Events, leisure, and the social construction of place

This article was written for Uncover magazine - Meaningful Leisure Experiences. 

Authors: Greg Richards is professor of Events and Placemaking at Breda University of Applied Sciences. Ilja Simons and Esther Peperkamp are lecturers and researchers at Academy for Leisure & Events and co-chairs of the professorship in Events and Placemaking.

Meaningful experiences and societal impacts
Events and leisure activities play an important role in how places are experienced, understood, and valued. Within this professorship, we examine how leisure practices - ranging from festivals to everyday activities - generate meaningful experiences and produce societal impacts.

Eventful cities
A central theme throughout our work is the concept of Eventful Cities (Richards & Palmer, 2012), a framework for understanding how events create value for urban environments. More than temporary spectacles, events can act as catalysts for transformation, building local identity, encouraging civic pride, and reshaping the narrative of a place.

An example is our study of the Zandvoort Grand Prix, in collaboration with the professorship in Social Impacts of Tourism (Zegers et al., 2022). Building on this work, we are now conducting a qualitative study with one of our MSc students, exploring how the event acts as both a unifier and a polariser, revealing the complex layers of social impact.

In Curaçao, we collaborated with local researchers to investigate how the Kaya Kaya festival acted as a catalyst for change in a stigmatised neighbourhood (Simons, 2023). Kaya means street in Papiamentu, and through a mix of community engagement and physical interventions like murals, the festival helped shift perceptions and reclaim public space - challenging negative stereotypes and allowing new narratives to emerge. This theme connects closely to our ongoing work with Blind Walls Gallery in Breda (Brito et al., 2024), where we continue to study the participatory process of creating murals and explore how the stories behind the murals help newcomers feel at home in the city. We also continue to explore how large-scale cultural celebrations shape social bonds. Our research on Carnival in the Netherlands and Brazil (Richards & Marques, 2022) examines the social bonds created by the event in both countries. Recently, we expanded this project to Aruba, where one of our MSc students is conducting a qualitative study into the interactions between residents and tourists during Carnival.

Street culture is another recurring theme, which Peter van der Aalst (2024) is examining in his Professional Doctorate project on the role of street culture and sports in urban placemaking in Brabant. Increasingly, local authorities are using street culture to make places more attractive to young people and as a stimulus for wider placemaking interventions. 

Everyday leisure and social value
Beyond festivals and urban culture, it is also important to look at the quieter, everyday side of leisure. In her recent project, Esther Peperkamp (2024) explored how a variety of repetitive leisure practices, such as hobby meetings and events contribute to social interaction and community building. The study looked closely at the interplay of leisure, social encounters, and the spaces in which these activities unfold and how they support - or sometimes fail to support - social cohesion.

Digitalisation and hybrid event formats
As leisure moves into new spaces, our work has also turned to the digital realm. The influence of digitalisation and virtual spaces on business events is explored through the concept of ‘phygital reality’ presented in Design Futures scenarios related to hybrid event formats (Bevolo & Amati, 2024) developed with Design Research methodologies and then further updated and validated by Gen-AI automated foresight.

Leisure and events as forces of connection and division 
Our professorship also addresses global challenges such as polarisation, disconnection, and the commodification of leisure, all of which have a significant impact on communities and places. Our research aims to deepen understanding of how events can serve as unifying forces, and how the rituals and practices around them can contribute to social cohesion and positive change. However, we also examine how the same mechanisms can lead to exclusion, division, and inequality.

Taking a critical approach, we investigate the role of events in social sustainability, aligning our work with the Sustainable Development Goals. We aim to play a key role in these discussions, encouraging debate and offering new perspectives. Our goal is to shift the conversation beyond viewing places, leisure, and events solely as commercial entities that need to be managed, and instead recognise them as socially and culturally meaningful contexts.

This effort includes organising an expert panel on ‘Leisure for Liveable and Lovable Places’ during the WLO Congress, featuring experts from Rotterdam, Breda, Barcelona, and Edinburgh. The panel will explore how leisure and events can act as catalysts for creating liveable and lovable places by changing and enhancing the uses, perceptions, and narratives of places.

This focus has implications for our research projects; we aim to focus on projects that are both socially and culturally meaningful, contributing academic and practical knowledge to create impactful leisure experiences, places, and events. 

Encouraging critical thinking and building strong networks
We feel it is important to educate students to take a critical approach to places and events. We encourage students to consider the broader context, and by questioning the possibilities, consequences, and dilemmas that arise, students are guided to explore how events and placemaking practices are embedded within larger social, cultural, and historical frameworks. We encourage students to view events not just as isolated occurrences but as stages for interaction and meaning-making that contribute to people’s everyday lives. Our goal is to equip them with the knowledge and skills to navigate these contexts and design meaningful interventions that resonate with the communities they engage with.

This approach also has implications for our network. We collaborate with many different stakeholders, from academic researchers to event and placemaking practitioners, and cultural and social actors. We maintain strong connections with scholars in critical events studies, such as the ATLAS SIG Events and the newly established WLO SIG Critical Events Studies. We are also actively involved in several placemaking networks, including Placemaking Europe and KreativEU. While we continue to work with commercial partners, our primary focus is on academic and community-driven collaborations with a critical perspective as our guiding principle.

Sources

- Aalst, P. van der (2024). The city belongs to everyone: Copenhagen engages communities in designing a vital, inclusive and future-proof city. Uncover. 2024, 8, p. 57.
- Bevolo, M., & Amati, F. (2024). The future of business events in the “phygital” age: development of a generative tool: A qualitative research project combining Design Research and foresight principles to co-design and develop a futures matrix for potential implementation by business event designers and managers. World Leisure Journal, 66(1), 92-115.
- De Brito, M. P., Calvi, L., Zegers, K., Boor, J., & Braam, E. (2024). 11 Murals as Creative Placemaking Interventions. Tourism Interventions: Making or Breaking Places.
- Peperkamp, E. (2024). De sociale waarde van vrije tijd – een drieluik. Deel 1: Een theoretische beschouwing van de sociale waarde van vrije tijd. Vrijetijdstudies 24(1).
- Richards, G., & Palmer, R. (2012). Eventful cities. Routledge.
- Richards, G. & Marques, L. (2022). What happens to communities when Carnival disappears? Uncover, 6, p. 64.
- Simons, I. (2023). Events as contexts for creating new narratives: an exploration. Presentation ATLAS Annual conference.
- Zegers, K., van Liempt, A., Klijs, J., van de Graaf, J., & Mazeland, S. (2022). Onderzoeksrapportage Impact Dutch Grand Prix Zandvoort 2022: Economische en sociale impact van de Dutch Grand Prix voor bezoekers, bewoners en bedrijven.