociability. However, the visual order of the festival repertoire produces ambiguous relations when tourists, eager to consume the unpredictable moment, watch resident drunks mimic street performers in a guileful ruse. Unsure of the status of the spontaneous spectacle, crowds of expectant tourists dutifully applaud the impromptu gesture. In a social context that signals the expectation of a performed and playful self, both the drunk and the street performer offer his cap for any spare change the tourist may wish to liberate. To avoid contradictions in the festival city, the gaze imputes theatricality in each and every thing.4 Mediated through the festival gaze, the city’s social differences are framed as nonthreatening and playful. In part, the festival gaze is based upon the constructed rhythms and conventions imposed by the city’s governing institutions, but it is also based upon distinct modalities 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 ostentatiously performed during Edinburgh’s festival season, and the uncertainty of masked identities beckons a certain mode of participation that is reflexive and attentive to the conventions of the city’s temporary spaces. Specifically, the mode of subjectivity elicited through the space and time of Edinburgh’s summer festivals facilitates a gaze more complicit than that ascribed to contemporary tourists (Urry, 1990). Urry’s (1990) “tourist gaze” is rounded by the specific historical conventions of commercialized tourism and does not adequately account for the festival gaze that seeks out “the unexpected, not the extraordinary”; this gaze solicits a desire to glimpse the authentic cultural act (MacCannell, 2001, p. 36). A glimpse of the unexpected act is implied in the framed liminality and intrigue of such large-scale urban festivals. The immediate velocity of performances in doorways, alleyways, and public gardens fuels the choreographed surprise element and organizes the 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 such as those hosted in Edinburgh. The appetite for safe yet unexpected encounters necessitates complicity with the city’s dominant visual logic of bounded flamboyance and spontaneous street activities. To participate in the city’s festivals is also to participate in the city’s public relations, which necessarily guarantees protection from the socially incompatible and visually irreconcilable and solicits complicity from the urbane visitor. The festival gaze belongs to a leisured modality experienced in the company of strangers. It belongs to those comfortable and skilled in looking and being looked at in 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 city with an air of polite bohemianism and civility, but this temporary and overtly visible sociability is a manifestation of the festival gaze, which has both geographic and social boundaries.

Boundaries of Branded Revelry

Edinburgh’s festival spaces have both social and geographic boundaries, which if absent, would discourage the visitor sought by the service economy stakeholders and city marketing consortiums. The spatiality of Edinburgh’s festival events serves the concentrated city center service economy5 far from the city’s housing estates and socially deprived areas. The bounded central location reassures the cultural tourists of a safe encounter with a city that has mapped its celebrated cultural activities on to the city center’s medieval Old Town, a World Heritage Site popular with tourists all year round. The temporary structures of stages and stalls that hallmark the seasonally pedestrianized 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 the official Scottish residence of the British royal family, namely, Hollyrood Palace. Be- tween these two landmarks, the Old Town’s historic alleyways, which usually provide social gathering territories for the city center’s homeless community, are re-claimed during the festival season by the authorities and re-configured as performance and market stall spaces. Policed and licensed, these formerly ignored spaces become economically productive and embodied by performances, thus sustaining the preferred festival gaze. Here, those who are “other” to the festival gaze, whose lives revolve around the city’s chthonic rhythms and do not have the choice to escape the enforced flamboyance of the streets, are forced to appropriate what is potentially of use, whether it be a crowd of disoriented tourists or a discarded jacket. Those who are other or excluded from the cultural values and economy of Edinburgh’s festival culture are either rendered a feature of the spectacle or rendered invisible by the geographical and social boundaries of festival spaces. Although difference and diversity are celebrated in the city’s arts festivals (City of Edinburgh 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 those traveling performers who are foreign to Edinburgh’s social climate and the politics of difference that makes it a “city of contrasts.”6 The cultural differences that are celebrated during Edinburgh’s festivals privilege the dominant interests of the wealthy cultural pilgrims who seek the palatable and traditional otherness “supported by the stereotypical images of consumerism and advertising” (Miles, 1997, p. 176). The festival city orders appearances and cultivates the appearance of differences (Lefebvre, 1991). This manufacturing of difference (Crang, 1988) obscures those differences that lie beyond the tourist image of the city en fête. It is the differences of artistic expression rather than the expression of social difference that justifies the festival’s existence and so delineates the aesthetic and historic topography 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 the City of Festivals. The choice of historic landmarks and tourist centers as performance sites 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 be promoted, recognized, and celebrated, whereas those differences that would genuinely challenge and re-order social meaning are beyond the limits of the festival map. The way of looking at differences in the City of Festivals is theatrical and self-important and belongs to a gaze that is itself gazed upon in a complicit parade of leisured freedom. Festival culture provides symbols of cultural capital, cosmopolitan intercultural scenes, sociability, and an extensive range of signature hotels, restaurants, and bars. Its global appeal elevates the significance of this national capital city to one of international importance. Self-conscious of the symbolic and economic value of festivals, The City of Edinburgh Council claims that Edinburgh is “the cultural capital of Europe, if not the world” during the month of August, and all year round, the city is identified with the festival: “The city is the Festival; the Festival is the city . . . that image brings with it associations of sophistication, modernity, civilization and attractiveness” (City of Edinburgh Council, 2001, p. 4). Edinburgh’s preferred pseudonym, City of Festivals, operates within the discourse of generic urbanism and constitutes the city as a branded destination, a functionally named place. In the name of its festival culture, which relies upon a long chain of services, the shape and texture of the city continue to change. Whether the festival culture supports a growing service economy or a now expansive service economy supports a growing calendar of festivals is debatable. As local stakeholders prepare to extend the city’s events and therefore ensure that Edinburgh is branded with the identity of its festivals, it is evident that Edinburgh the festival brand is a tourist destination. This view 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 festivals which might be created to fill festival-free parts of the Edinburgh year” (City of Edinburgh 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 identity to attract more visitors7 throughout the year. The cultural planning of Edinburgh’s festivals 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 perceived as empty space to bring tourists and profit to the city, the festivals are fast becoming the 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-minded cultural pilgrims in a city that is promoted as a time and place designed for the appearance of liminality and freedom. These travelers and tourists gather in the invented and idealized City of Fes- tivals, the hub of cultural expression, where their presence sustains the myth of the brand. One of the main concerns ex- pressed in the Festival Strategy (2001) is Fig. 3. The bounded revelry in the city’s his- whether the branded name should either toric Royal Mile. appear as “City of Festivals” or, as is currently 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 unbounded cultural expression.

Conclusion

Interestingly, the identity “City of Festivals,” which Edinburgh self-consciously adopts, relies upon bustling festival streets, which are identified as festive not because of the “concept city” brand name but because of the production of a festival gaze. This gaze choreographs different forms of identification and interaction with the city. Con- sequently, connections with the city’s diverse social worlds are bounded by the topography of festival spaces. Edinburgh is mediated through the gaze as a site for and an object of cultural consumption for tourists and service sector investment. The temporary freedoms of festive play are carefully choreographed and limited by the 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 a humanized city quarter. While extravagant cultural expression fills the Old Town’s streets, other cultures and spaces are rendered invisible by the topography of festival attractions; difference in Edinburgh’s class, taste, and environment is not re-imagined and re-ordered but ignored in the production of an aesthetic tourist experience. Edinburgh acquires worldwide significance and acclaim through the temporal structure of its festivals. Those claims that are made in the name of its Festival City identity attract visitors gripped by romanticism and nostalgia for a more sociable and public mode of urban living. More practically, the Festival City is an asset of the city’s economic development task forces, which produce spaces that continue to reproduce elite pleasures and segregate festival culture from the other realities that are lived beyond the idealized image of a “City of Festivals.” Finally, Edinburgh’s festivals are both a celebration of cultural expression and commercial enterprise, and they are thus more concerned with display than inversion and revolt. Their position as ritual or tradition is tied to the specific historical rela-

tionship with the city and is articulated through the production and social boundaries of festivalized spaces. Although playful and hedonistic in cultural terms, symbolically the festival provides images and values that support Edinburgh’s bid in the global game of city competition for tourism and investment. Economically, the festival city structure supports a thriving service economy, which offers temporary contracts, long hours, 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 the work of Stallybrass and White (1986) in their study of the containment of popular spaces in the nineteenth 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 emerges through 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 and distant from the crowds than Benjamin’s flâneur; it is the festival crowds’ complicity which distinguishes 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 and disease. 7. Overseas tourism in the Edinburgh area is worth an estimated £325m, about one third of the Scottish total. 8. “In developing its international brand, the city of Edinburgh should emphasise the significance of the festivals. The brand should, accordingly, explicitly link the city’s name with the word ‘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 in retail 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. So while some sections of Edinburgh’s working community are well-paid, thus increasing the average 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 former cultural worker for many of Edinburgh’s festivals. Her research focuses upon issues of urban politics, representation, identity, and the regulation of culture and the creative industries at a European and local level. Her thesis title: “Reveling in Policy” is a cultural interrogation of contemporary cultural festivals and their space within and beyond the traditional rhetoric of “culture” 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 of cultural policy.