Festivalization and Urban Space: Events, Tourism, and Cultural Governance in Postcolonial Cities

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This course explores how festivals and cultural events increasingly shape postcolonial cities through processes of festivalization. Drawing on urban anthropology and critical tourism studies, the course examines how festivals operate as tools of city branding, tourism development, heritage-making, and urban regeneration, while also generating new forms of spatial inequality and social tension.
Students analyze how event-led urban strategies transform public space and reshape mobility patterns. Key themes include cultural policy and governance, tourism imaginaries, place marketing, public-private partnerships, heritage management, securitization and crowd control, and the tensions between global visibility and local participation.

Using case studies from cities across Africa and the wider Mediterranean region, the course investigates how festivals contribute to broader agendas of urban competitiveness and cultural development. At the same time, students engage with ethnographic perspectives to understand how residents, workers, and visitors experience festivalized urban environments, and how these spaces become arenas of negotiation, exclusion, and cultural production.

Through critical readings and observation-based methods, students develop transferable analytical tools to interpret event-driven urban change and to assess the promises and contradictions of cultural tourism as a model for urban development in postcolonial contexts worldwide

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