LUMINATO FESTIVAL: TORONTO’S ANSWER TO THE CRISIS OF SPACE AND PLACE FOR CITIZENS

Abstract

Dragan Klaic, a leading researcher on festivals in Europe, believes the new emerging purpose of festivals is that they"increasingly… are not just artistic packages with appealing and valued content but instruments to re-examine the urban dynamics, … within the city space.…[F]estivals challenge the habitual pathways and perceptions…. In the urban space, functionally dominated by housing and consumerism, festivals reaffirm the public sphere in its civic dimension, including polemic, debate, critique and collective passion for a certain art form or topic.… [F]estivals appear as a precious force to mark the perimeters of the public sphere, upgrade it by the concentration of creative gestures and their collective appreciation"(202-203).Klaic captures a theme of central importance, one that has been debated already within the context of broadcast media, the Internet and newspaper industry, but that still has yet to be thoroughly explored by theorists within the context of the cultural sphere of festivals: the public sphere. Specifically, because of the nature of festivals as a spatiotemporal event within the physical space of the city, and because political, socioeconomic as well as artistic-cultural spaces intersect the festival event, festivals areunique points of convergence in the context of the public sphere.