Community engagement through the neighbourhood street festival: Between external simulation and local stimulation

Lina Naoroz Bråten and Marius G Vigen
Additional contact information
Lina Naoroz Bråten: Department of Architecture and Planning, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Norway
Marius G Vigen: Department of Sociology and Political Science, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Norway

Urban Studies, 2025, vol. 62, issue 14, 2824-2841

Abstract: While grassroots initiatives often involve extensive community engagement in response to external (un)desired development, there are also several ‘top-down’ initiatives where municipalities or external organisations strive to improve neighbourhood engagement. This article focuses on the latter, an externally initiated neighbourhood street festival in Trondheim, Norway. During this festival, temporary interventions and activities are implemented in public spaces to engage citizens in conversations on local urban development and enhance their sense of belonging to the area. Based on street interviews with neighbours and visitors at the festival and in-depth interviews with involved actors, we investigate what these actions contribute locally. We ask: How do neighbourhood-based festivals influence community engagement? How can we understand the organisation of such initiatives more conceptually? Our analysis suggests that the festival finds itself in a delicate balancing act between simulating a local initiative that does not exist and awakening a latent initiative locally by stimulating action. Based on this tension, we suggest a conceptual framework for neighbourhood initiatives relevant to research and practice in urban development and planning.

Keywords: citizen participation; community engagement; events; festivals; neighbourhood initiatives; å…¬æ°‘å ‚ä¸Ž; ç¤¾åŒºå ‚ä¸Ž; 活动; 节日; 街区举措 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/00420980251323495 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:urbstu:v:62:y:2025:i:14:p:2824-2841

DOI: 10.1177/00420980251323495

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Urban Studies from Urban Studies Journal Limited
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().