Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
Mayan Spring festival of Cha'an (enjoy) that marks the end of the planting season
takes place on empty ground adjacent to and in the town square in Chemax (Yu-
catan), a site that became the centre of the Spanish colonial town and now functions
as its commercial node with people of mainly non-Mayan, Mexican heritage for
most of the year (Brown
2007
). Similarly, the annual recurring clashes in Northern
Ireland over the routes of the Orange Parade marches, show the differences between
the celebrations of the Protestants at their ascendancy, because of King William of
Orange's victory in the battle of the Boyne in 1690 that vanquished the attempt of
the Catholic King James to retake the English, Scottish and Irish thrones, and the
resentment of the Roman Catholics over this annual display of triumphalism.
The temporary occupation of space is not the only trend involved, for over time
special spaces for festive events have been built in cities. Many of the central pi-
azzas in Italian towns in which festivals are held were originally common areas
outside the town that were absorbed by the town as it grew, but remained the site of
various festivals, as seen by the word campos used to describe many central areas.
This type of trend also accounts for the inner city location of many fairgrounds and
agricultural exhibition sites that are found in North American cities that were on the
edge of cities in the early twentieth century when they were first created. The spaces
occupied by the various festivals are now complemented by additional business
functions, so the area is not only occupied for the limited festival time.
Some festivals have grown so big that special areas have been built to accom-
modate them, whilst others have become permanent spaces because of their need
for buildings to contain them, or because they use expensive and difficult to move
facilities or machinery. For example, the Sambadrome is now the focal point of the
Rio Carneval, which houses the spectators and the judges of the spectacular floats,
costumes and dance parades that provide a climax to the Lenten festival, activities
that take the various neighbourhood samba schools much of the year to build and
to choreograph. This venue is a purpose-built six block series of stands, imitating
the street form through which the parades used to pass in the centre of the city. A
more general example can be seen in the Darling Basin area of inner Sydney, in
which the need for a major site for the massive Australian Bicentennial celebrations
of 1988 provided the stimulus for the renewal of the area's derelict railway and
harbour lands. Today, it is a new zone of leisure and entertainment for the city, the
site for many festive events during the year. Although each of the multiple festive
events are temporary, they succeed one another in this permanent space for festivals
and exhibitions. This may be seen as spatially crystallizing the extended number
of festive events in cities. So the loss of a spatial ephemeralness through festive
events occupying different spaces, is replaced by a temporal sequential festivity
in the same place, through the addition of more temporary festive events in these
permanent locations. It also must be noted that some festivals may move around a
country or region in different years, such as the annual Eisteddfod, a celebration of
Welsh culture in Wales, or the Saint-Vincent-Tourante wine festival in the Cotes
d'Or in Burgundy that moves sequentially between the regional settlements, with
the most famous wine villages hosting it every twenty or thirty years on January
22-23rd. This was a new event created in the 1930s to promote regional wines as
