Geographies of Festival and Event Spaces and Places

The geographic literature on festivals and events has expanded rapidly since Hall and Page (Geography and the study of events. In S. J. Page & J. Connell (Eds.) The Routledge Handbook of Event Studies, 2014) described event studies as a young study area ten years ago. The significant expansion in research output on the topic reflects the fact that as Frost (Anthropology and festivals: Festival ecologies. Ethnos 81(4), 2016: 569) notes, events like festivals and carnivals are significant contemporary phenomena in societies across the world'. For several decades now, geographical research has focused on investigating the complex relationships between festivals and events, and the core geographic concepts of place, space and to a lesser extent, environment. It reveals how festivals and events are obvious examples of the kinds of activities that endow space with the significance that turns it into the kind of place where people want to spend time engaging in activities that promote well-being, facilitate self-expression and the formation of identities. In transforming space from the everyday into the extraordinary, festivals and events represent transformative experiences and facilitate passage into the kind of liminal spaces that allow people to refresh and re-energise. This chapter contributes by reflecting on how recent geographic work has contributed to theorising and furthering understandings of festivals and events, and by considering emerging developments in the literature.