With the increasing popularity of urban athletic events, pop-up dinners, and creative ways to use existing space, cities are volunteering to temporarily host unprecedented amounts of people. Comparable to the Olympics, but at a smaller scale, this temporary use of space doesn’t often require the building of venues, but does demand solid infrastructure. Whether relying on transit systems, parking, plumbing, or electricity, the performance of aging systems become strained; think of the system as a sorority house where everyone plugs in their hair dryers at the same time. This sudden demand of energy, more often than not, causes infrastructure shut-down – too much is not always a good thing.
After the DC Rock N Roll marathon on Saturday, the line for the Metro was a half block long and growing. Thirty thousand runners sparked fifty-two street closures around the city. As I boarded my train with a New York City rush hour caliber crowd, I silently hoped my train was powerful enough to carry all of us to our destinations safely. It was, and we made it home without issue – but it did make me wonder when it is worth overriding the built urban system at the cost of hosting an event.
I had a contrasting experience in Philadelphia last year when I attended a Diner En Blanc. This pop-up dinner event where over a thousand people converge, dine, and dance in a public space, was executed beautifully. As we gathered into different parts around the city and made our way to Logan Circle, I was sure we would get disciplined at some point for being too loud, needing to leave, or swimming and dancing in the fountain after dinner – there was none of it. Philadelphia simply let us enjoy ourselves, and I came away with wholehearted thanks to the local government and the police department for allowing us to use the urban space in a way it had never been used before.
Participants of temporary events are left with an impression created not only from how the infrastructure performs, but the location in which the event is held. When holding an event in a city, organizers would presumably want to portray the place in the most favorable light. In the same way you clean your house before having guests over, you want to impress people with the setting and the surroundings – so how do you choose what to show off?
This introduces the element of access and marketability. While some areas may be in greater need than others for temporary visitors, publicity, and community building, they may also not be the areas to which you want to attract outsiders. Philadelphia may have given many of us a different impression had we not been dancing under the moonlight in a public fountain outside an art museum. How would my experience have been different if I were in an overgrown field, surrounded by the same 1,300 people but with a backdrop of vacant town homes or public housing? What if I were in a community garden surrounded by barbed wire? Perhaps my impression of the event would not have changed – but I’m willing to bet it would have.
City planners speak about the importance of access to public spaces and greening, but parks are just the tip of that iceberg. Each community needs space to play and be and go, but we also need to think about what we can see from the park. Looking at homes with cluttered yards gives us the impression we’re in a different place than it would should we look out from a park and see well-maintained residences and freshly painted porches. Attracting outsiders for temporary events provides an opportunity for a city to leave a lasting impression through a snapshot of an experience. Critical thoughts of what our city decides to show the public and what it decides to hide is worthy of analysis, because quite simply a city that decides to host an event directly reflects on the event organizers, as well as the city itself.
