‘The urban festival provides a bridge between the ordinary city of everyday experience and the extraordinary city- projected in part by the festival – of idealistic and technological urbanism; of utopian hopes, projects and illusions.’
Alan J. Plattus (1987)
‘The urban environment is constantly changing. Permanent alterations are the result of new buildings going up and others being demolished, streets being widened or straightened, new neighbourhoods being developed. No less significant, however, is the way in which the shared public space of the city is altered on particular occasions, such as for festivals of ceremonies, when temporary effects transform the familiar to underline the significance of given events. This process of temporary and permanent change is true to all cities.’
‘Parades let people reclaim urban spaces not just as a place of work but to renew their relationship with the environment. By animating all senses, parades change people’s relation to the city, letting them look at the city in a new way. Parades allow all different groups of people to get together in public in an important way, crossing all political, economic, religious and ethnic barriers. There are very few events in the city that do that.’
Wishes Come True, J. Kugelmass
As human beings, we have created a physical world that is nuanced by the collective legacies to which each of our cultures cling. Our cities, though physically little more than cells of combined activity and habitation under a set of accepted codes, also hold a higher ideological significance to each inhabitant. The city in a more enriched sense is the modern plain upon which man exerts his desires and actions. The city contextualises the life of the inhabitant, pulling on the basic propensities within each individual and making their life somewhat different than it would be anywhere else in the world. This is the power of the overlaying of city histories. In older cities centuries of collective experience shape the city as well as the behaviour of the individual within it. This isn’t an altogether mystical idea of invisible magic that lives beneath the cobble stones although that metaphor comes close to it. Rather, as Rossi discuses in Architecture of the city, urban artefacts can contribute to the locus of the city, and eventually affect the overall identity of the place.
‘One can say that the city itself is the collective memory of its people, and like memory it is associated with objects and places. The city is the locus of the collective memory. This relationship between locus and the citizenry then becomes the city’s predominant image, both of architecture and of landscape, and as certain artefacts become part of its memory, new ones emerge. In thi entirely positive sense great ideas flow through the history if the city and give shape to it.’ Aldo Rossi, The Architecture of the City
This is also true of urban celebrations. In certain situations, where the festival and the city have grown together, infused with one another as in Port-of-Spain’s Carnival, the festival is a breathing and moving action that yearly reanimates the place. ‘Signature ephemera’ as discussed by J. Mark Schuster, are urban events which come to directly inform the identity of a city. These types of celebrations are often deeply linked to the myths underlying each place, taking on the weight of a kind of civic religion.
No comments:
Post a Comment