Lawrence J. Vale and Sam Bass Warner Jr. (eds.),

CUPR Books, New Brunswick, New Jersey, 2001.

J. Mark Schuster is Visiting Professor of Cultural Policy at the Cultural Policy Center of the Irving B. Harris Graduate School of Public Policy Studies at the University of Chicago, where he is on sabbatical from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His publications include: Patrons Despite Themselves: Taxpayers and Arts Policy; Supporting the Arts: An International Comparative Study;Who's to Pay for the Arts? The International Search for Models of Arts Support; Preserving the Built Heritage: Tools for Implementation; The Audience for American Art Museums ; andThe Geography of Participation in the Arts and Culture. Professor Schuster is Joint Editor of the Journal of Cultural Economics, a member of the editorial board of the International Journal of Cultural Policy, and a board member of the International Alliance of First Night Celebrations. He has worked extensively with governmental agencies and nonprofit organizations in the arts and culture including UNESCO, the Council of Europe, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Arts Council of Great Britain, the London Arts Board, the Canada Council, Canadian Heritage, the Arts Council of Ireland, the Arts Council of Wales, the Queen Elizabeth II Arts Council of New Zealand, the Hungarian Ministry of Culture, the Massachusetts Council on the Arts and Humanities, the British Museum, the Departments of Culture of the cities of Barcelona, Spain and Saint Petersburg, Russia, and the Department of Culture of the government of Catalunya.

J. Mark Schuster

Urban ephemera are organized, momentary, repeated urban public presentations. They include parades, festivals, celebrations, outdoor performances, and rituals of all kinds. Because they impress themselves upon the public images of cities in small ways and large, Mark Schuster, a cultural policy analyst, urges city designers and planners to add ephemera planning to their list of tools.

Hitherto commentators have viewed these events either as grist for tourist promotions or they have taken alarm at their possibilities for public pacification. The tourist promoters mistake the shows for the life within the festivals while the social alarmists mistake communal fun for a social drug. Schuster challenges both groups by adding a third unit of analysis to the urban image discussion. To the familiar dichotomy of local images and outside images he adds the corporate media. By this step he makes explicit the assumptions of many of the essays in this book. Schuster asks whether such corporate media images really do so dominate the reputation of cities that city dwellers must accept their portraits. The workings of ephemera reveal the absurdity of such a stance.

With the exceptions of Worlds Fairs and Olympic Games, most ephemera are events where local people play before local audiences. If some of them catch the media's attention, and if they thereby catch the public's fancy, they may attract tourists. Surely the Mardi Gras at New Orleans and the Rose Bowl Parade are such events. Boston's infectious First Night and the Head of the Charles Regatta are, for all their crowds, not tourist attractions.

Schuster reviews a number of locally significant public events around the world: the long standing Las Fallas festival of Valencia, the newly altered Daimonji Festival in Kyoto, and the new WaterFire spectacle of Providence, Rhode Island. In all three he brings forward the local component. The fact that city residents carry on these events year after year, often as volunteers, is the key to their energy and dynamism. In all the cases the city government offers support, as do local businesses, and the media report and publicize. Thus, like all aspects of urban planning, urban ephemera are mixed affairs, full of possibilities for both local apathy and local conflict.

In his presentation of these events Schuster shows the mix which ranges from local street clubs who perform without anyone's aid, to the heavy subsidies of the Olympics. In the end he makes a persuasive argument that ephemera carry important benefits to their cities, especially by encouraging the residents to represent themselves, and by encouraging the residents to come together in ways that make them esteem their city. For planners, there await here all the familiar issues of land use politics: competition, conflict and the difficulties of locating and maintaining the public interest. In his review Schuster confirms the planner’s wisdom that an open process is the surest path to enduring success.

My topic is ephemera--the ephemera of urban life--the temporary, the occasional, the fleeting. Spectacles, pageants, rituals, celebrations, and events of all sorts will attract my attention, but I also wish to cast my net even more widely to include other, smaller phenomena, the ephemera of daily, weekly, and seasonal life. I will pay particular attention to designed and managed ephemera, ephemera that occur with some identifiable and understood regularity. I will argue that no such ephemera are too small (or too big) not to deserve our attention as planners, as urban designers, and as citizens. I will argue that ephemera make an important contribution to the life of the city as well as to the imaging of the city, but I will also argue that ephemera may be components of imaging that actually work their influence more outside the realm of the media than inside that realm.

One does not normally think of ephemera as an important element in planning and urban design. Why? Is it because we feel that something that is ephemeral is fleeting and insubstantial, perhaps frivolous, only to be considered after the more serious matters of urban life are resolved? As planners we are trained to be instrumental, single-minded, and calculatingly rational in our actions, but not to be playful or experimental or to pay attention to emotions and feelings. We have surrendered to the discourse of economics; "value" has taken on a narrow meaning incorporating only costs and benefits that can be readily measured. Yet, our memories and images of places, our views of their importance and meaning, our impressions of their quality and value, are shaped by ephemera. Surely we would be remiss not to notice.

As I have thought about urban ephemera, I have thought about Olympic Games and World’s Fairs; about New York ticker tape parades and inaugural pageantry; about holiday festivities and days of mourning; but I have also found myself thinking about flea markets and street fairs; about neighborhood festivals and street decorations; about seasonal plantings and temporary kiosks that appear and disappear throughout the year; about electoral campaigns and the arrivals and departures of conventions; about the beacon at the top of the old John Hancock building in Boston, tracking the weather and whether or not the Red Sox game has been canceled. I have found myself intrigued with the "Standing the Pillar" ceremony held once every seven years at the Kamisuwa and Suwa shrines in Nagano, Japan, as well as with the Passion Play held every ten years in Oberammergau, Germany, fulfilling a vow made in 1633 in the hope that God would protect the town from further ravages of the Black Plague.

One might begin with the literature on festivals, a literature which includes discussions of everything from Kool-Aid Day in Hastings, Nebraska, the Shrimp and Petroleum Festival, in Morgan City, Louisiana and the Octubafest in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, to the Passion Play in Oberammergau. But to do justice to festivals alone one has to enter the fields of comparative religion, anthropology, sociology, ethnography, cultural studies, geography, and folklore just to name a few of the disciplines that have brought their attention to bear on one or another of their aspects. Because of both their visibility (their imageability) and their urban impact, the Olympic Games have attracted considerable scholarly attention. World’s Fairs, too, have been systematically mined for their greater significance.

From an urban planning perspective, two literatures have been predominant. One is the "Livable Cities" literature embodying an idea first promoted by Partners for Livable Places and now formalized in a series of annual conferences. This literature often makes passing mention of ephemera, but to my knowledge it has not yet addressed them systematically.

More recently developed is a literature that might be called the "Arts and Urban Development" literature, which attempts to document the role that the arts and culture can play in urban economic development. Deben, Musterd, and van Weesep, who are quite cautious about the evidence concerning the impact of this role, pose a key question: "Is there a new cultural vitality to be witnessed in the cities, and is it based broadly enough to be able to speak of a revival of urban culture? Or does the revival end in superficiality, in organized events where the opposite numbers in urban society can rub shoulders for one day or one night, before returning to their respective places and lives, relieved that once more the feared social explosion did not happen?"

But much of the literature on the arts and urban development does not concern itself with this question. Rather, it is relentlessly instrumental. The arts and culture are seen as tools for urban revitalization, the central idea being that they can (1) provide the catalyst for physical and environmental renewal, (2) attract tourists and capital investment, (3) enhance a city’s image, and (4) create new jobs. While I will ultimately be concerned with the third and, to a lesser extent, the first and second, this literature offers little clue as to why one might encourage ephemera either for their own sake or for their contribution to building and defining community.

I refer to these literatures, not because they offer exactly what I would like--there is a huge research agenda here--but because they are what is available. Only one author of whom I am aware organizes her thinking along lines similar to the ones I wish to pursue: Sarah Bonnemaison in her excellent albeit much too brief paper, "City Policies and Cyclical Events," explores a variety of questions with respect to temporary urbanism. If there is a single foundation other than my own experience upon which the current paper is built, it is this.

In What Time Is This Place? Kevin Lynch extended his work on the image of the city to take account explicitly of the influence of time on that image. This is an excellent place to begin from the urban design perspective. Because he saw planning as the management of change, an emphasis on time was only logical. He calls upon us to notice those things that are temporary yet important in shaping our images and experiences of the city--noises, odors, lighting, events, physical traces of change--and to notice the time-based ebb and flow of these elements. He exhorts planners, designers, and citizens to take note of the dimensions along which the structure of time can vary and, by extension, the richness that comes from variation in the urban environment. The concepts of grain, period, amplitude, rate, synchronization, regularity, and orientation become the building blocks of time-cognizant planning and design: "We take pleasure in distinctive events, as in distinctive places. Important hours should be perceptually remarkable, and then we can find our way in time. Places and events can be designed to enlarge our senses of the present, either by their own vivid characters or as they heighten our perception of the contained activity--setting off the people in a parade, an audience, or a market. Places can be given a particular look at particular times."

As always, Lynch’s work is not only rich in theory but also overflowing with practical, honest suggestions as to what planners and designers might do to incorporate these ideas into their practice. I attach contemporary examples to his suggestions:

Despite the power of these examples, planning agencies (at least American ones) have hardly responded to Lynch’s exhortations. Indeed, he was not entirely optimistic:

Halfhearted attempts are one thing, but there are other, more serious critiques that challenge Lynch’s optimism. Two of them deserve particular attention.

In 1961, only one year after the publication of Lynch’s The Image of the City, another rather different book on the power of image appeared: Daniel Boorstin’s The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America. Paraphrasing George Will’s comments in his afterword to the 25th anniversary edition of Boorstin, both books changed the way we think because they changed the way we see and listen, but they accomplished this in very different ways with very different analyses. Boorstin’s topic was the American image and how it was being increasingly shaped not by the accumulated daily actions of its citizens, but by the influence of the media.

Boorstin’s challenge to Lynch derives from the fact that he is much more pessimistic about society’s ability to create the possibilities for spontaneous events; indeed, he would be very reticent to accept the notion of designing spontaneous events. Boorstin centers his warning on the rise of "pseudo-events," events created for and structured by the media, which in his view increasingly drive out real, spontaneous events. He argues that this is happening because:

I have reproduced Boorstin’s list of the characteristics of pseudo-events in detail because of the role that "planning" plays in that critique: the particular requirements of the media cause one to plan in order to satisfy those requirements, and one becomes caught up in a cycle of pseudoness. One can easily imagine Boorstin warning Lynch that planning would have a deadening affect on any innovative initiative with respect to ephemera. One can also imagine that Lynch would not have been fully convinced.

A good deal of the academic literature on the influence of ephemera in modern life is critical, brooding, complaining, and cynical. Very little of it is upbeat or optimistic in the Lynchian style. Much of this work is rooted in or makes reference to the work of David Harvey, whose critique originates in political economy rather than in media studies.

Harvey chronicles the rise of the "entrepreneurial city," which, because of the globalization of capitalism, finds itself engaged in four types of competition:

With little else to fall back on, image becomes key: "The production of an urban image through, for example, the organisation of spectacles...becomes an important facet of interurban competition at the same time as it becomes a means to rally potentially alienated populations to a common cause."

From here it is only a short step to the conclusion that festivals and urban spectacles are nothing more, nor nothing less, than instruments of social control in societies inevitably riven by class conflict. Festival marketplaces, professional sports activities, and Olympic games become symbols of the supposed unity of class-divided and racially segregated cities while they are actually hegemonic devices by which an elite has its way through placating and deceiving the masses. It is not difficult to imagine Harvey extending this analysis to ephemera more generally.

This analysis is powerful and worth heeding. It has been picked up with a vengeance in the literature on public events, festivals, and celebrations. Lenskyj, for example, worries about the difficulties faced by those brave citizens who challenge hegemonic assumptions concerning the value of Olympic sporting competition. But the trap in this approach, of course, is that it suggests that anyone who thinks the Olympics (or, for that matter, ephemera more generally) are a good idea is engaged in hegemonic behavior, either by wishing to exert hegemony or by virtue of having been duped. That does not leave much room for another view.

Brown takes a slightly different tack on this issue:

Thus, for him the "shadow geographies" of ephemera are functional, responding to internal psychological needs rather than imposed from without. Where Harvey is critical, Brown is resigned.

Yet, not every commentator who has taken a look at ephemera has come away critical. In particular, such analyses begin to seem less compelling when one stops to ask citizens themselves about their reaction to these phenomena. Sussman set out to develop a critique of the New York City ticker tape parade that welcomed home soldiers from the Gulf War, but he pulled up short when he realized that, "none of this quite explains why millions of people turned out with homemade costumes and signs, photographs of loved ones, and messages of patriotism." Hiller seemed genuinely surprised when he discovered the level of residual support and goodwill among the citizens of Calgary for the 1988 Calgary Winter Olympics. Guillermoprieto, Flake, and Cohen all demonstrate how poor, disadvantaged communities (as well as wealthy ones) embrace festival and celebration, investing considerable resources to indulge in class role reversal at Carnival time.

Harvey’s views are picked up and echoed in the work of Ley and Olds on World’s Fairs. To them the World’s Fair is a manifestation of the culture industry imposing hegemonic meanings through spectacles onto a depoliticized mass audience. Yet, as they sifted through their evidence they came to the realization that "a number [of the pavilions] displayed themes which revealed more diversity than a tightly woven view of hegemony might accommodate." They ultimately conclude, "The cultural dupes posed by mass culture theorists are less visible on the ground than they are in nonempirical speculation."

Dupes or not, Harvey’s critique is one that informs much of the thinking behind ephemera in cities. Indeed, it may be what keeps planners and urban designers from considering ephemera as part of their urban design/planning toolkit. We need to be aware of this critique and adopt a position with respect to it, but there is no compelling need to succumb to it. Lynch would not have been overly troubled. He would have remained upbeat and optimistic, continually searching for the many counterexamples that could support a different, more positive point of view and provide an alternative understanding.

It is the claim of much of this volume that the electronic and print media are now the primary agents in imaging cities. And, in many ways that influence is just as salient with ephemera as with other attributes of the city and its life. One can only assume that any city would be delighted, as Fremantle was, with Morley Safer’s comments on 60 Minutes concerning its hosting of the America’s Cup: "So unimportant an event as a rather esoteric boat race has meant something to a whole country and given it a focus... The joy of nations is a strange thing. A people with so much wealth and achievement and so much self doubt become believers in themselves. And all because of a rather useless ugly and overdone hunk of Victorian silver." And it seems that Barcelona and Catalunya both have good reason to be pleased with the image that they projected to the world through the Olympic Games.

The omnivorous quality of the media does present risks for cities bold enough to engage visibly and proudly with ephemera. Rutheiser, in his scathing critique of the redevelopment of Atlanta published just prior to the Olympic Games, captures that risk rather well: "Approximately 15,000 journalists will be descending upon Atlanta in the summer of 1996, an unspecified percentage of whom will have the express purpose not of covering the Games, but of demonstrating how Atlanta is not really what it claims to be." The citizens of Atlanta may now be of mixed mind as to how well the media served the image-building elements of their Olympic project.

Moreover, the media are not merely passive in transmitting an image, positive or negative; they can be active actors in shaping that image. A few anecdotes make the point. Boorstin, in looking at the depictions of places in guidebooks, recounts: "In Berlin, in the days before the First World War, legend tells us that precisely at the stroke of noon, just as the imperial military band would begin its daily concert in front of the Imperial Palace, Kaiser Wilhelm used to interrupt whatever he was doing inside the palace. If he was in a council of state he would say, ‘With your kind forbearance, gentlemen, I must excuse myself now to appear in the window. You see, it says in Baedeker that at this hour I always do.’"

Ludwig, in his book on quintessential American events, recounts a more cautionary tale from the 1973 Tournament of Roses Parade:

A white policeman offered an alternative explanation:

There are more recent examples as well. To manage the images that would appear on television during the Seoul Olympics, organizers constructed walls and barriers to obstruct the cameras’ view of slums and poor quality houses along the torch and marathon routes.

Nicely indicative of the pressures on image are the debates that occur around Olympic cultural festivals. Each Olympics is required by the International Olympic Committee to sponsor a full program of cultural events to parallel the games. One might have expected the cultural program to develop as a way of offsetting the increasingly global nature of the Olympics, becoming a haven in which the local could be showcased. But the pressures move in the opposite direction.

Eager to present themselves on the world stage, the organizers of the Sydney Cultural Olympiad have found themselves moving away from the opportunity for local expression to plans that, in Stevenson’s view, will reinforce existing divisions between high and low cultural expression and provide few opportunities for direct grassroots participation in order to make a statement about Sydney’s status as a world class city and assert Australia’s position as a center of cultural and artistic excellence. Tellingly, Olympic organizing committees have tried to deal with this dilemma by creating a strict organizational and perceptual separation between the cultural elements of the opening and closing ceremonies in which local cultural elements are featured, on the one hand, and the Olympics arts festival, on the other.

Thus, the influence of the media is detectable, but a countervailing force that is unwilling to submit entirely to that media influence has developed and even flourished. Ironically, it is the representation of local culture offered up through the opening and closing ceremonies that are broadcast to the world, not the offerings of the Olympics arts festival. To notice that the opening and closing ceremonies of each Olympic games are presented in such a way and at such a scale as to render them able to be effectively broadcast around the world is not the same thing as concluding that the media have created that image.

Clearly there are issues of image at play in each of these examples, but the last example suggests that local, indigenous ephemera that are indicative of a place have sufficient salience and power that they will see the light of day and that they may play an important role in the shaping, if not the determination, of that image. If this is so, then one must ask to what extent the image of the city is shaped by hegemonic, externally created ephemera and to what extent it is actually shaped by other, more local, temporary, cyclical manifestations of that place. It may be just possible that ephemera help build that image in a manner that is surprisingly unaffected by the media.

Ephemera do contribute to image--the many examples I have cited so far have made that quite clear--but I want to posit that it is less the ephemera staged for the media ("media events") that accomplish this than those ephemera that remain outside of the media’s design if not outside of the media’s attention. If this is true, an important conclusion follows: the first task of image building is self-image.

For the sake of argument, let me posit the existence of a form of ephemera that I will call "signature ephemera," temporary urban phenomena that are indicative of and native to a particular place. Events and other ephemera that have no evocative place link are not to be considered in this category. Calvin Trillin understands what I have in mind, I think, when he points out that, for all practical purposes, Mardi Gras and New Orleans have become "virtually congruent," and hastens to add that there are not many American festivals that could be described as congruent with the city in which they take place. Yet, even though Mardi Gras may define one extreme of signature ephemera, it hardly epitomizes the class.

To clarify the concept of signature ephemera, select a city with which you are familiar and then list, as quickly as possible without undue nit-picking, the essential signature ephemera of that place. By way of example, let me propose two lists for Boston. First, in no particular order, the big six: the Boston Marathon, the swan boats in the Public Garden, the Head of the Charles regatta (even though it is arguably more a Cambridge phenomenon), First Night Boston, the Walk for Hunger, and the Fourth of July celebration on the Esplanade. Then, because reasonable people are sure to quibble, let me add thirteen more: the Evacuation Day (i.e., St. Patrick’s Day) Parade in South Boston (perhaps less of a signature event than it once was); the various saints festivals in the Italian North End; the Beanpot (the four college ice hockey tournament); the summer season of the Boston Pops (arguably more visible as ephemera than the seasons of other local performing arts organizations); the summer concert season at the Harborlights Pavilion (architecturally as well as programmatically); the fall visit of the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus (now supplemented, if not supplanted, by the spring visit of the Big Apple Circus—even though the latter qualifies as a New York signature ephemera as well); the ebb and flow of rental trucks in the Back Bay the first weekend in September (to demonstrate that the ecology of the actions of individuals can produce signature ephemera); the Make Way for Ducklings parade commemorating Robert McCloskey’s beloved children’s book; events honoring various moments in the Revolutionary War—the Boston Tea Party, Paul Revere’s Ride, the Boston Massacre, and Bunker Hill Day; the spring round of college graduations; the Franklin Park Kite Festival; the Chinese New Year and the Festival of the August Moon; and Haymarket, Boston’s outdoor fruit and vegetable market, on Fridays and Saturdays.

I do not claim this as a definitive list; I only claim it as my list. What is key here, though, is that I am quite sure that I have evoked an image of Boston for you, an image of what Boston "is" and how it is different from other places. The extent to which I have created that image by suggestion rather than by teasing out your "real" image, at least as that image touches upon ephemera, is unclear. Nevertheless, this exercise does demonstrate that ephemera do play an important role in image.

I do not intend to argue here that all local ephemera, even signature ephemera, are always immune from the influences of commercial or political interests. It is all too easy to find examples of such influence (though it is nonetheless worth asking how pervasive they are). Writing on carnivals, Orloff criticizes "the mundane carnivals that have completely lost touch with their roots and have become lavish show business productions for the entertainment of paying tourists. Not only have all the cult rituals been purged, but the spontaneous participation of the public has also been structured out of these staged celebrations in which the participants are hired to play in front of passive spectators." But he is also quick to point out that this is not the only possible result, "[I]n most carnivals the tourist is a tolerated byproduct of the celebration." And that is a crucial phrase for the serious student of ephemera to notice.

Or, consider Las Fallas of Valencia, Spain, arguably the most signature of signature ephemera. During the city’s main festival, the festival of St. Joseph, more than 750 sculptures made of wood and papier-mâché, some of them more than 20 meters tall, are constructed in the city’s public squares. Designed by artists and paid for by groups of neighbors who band together to produce each year’s local falla, these sculptures comment on a wide variety of social and political issues. Finally, approaching the end of the festival on the midnight of March 19, these sculptures are all burned down in a sequence of bonfires that light up the entire city [Fig. 14.2]. One element of this festival that has attracted comment is the fact that over the centuries the aesthetics of the fallas have tended to converge toward a particular exaggerated cartoon-like populist style. At least one commentator attributes this convergence to a conscious attempt to address a broader audience of tourists who previously had found the cryptic, local social commentary difficult to appreciate. Indeed, earlier in the century Las Fallas were marketed heavily with fallas trains being chartered from all over Spain and even fallas boats arriving from America, one result being that with this increased attention the scale of the entire event was ramped up. Yet, although the aesthetics, the institutional structure, and the scale of Las Fallas have all evolved over the centuries, one would still be hard pressed to argue that they are no longer signature ephemera that make a distinctive contribution to the image of Valencia, among both its residents and its visitors.

Similarly, the International Alliance of First Night Celebrations, which has overseen and encouraged the growth of some 200 New Year’s Eve celebrations of the arts and community, finds itself increasingly concerned about the homogenizing effects that a recent turn to heavier reliance on corporate sponsorship as a source of funding is having on the programming of its member First Nights. The Alliance finds itself asking the question, to what extent is it still possible to create truly unique, locally distinctive ephemera?

The evolution of the Daimonji Festival in Kyoto, Japan provides yet another fascinating example. For Japanese Buddhists the period from August 13-16 is the occasion of the bon ritual, a time during which the ancestral spirits are said to return to earth from heaven to visit their living relatives and to stay with them. The Daimonji festival marks the end of the bon ritual. Five symbolic fires are lit on the mountaintops that surround the city of Kyoto, and these fires light the path of the ancestral spirits up to the other world as a mark of respect and farewell [Fig. 14.3]. Wazaki recounts the external pressures on this festival and the response of the citizenry. He observes that the definite order in which the bonfires on the five mountains are lit is "a late invention," the result of government efforts in the 1960s to make it into "a more satisfactory event for tourists." City officials tied their economic assistance to the five Daimonji organizations to compliance with this plan but, Wazaki observes, "the people of Kyoto did not receive this edict passively. Rather, they reinterpreted the received order of the rituals to create a religious story with the theme of ritual movement from the eastern to the western sides of the city…It is a democratically constructed urban cosmology.... Thus the people of Kyoto have successfully reconciled their folk beliefs with the Buddhist doctrine to create a ‘Kyoto story.’" Over time, moreover, citizens of Kyoto began "to portray their belief in this religious story of progress through the five mountains towards the western paradise as traditional and as deeply rooted in history." In a sense, this example is just as much a tribute to the power of signature ephemera as it is to the power of other forces that might be brought to bear on ephemera.

But recognizing the presence of these pressures and influences is not the same thing as capitulating to David Harvey’s analysis and condemnation. Surely such influences must be noticed, considered, and accounted for in any strategy that employs ephemera as a element in building community, but the fact that such influences exist does not mean that the whole ephemeral enterprise must be abandoned. Ephemera, particularly signature ephemera, remain a particularly fruitful focus for detecting the distinctively local contribution to the image of a place.

A stunning recent example of signature ephemera, and one that deservedly has received considerable attention, is WaterFire, an outdoor art installation in downtown Providence, Rhode Island [Fig. 14.4]. For its tenth anniversary First Night Providence (Providence’s New Year’s Eve celebration) commissioned artist Barnaby Evans to create an outdoor installation that would take advantage of the newly opened rivers of downtown Providence. Formerly decked over, they had been uncovered and landscaped with exquisite detailing, but the street life that was expected to return had not. That first year Evans placed ten braziers in the middle of the river. Fires were lit and kept burning throughout the evening by volunteers in boats. Hauntingly evocative music was played through loudspeakers spread along the rivers. WaterFire was brought back for a second showing during an outdoor art conference, and then it took off. For the last two years, the fires have been lit every two weeks throughout the spring, summer, and fall. More than eighty braziers now line the rivers. It is not unusual for 10,000 people or more to come downtown to experience the evening, the smells, the sound, and the ambiance. Providence has adopted WaterFire as its own. There are waiting lists for people who have volunteered to light and replenish the fires. People come, sit, visit, meditate, and linger long after the fires are extinguished and the music is turned off. It is a model of what is possible; an authentic, locally distinctive, shared experience that is all the more striking for its evanescence. WaterFire makes downtown Providence a more interesting place to be and not only on those evenings when it is ablaze.

In a sense, what I have been asking us to do through my excursion into signature ephemera is to recognize authenticity in the midst of imaging. Rowe and Stevenson, in their broad ranging discussion of the applicability of festival marketplaces to provincial Australian cities, back into this point when they conclude that state authorities prefer "spectacular images of a transformed physical environment. More modest, alternative plans and proposals, such as those based on existing local cultures and facilities appear tentative and insipid by comparison, although they appear to be much closer to the everyday interests of local populations, much more easily achieved and of greater appeal to tourists seeking ‘authenticity.’" Paul Goldberger picks up this theme is his fascinating review of the construction of the Millennium Dome in Greenwich:

Indeed, being together in a large public space with other people may be a defining characteristic of signature ephemera and one that should command the planner/urban designer’s attention.

Before moving on, have a go at the signature ephemera game yourself. It is both addictive and instructive: Fifth Avenue at Christmas, the New York Marathon, the Greenwich Village Halloween Parade, Times Square on New Year’s Eve, the Big Apple Circus’ season in its outdoor tent at Lincoln Center, Shakespeare in the Park, Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, ice skating at Rockefeller Center, ticker tape parades, chess matches in Washington Square Park, and any number of neighborhood festivals in Manhattan; inauguration parades and the Cherry Blossom Festival in Washington, D.C.; skating on the Rideau Canal and Winter Carnival in Ottawa; the Blessing of the Fleet in Gloucester, Massachusetts; the Rose Bowl and Parade, the Hollywood Bowl season, and the Oscars in Los Angeles; the Canadian National Exhibition in Toronto; the Iditarod, the Tour de France, and the Giro d’Italia; the Mummers Parade in Philadelphia; Carnival in Venice and many other cities; the Day of the Dead in Mexico; the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah; the "Marching Season" in Belfast; and on and on. Surely, as planners and urban designers we should train ourselves not to miss or dismiss these phenomena; rather, we should learn their lessons.

Bonnemaison points out that, "City planning has traditionally been involved with the permanent urban fabric, with little thought for a cyclical layer." What would it mean to pay attention to a cyclical layer of the urban fabric? What would it mean to adopt a planning and design agenda for temporary urbanism?

One possibility would be to train event planning specialists. Writing in the run-up to the celebration of the nation’s Bicentennial, Lynch noticed, "The conscious design of special events is being practiced again...An event designer would be charged with creating an array of occasions, designing the environment, arranging the details, supporting and suggesting possibilities for the actions themselves. He would be competent in the suitable media...He would be skilled in timing...He would be a temporary environmental manager..." In later writings, he actually called for a new type of urban professional: "Most city events are accepted as if they just happened. Event designers are unsung. Their professional role is precarious, their work ephemeral, and their next job uncertain. If these happenings had a more stable institutional base, and if their composers had more explicit recognition—perhaps if their works, like that of a composer or a dramatist, were repeatedly performed and thus attracted critical judgment—then event design might be a more compelling role." I am sure that he would have agreed to extend this diagnosis to the management and design of ephemera of all types.

At the very least, it is clear that ephemera have spatial implications that planners and designers need to appreciate. Hallmark events are often remembered for their architectural or planning gestures; the Crystal Palace, the Eiffel Tower, the white city of Burnham and Olmsted, the Rome Olympic stadium, the Seattle space needle, the Tokyo Olympics swimming hall, and the Barcelona pavilion, recently reconstructed, are all legacies of such events, as are many others. The subtitle of Paul Goldberger’s article on the Millennium Dome--"It’s impractical, extravagant, and useless—a great European monument"--was chosen quite seriously with little or no intended irony.

But we do need to be vigilant about window dressing where something more is required. It is not surprising that the Main Street program of the National Trust for Historic Preservation has hit on festivals as an element in their main street revitalization strategies. They have even published a directory of festivals in Main Street towns. The truth, of course, is that in many places such festivals and events occur in front of empty storefronts filled for the occasion with posters, bunting, and children’s art work, a desultory and all too temporary result that calls attention to failure more than success.

More broadly, planners and designers must surely be involved in decisions about what McNulty calls the "amenity infrastructure," capital investments intended to provide recreation, entertainment, and cultural enrichment. He points out that many cities have made no significant new investment in their amenity infrastructure since those amenities were first put in place.

Often, attention to ephemera is a good first step in planning initiatives. Planners in Baltimore "began creating animation--creating happenings, turning the city on to itself, using public programming as a means of bringing people back downtown again. We did it initially for one real reason--school spirit. What we wanted Baltimoreans to do was to begin to feel good about themselves, so that then they would feel good about their city." In a similar vein, consider this description of ephemera planning in pre-Guggenheim Bilbao: "Th[e] participatory approach is complemented by an attempt to inject dynamism into city life, by organising celebrations, festivals and other cultural animation initiatives. There is a clear intention to rediscover for the city the atmosphere of the fiesta and the vibrancy of celebration, and open air performances which help transmit the feeling of urban liveliness. Expenditure on initiatives of this type is becoming more and more significant in Bilbao. Open-air cinema, festivals in parks and carnivals proliferate." Both examples strike jaded Cantabrigian eyes as a bit corny, but they are considerably less expensive than an uncertain capital investment, and may well be necessary as a precursor.

What can planners and designers can do to incorporate ephemera into their work? One might endeavor to make ephemera visible. One of the great sights of Los Angeles is the early morning flower market where orchids from Hawaii are received in huge quantities over night. I have only seen it featured in one guidebook, though it is fascinating and absolutely authentic. As I added moving vans in the Back Bay in early September to my list of Boston signature ephemera, I thought back to a project that placed artists in New York City Departments. Mierle Laderman Ukeles, working in the Department of Sanitation, created a piece of choreography for street sweeping machines. Imagine Boston welcoming students back with a dance of the moving vans. Occasional looks behind the scenes of the city could be fascinating and instructive--consider the tours of the Paris sewers or industrial plants. Cities could do much the same

One could create ephemera. The success of First Night Boston and its spread to nearly 200 communities in North America, New Zealand, and England is a case in point. Creation can happens at all scales. One should be sensitive to the ephemera created by citizens and work to nurture and support them.

In an odd sort of way, ephemera can become the reason for actually getting things done in our cities that otherwise would not get done. The visibility and the date-specific nature of many ephemera, particularly hallmark events, give a concrete target toward which to work. Again speaking of the Millennium Dome, Paul Goldberger pointed out that "the one thing a building for the millennium cannot be is late." But it is also because hallmark events have become so large that they present the opportunity to pursue other goals, and this, in turn, can be used to justify the expense. It has been claimed that in Barcelona thirty years of infrastructure investment was made in the six years between its selection by the International Olympic Committee and the opening of the Olympic Games. Millet i Serra, in a fascinating article on the urbanism of the Barcelona Olympics, argues that projects associated with the Olympics fared much better than other projects of substantial scale that lacked this association. He makes the telling point that delays in the latter sorts of projects "do not affect overall urban identity," whereas Olympic projects carry special import: "[W]e are not speaking of a stadium more or a stadium less, but the overall activity of the city, the expectation generated by the Olympic project, and the renewed trust in the city’s own capacity for administration and transformation. Without the Olympic Project, Barcelona would not have changed in this respect."

Planners need to think, too, about the legacy of ephemera, particularly those ephemera that occur on a regular cycle but in a different place each time. Much of the debate about the impact of Olympic Games or World Fairs is about this legacy. Considerable care must be taken in designing infrastructure and venues that will have a viable life after the event, since the record of these various events is mixed in this regard.

But it is important to expand one’s purview beyond the physical and economic legacy of these events. The organizers of the Barcelona Olympics would say that one of the main legacies of the Olympic Games has been the creation of a spirit of volunteerism among the citizens of the city, a spirit that was notable by its absence before. They would also say--and it is a point that is certainly linked to the first one--that there has been a tremendous improvement in the citizens’ image of their own city. Nor is Barcelona the sole positive example. Hiller, in considering the impact of the 1988 Calgary Winter Olympics on the community, concludes that the residents of Calgary transformed the Olympics from an elitist athletic event into an urban festival partly planned and partly spontaneous, providing the pretext for an urban celebration that often made the athletic event less important than what took place in the community. To have accepted the challenge and to have carried it out is worth a lot to a city’s self image.

Some events are designed to leave an institutional rather than a physical legacy. Consider the clever model of the National Folk Festival. Established in 1934, this event became America’s first multi-ethnic folk festival. The 1935 festival, held in Chattanooga, featured mountain fiddlers, Cherokee and Kiowa dancers, Mexican balladeers, and local Black spiritual choirs. In the 1970s, the National Folk Festival Association became the National Council for the Traditional Arts, and moved the festival to Wolf Trap Farm, near Washington, D.C. where it was held for eleven years in collaboration with the National Park Service. But then a new model was put in place. Today the National Folk Festival travels around the country choosing a site where it resides for three years before moving on. It was located in Lowell, Massachusetts in 1987, 1988, and 1989. When the National Folk Festival moved on to a new site, the Lowell Folk Festival was created, a direct legacy of the careful structuring of the National version. Attendance now approaches 200,000 each year and the local organizing committee feels that it has become an important element in the continuing effort to revitalize downtown Lowell.

But in the end, it is the legacy of a change in the city’s image that cities are hoping for, whether they pursue mega-events or facilitate more modest ephemera. Bob Scott, Chief Executive of the Manchester Olympic bid, made this hope manifestly clear while discussing Manchester’s Olympic campaign, "As an Olympic city the old image of Manchester would simply evaporate." While there are many other questions one must address with respect to ephemera, the question of image still remains central.

It is not enough to plan ephemera; we must also grapple with how to fund them, at whatever scale. The specter of instrumentality returns at this point. Are we willing to consider public expenditures only if they are clearly in the service of economic development or attracting tourists? Beyond this, do we only want to entertain the possibility of mounting those events that corporate sponsors will support? Or is there a place for "we did it because we wanted to"? Very few of the signature ephemera are, in the end, justified only because they are instrumental in bringing about other economic and development goals. Such rationales are often voiced, but in the end residents get involved in the most successful ephemera because they want to and they think their lives will be richer as a result. How else can one explain the growth of the traditional elements of citizen participation in, for example, Catalan festivals--the groups of castellers building human castles, the creation and display of each city’s and each neighborhood’s emblematic giants, the involvement of young people in groups of devils to present the correfoc, or the creation of floral carpets for the feast of Corpus Christi in Sitges? [Figs. 14.6, 14.7, 14.8].

It has been suggested that one of the main appeals of hallmark events to planners and city officials is that they offer the opportunity to extract considerable funds from other levels of government. Ley and Olds point out that as part of the preparations for the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition a survey was addressed to San Francisco businessmen asking them if they were in favor of the Fair and whether they knew of "any other event likely to occur about that time that would better enable us to secure state and government aid?" Many Olympic and World’s Fair bids are built on the promise of considerable infrastructure investment from a higher level of government.

One must be careful, of course. Cities that are reticent to embrace the messy business of events, festivals, celebrations, or ephemera of whatever stripe might find it attractive to accept the funding that comes attached to offers of prepackaged events created by promoters and sponsors. Davis points out that special events are now an important subindustry of public relations. Corporations "take over a city for a day" to promote their corporate image or their products through one event or another. All costs are covered, all publicity arranged. And if the event is ambitious enough, television networks that are looking for cheap programming are more than happy to jump on board. This phenomenon, which museums have been dealing with for some time in the form of exhibits assembled and curated by corporate sponsors, is beginning to hit cities full force. The arrival of European style banners in the streets of our major cities has not only been because we like the aesthetics of banners flapping in the breeze. Sussman, in discussing the ticker tape parade as a civic ritual, picks up this theme: "[I]t is the mayor’s privilege to announce one--and the business community’s privilege to step in and fund the festivities." (Of course, someone has to pay for the manufacturing of ersatz ticker tape, which is no longer available free as a byproduct of the operations of Wall Street.) Such prepackaged events do, of course, run the risk of being co-opted by corporate values and objectives. They suggest that an image built on ephemera might well be ephemeral, but we should not let the existence of counterexamples distract our attention from other, more organic ephemera, which, if I am right, contribute much more to a place’s image.

Orloff offers the most provocative rejoinder to those who are unwilling to use resources of whatever type to pay for such ephemera: "We are renewed by our extravagance and our disregard for the restraints within ourselves and our society." His reference is to carnival, but would an extension of this idea to other urban ephemera be too out of place?

The other side of this coin, of course, is the prospect of autocratic planning decisions made by a few on behalf of the many. The literature on Olympic bids-- even those less scandal-ridden than Salt Lake City’s--is full of discussion of how they are often developed in secret, without input from the citizens whose lives will be most directly impacted, and manipulated by the corporate interests of those who are willing to put up the money. But this is not only true of the Olympic Games. Ephemera, like any other social activity, have the potential for serving certain interests while conveniently forgetting others. Thorne and Munro-Clark make this point in considering the decisions that led to the construction of the Sydney monorail as part of the Darling Harbour Bicentennial redevelopment. Similarly, Booth and Boyle cite a museum curator who took a rather negative view of Glasgow’s selection as European City of Culture: "1990 was a year when an intellectually bankrupt and brutally undemocratic administration projected its mediocre image onto the city and ordered us to adore it." Lenskyj in comparing the processes followed by Sydney and Toronto in preparing their Olympic bids, argues that even though it lost the bid, Toronto "won" because of its more democratic bid preparation process, which funded community groups to prepare research reports on the predicted social impact of the Games. The financial politics are exacerbated, of course, when public money is at stake.

It would be a mistake only to undertake ephemera that were devoid of the possibility of tension and debate. As Deborah Karasov makes clear in Chapter 13, when artistic inspiration--often deriving from an intent to be provocative and confrontational--is at the heart of what is being proposed and designed, it is not uncommon for that inspiration to come into direct conflict with other forms of decision making. The social criticism on which much of the carnival tradition is based makes it stronger and more salient as a communal activity.

One avenue through which such tensions surface is through countervailing ephemera. The Doo Dah Parade in Pasadena, California is a humorous case in point. Originating out of both a community protest concerned with the economic and political forces behind the redevelopment of Old Town Pasadena and an artistic vision of a counter statement to the Tournament of Roses Parade, the Doo Dah Parade sprang into existence in 1978 when community artists surprised an audience expecting the real parade with a counter-cultural parody. (The Tournament of Roses Parade occurs on the first of January except if that day falls on a Sunday. 1978 was the exception, and local artists jumped into the breach.)

The St. Paul Winter Carnival has over the years incorporated countervailing elements into its structure. A Royal Family is selected to preside over the many activities of Winter Carnival. They represent both the cold of winter and order. But an ironic counter to the Royal Family is embodied in the Vulcans, who represent warmth and disorder. They appear at public events and lampoon the Royal Family; they have license to commit mischief (coating their faces with soot so that when they pursue women to give them a kiss they will smudge their faces). The inevitable annual victory of the Vulcans over the Royal Family symbolizes the defeat of winter and the coming of spring. When the ordinary is turned on its head, all sorts of unexpected, wonderful, and challenging things can (and do) happen. Of course, this attribute of festive ephemera, particularly events in the carnival tradition, is what makes them even more challenging for public officials.

Under pressure from the Catholic church, which historically had been the brunt of much of the social and political commentary embodied in Las Fallas of Valencia, Franco, reticent to crack down on the ephemeral social commentary that only lasted several days in the streets of Valencia, finally ordered the creation of a countervailing element in that festival, the Ofrenda de Flores ("Offering of Flowers"). Over two days nearly 150,000 people parade through the square in front of the Basilica to pay tribute to the Virgen de los Desamparados ("Our Lady of the Helpless"). Women and men in traditional dress carry over 40,000 bouquets and baskets of flowers into the square. These flowers are then used to form the dress of the fourteen-meter high figure of the Virgin [Fig. 14.9] and to adorn the façade of the Basilica.

As Alexander Orloff puts it, "Carnival and revolution have never mixed well, the one too serious, the other too frivolous to see that their goals are identical." One wonders how David Harvey might react.

The design and management of public space for the purpose of facilitating ephemera is hardly an apolitical act, particularly when decisions are made that privilege one voice over another. Which client is the ephemera planner to represent? Yet, this is not a reason to steer away from ephemera; planners and urban designers working for and with public clients ought to be used to such give and take. Ephemera are like any other planning and public policy action in this regard. Here, though, the saving grace is that the expression of these voices will be temporary and modulated by the expression of other such voices (if one is a responsible curator and broker of ephemera). The fact that they are fraught with pitfalls and uncertainty is no reason to leave ephemera out of the planner’s toolkit nor out of the urban designer’s palette.

While writing this essay, I worried a lot about the penchant of academics to quibble, to criticize, and to belittle. It is one thing to sit back and level a critique (as many of the articles that I have cited do), but it is quite another to go out and try to change the way things are (as many of the movers and shakers behind the ephemera I have discussed have done). Lynch, Bonnemaison, and many of the others I have cited help point the way, but there is a lot more work to do before the value and potential of ephemera are fully understood.

I was fortunate to be able to spend a 1992-1993 sabbatical year in post-Olympics Barcelona, where I found a lot of my attention being attracted to the rich menu of official and unofficial urban festivals, celebrations, and traditions as well as to the rich street life. While by most accounts Barcelona has enjoyed an enviable improvement in its international image since the success of the Barcelona Olympics, my Catalan friends have taught me that it is the citizens’ image of their own city that is the most important image, and if one contributes to that image, the image that others have of that place will follow.

Are Olympic bids or proposals for World’s Fair designation the only moments in which we will allow ourselves to have a vision that is out of the ordinary for our cities and our lives in those cities? I sincerely hope not. The question is not whether planners and city designers should become involved in the impractical, the extravagant, the extraordinary, the useless, and the ephemeral--but how. We need to pay attention to variation, change, cycles, because they are what makes urban life vital; if the role of a planner is to build community in both senses of that phrase, we must remember to pay attention to activity as well as setting.

Victor Turner describes festivals as society in its subjunctive mood. Ephemera highlight differences, offer experiments, depart from the "normal." If planners and city designers cannot ask "What if?" then who can? If we do not see, encourage, and perhaps even act to create these elements of our communal urban life, we impoverish our cities and ourselves.

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