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

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.