Seeking Common Ground

How might fifty years of garden festivals best be evaluated? Unlike a single building or urban open space development, festivals are an amalgam of cultural and commercial imperatives. Their nineteenth-century antecedents were purely horticultural events, but recent expositions have included ecology, public art, experimental theme gardens, and the paraphernalia of the leisure industry. They have been composite landscapes whose ephemerality might be regarded as a new landscape genre, inviting analysis in this regard alone. They are projects that, employing an established organizational methodology, facilitate inclusion and collaboration and increase the pace of development. Reclamation, environmental and economic benefits materialize as the festival process moves through its successive stages. They generate upgrades to peripheral services such as an transport infrastructure. Commercial or residential development may follow the six-month festival run but in every case a new or upgraded urban park comprises part, if not all, of the after-use condition. Each of these aspects of the festival process can be a focus of their evaluation. But it is their promotion of new urban open space patterns and conditions that is perhaps where they hold the most potential.

Their nested design sequence suggests, at minimum, separate evaluations for the six-month exhibition phase and ensuing after-use condition, usually an urban park. Exhibition grounds are overlaid with the accoutrements of a festival: pavilions, banners, giant Ferris wheels, cable car systems, cafés and food courts. Once all this is dismantled the festival ‘grounds’ become a ‘landscape’, with a new character and usage. The pragmatic and measured density of the exhibition gives way to a landscape less differentiated and more open. But caution must be taken with such a bivalent perspective; the evaluation of festival landscapes across cultures and decades requires identification of qualities that are not only universal but also intrinsic to the festival process.

Bearing in mind the above caveat, two main aspects of garden festivals are analysed in this chapter. First, generic properties of festival projects are identified. These include aspects of their organizational structure, displays of garden art and theme gardens. Secondly, I explore the ways in which these events hold the most promise for urban planning and design. It is not enough, however, to examine those cases where planning strategies align with, and are stimulated by, the festival process.