Can community festivals make urban places more hospitable?

Abstract

Cultivating places and spaces to encourage sociality and foster sociocultural inclusion is a very pertinent societal challenge. Community festivals are often marshalled in the interest of making cities more hospitable for the increasing numbers of migrants, refugees, remote workers and tourists internationally on the move. This study investigates if and how community festivals are constructing hospitality through their practices. The findings are drawn from a qualitative study of two community festivals in Dublin’s North East Inner City, an ethnically diverse area characterized by social disadvantage. They suggest that community festivals can make places more hospitable. However, the approaches taken to inculcating hospitality can differ substantially. Here, the two study festivals were found to differ in terms of how they extended welcome and exerted social control, how they constructed the host-guest dynamic and how they operationalized the concept of gifting. Overall, the findings encourage further analysis of festivals using the concept of hospitality.