Edinburgh Napier University

  I will explore how two distinct strategic management and local community stakeholder groups engage with a festival city through their visual portrayals of festival spaces. Informed by festival city discourses and a hallmark event tourism stakeholder typology (Todd, Leask & Ensor, 2017), I will consider the semiotics of Edinburgh, as the ‘world’s leading festival city’ (Festivals Edinburgh, 2020). Today, 11 annual city-based festivals form the Festivals Edinburgh strategic brand umbrella organisation; attract 4.5 million attendances from 70 countries worldwide; and generate £313 million for Scotland’s economy (BOP Consulting & Festivals Edinburgh, 2016). Edinburgh’s evolution as the festival city has seen destination managers’ leveraging its festivals to drive event tourism. Indeed, current strategy recommends sustaining and strengthening Edinburgh’s festival city status and promotion of its brand worldwide (Ibid). Nevertheless, recent discourses have witnessed residents and media criticise commercial agendas of staging year-round festivals in Edinburgh’s historic centre’s public spaces (Quinn, 2005; Smith, 2016); with accusations of destination managers’ commodification of these, marking Edinburgh as ‘the city for sale’ (Cockburn Association, 2020). Through studying systems of ‘signs’, semiotics uncovers layers of meaning and myth (Barthes, 1993; MacCannell, 1976). My study applies a semiotic lens to stakeholders’ perspectives of Edinburgh as the festival city. This is firstly by drawing from digital images shared by destination management stakeholders (Todd & Logan-McFarlane, 2019); then from a participative visual map of the festival city. This was produced by members of the Wester Hailes community, situated in South West Edinburgh, outside of its centre of designated festival spaces. In exploring management and community stakeholders’ images of shared and distinct signs, spaces, and places, I will reflect upon the idealised view of the festival city, alongside its contemporary socio-political and cultural environment of inclusion and accessibility. Furthermore, I will discuss the semiotics that sustain the visual culture, consumption and place ‘myth’ of the festival city.