AAA White Paper The political economy of informal events, 2030 | Page 58

4. PROSPECTS
While adult participation in informal cultural events promises to
stay buoyant, the decline in children’s participation in sports events
is worrying and needs to be reversed. In events as elsewhere,
organisers and local authorities need the physical and social skills
that junior sports events impart. Still, the likely convergence of all
age-groups on the music festivals of tomorrow, and a more relaxed,
Mediterranean attitude to children and the NTE, could do much to
turn things round.
As Clare Coghill argues on the page opposite, events often
provide an indispensable social dimension for cities, a fillip to
locals and visitors, and a chance to uphold a humanist kind of
universalism. At the same time, though, just as events alone can’t
regenerate cities, so they cannot by themselves produce real
social cohesion.
It’s important to get the balance between the economic and
social sides of events right. In a 2016 study of the ‘small, worldly
city’ of Cardiff, the Portuguese geographer Ana Gonçalves is right
to contend that any study of a city ‘can never be developed in
purely cultural terms’. She’s also right to note that urban event-
management entities often adopt ‘a predominantly economic
approach’ to events, one which aims at reaping short-term profit
and neglects the medium and long-term benefits that events may
bring to local communities. She’s accurate, too, when she says that
the spin-off from urban events is felt not just in economics, but also
‘in more subjective and difficult to assess ways which correspond
to people’s perceptions of a given city and how they feel in it and
about it’. Finally, this White Paper fully agrees with her that the
early integration of local communities into the running of events
makes such events more likely to succeed.
Unlike Gonçalves, however, we do not believe that events should
simply seek out the fashionable but also over-familiar favourites
of social policy – local inclusiveness and diversity, local quality of
life, local entertainment and play – in the hope that, in the process,
they can magically deliver local cohesion. In the cold light of day,
cohesion is more likely to come from a resilient consensus around
beliefs than it is from being in the moment together at an event.
Indeed, since the Brexit referendum of 2016, all the signs are that
managing the unity of events in the UK could become more of a
test in the years to 2030.
That, however, should prompt professionals around events to
be still more professional in their stewardship of them.
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