Edinburgh Napier University

  Cities are under growing pressure to address the challenge of supporting more inclusive and sustainable communities. Festivals and events, increasingly used as urban development tools, can assist in the creation of sustainable cities with prosperous, happy and inclusive communities (Mair & Smith, 2021). The understanding of how such positive outcomes from events may be realised is, however, lacking in clarity.
Planned tourism and event development approaches in some urban contexts are often seen as tokenistic, exclusive and egalitarian, with stakeholder power relationships playing a crucial role (Church & Coles, 2007, Nunkoo & Gursoy, 2016). Consequently, critical and reflective perspectives are required on the role that festivals and events play in integrating community voices through participative (Burns, 2004, Tosun, 2006) and co-creative planning (Foster, 2022) to better understand and evaluate the potentially socially sustainable outcomes which could be derived from planned event development.
Through the analysis of planning documents and survey/interviews with community-based stakeholders, this project explores community participation specifically in the context of participative planning and development of new arts and cultural venues in festival cities. Focusing on the case study of the Dunard Centre as “Edinburgh’s first dedicated new space for music and the performing arts in 100 years” (IMPACT Scotland, 2022), the project aims to problematise new arts and cultural venues as drivers for sustainable development in festival cities to understand how their development addresses social sustainability and assists in the creation of sustainable host communities.