Festivals are examples of the complex and diverse processes of place-making. They have proliferated in response to a range of social and planning policies that encourage participation and encounters with others as a mean to minimize social isolation and facilitate greater understanding of difference.
However, we argue that a festival provides a space not solely for the act of chance encounters that occurs within the specific timeframe of the event. Instead, the festival is also about ongoing exchange, not only in economic terms but through the possibilities provided for participants to acknowledge, experience, feel, debate and determine the complexities and contradictions inherent in processes that go into informing community and place making. In this framing, the festival alone is no longer the focus; instead, its purpose is to catalyse exchanges that may go on to shape notions of community and place as the festival’s impacts spill out beyond its temporal and spatial boundaries. Nonetheless, the question remains one of evaluation of the changes generated.
The introduction of care, and more specifically an ethics of care, into thinking about the role of festivals shifts attention to the ways ‘existing care practices … both exceed and mobilise publics to potentially generate more inclusive and ethical infrastructural spaces’ (Alam & Houston, 2020: 1-2). In this paper, and drawing on the infrastructures of care literature, we argue that community festivals ‘make visible, re-vision and re-value the caring possibilities’ (Power & Mee, 2020: 486) in surprising and unexpected ways as a sense of community is enacted and performed. This paper presents an initial exploration to re-think regional festivals as a fundamental element of resilient social infrastructure (the places, spaces and people that support social connections), which are as essential to community life as physical infrastructure.