Designing Conviviality? How Music Festival Organizers Produce Spaces of Encounter in an Urban Context

Inclusion and diversity have become paramount within the festival sector and beyond, often focusing on bringing together a diverse group of people within one space. Within leisure studies, there has been a longstanding interest in leisure as spaces where people meet “others.” Nevertheless, previous research found that physical proximity is often not sufficient to enable social mixing. Adopting a cross-disciplinary approach combining urban planning and design with cultural sociology and leisure studies, this article addresses how music festival organizers produce spaces of encounter within festival spaces. The study is based on semi-structured interviews with 31 organizers of music festivals in Rotterdam. Findings indicate that organizers use their knowledge of spatial design and symbolic boundaries to stimulate or block movement of audience groups, which affects segregation and mixing of audience groups within a festival. Spaces of encounter therefore are consciously designed through symbolic and social boundaries that have spatial consequences.