Swartjes and Berkers studied designing spaces for festivals; their findings have implications for the development of all sorts of public areas. The investigators found after interviewing festival organizers that “Spaces with varied rhythms of movement, such as parks and streets, provide the opportunity for encounters as people engage in activities of lingering, people-watching and playing. . . . if one can see the whole route at once before starting to walk, it will feel as a ‘tiring length.’ . . . it is important to provide the possibility to hop from stage to stage, to create an experience and make the space visually interesting so that people will want to move around and to steer people in certain directions through signing. . . . separation of social groups as well as movement of those groups is important to create a safe environment. . . . safety is about creating a space that makes sense and where people can easily distinguish important places. . . . for [encounters] to occur people need to feel relaxed, both mentally and physically.”
Britt Swartjes and Pauwke Berkers. 2022. “Designing Conviviality? How Music Festival Organizers Produce Spaces of Encounter in an Urban Context.” Leisure Sciences, https://doi.org/10.1080/01490400.2022.2106328