Festive Parks as Inclusive Spaces: Celebrating Latin American London in Finsbury Park

Abstract

Festivals are often regarded as a way of making cities and urban public spaces more inclusive, particularly for migrant communities. This proposition is examined here by analysing a festival that celebrates the growing number of Latin Americans who live in London. The research assesses how the Latino Life in the Park festival contributes to social and cultural inclusion and focuses on how this festival affects the inclusiveness of the park in which it is staged. Large-scale, fenced music festivals tend to be regarded as installations that make London's parks less inclusive. However, this article highlights the value of staging a free, and fence free, festival in a park setting. This created a sociable, festive park in which marginalised communities were made visible. By examining how the festival was organised, the ways people behaved and who attended, the article outlines how music festivals affect the dynamics and inclusivity of public spaces.

Keywords:

• parks
• festivals
• inclusion
• exclusion
• migration
• public space

Among various other epithets, London is known to be an eventful city,¹ a migrant city,² and, since 2019, a National Park City.³ These three elements come together when festivals are staged in parks to celebrate the city's cultural diversity. This article focuses on one such event, Latino Life in the Park, the UK's largest Latin festival. The festival is presented by its organisers as a ‘Latin festival run by Latinos, showcasing Latin culture in all its breadth and depth; the variety, the diversity, the fusion of genres and ethnicities’.⁴ As such, it provides a fascinating case through which to explore the potential of festivals to support migrant communities directly, but also indirectly—by linking them to other communities. Creating communal experiences in public spaces can widen access to culture,⁵ as well as generating the types of social encounters that are known to lower levels of societal prejudice.⁶

There is growing interest in the role of festivals as vehicles for promoting social and cultural inclusion,⁷ but ‘there is still a dearth of research on the experience of migrants attending multi-cultural festivals’.⁸ This article aims to address this gap, as well as exploring the wider significance of park-based festivals as vehicles for achieving more inclusive public spaces. Our research is guided by a key question: how does the Latino Life in the Park festival affect the inclusivity of Finsbury Park? The article begins with a review of existing ideas and literature. A detailed discussion of London's Latin communities is then provided which highlights the challenges faced by the 100,000+ Latin Americans who live in London. These sections are followed by a review of the qualitative methods used to research the case study. The subsequent evaluation of the Latin festival is presented in three key parts, each of which outlines implications for inclusivity. The first examines how it was organised; the second examines behaviours of, and encounters between, people who attended; and the third explores who was present. The implications of the case study are then outlined and discussed in the concluding sections. Our analysis extends beyond the temporal and spatial boundaries of the festival, which helps to understand its inclusive qualities. By examining Finsbury Park during the festival and at other times, we suggest that the Latino Life in the Park festival is best understood as a celebration of the park's (existing) inclusivity; a visibilisation and intensification of the way the park normally functions. By exploring how the event integrates with the park, our research identifies how a free festival can encourage the sociabilities that transform open spaces into public spaces. The research also highlights the way urban festivals can nurture solidarity, resilience, and resistance among London's migrant communities. Some examples of this phenomenon—most notably the Notting Hill Carnival—are very established and widely appreciated, but our article suggests the role of newer, smaller and less well-known events should also be acknowledged.

Festivals as Agents of Inclusion

Inclusivity is an important, yet contested and vague objective, and the term is used here to refer to people's capacity to participate fully in society, particularly those who are marginalised or disadvantaged. Inclusion doesn't just mean increasing access to various services and opportunities, it also means making people feel welcome and comfortable when they do. The United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals include the aim to ‘make cities more inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable’ and greater inclusion is a key priority for many municipal governments, including London's.⁹ Festivals have been specifically identified as vehicles to achieve more inclusive urban societies.¹⁰ As Fincher, Iveson, Leitner, and Preston, and Hassanli, Walters, and Williamson note, festivals are often supported to celebrate communities that are stigmatised or marginalised in the public sphere, including migrant communities.¹¹ Festivals that celebrate difference or diversity are increasingly regarded as social policy tools that can promote inclusion, particularly as they encourage people from different backgrounds to share the same spaces and, ideally, interact. Indeed, Koutrolikou suggests that festivals ‘have the potential to legitimise cultural identities and facilitate ethnocultural encounters’.¹² Such encounters are known to increase knowledge and awareness of diversity, and help lower levels of prejudice,¹³ highlighting the ‘more than representational’ roles played by urban festivals. Festivals can do more than promote societal inclusion, they can actively produce it, especially when social distinctions amongst those present are blurred¹⁴ and when festivals involve acts of protest and resistance.¹⁵ As Johannson and Kociatkiewicz argue, this occurs through de-territorialisation with city festivals transforming city space and city life by ‘casting out or subverting the dominant meanings and institutions’; ‘inviting new social actors into the festival space’; ‘bringing in new themes and activities’, and ‘changing established pathways and behaviours’.¹⁶ These temporary effects might be made more permanent (a re-territorialisation) if festivals inspire new spatial and social practices,¹⁷ or if the festival helps to support related enterprises or events that coalesce into clusters or networks.¹⁸

Festivals are vehicles for constructing and performing social identities, but they can also highlight and exacerbate differences. This latter point highlights that festivals can divide and exclude, even if their intention is to promote unity and inclusion. Division may result from disagreements about festival funding, content or location: in other words, whose culture is subsidised and emphasised, and where? Festivals are also notorious for disputes within and between the groups tasked with organising them and may highlight or even intensify disputes between social groups.¹⁹ This is why Pinochet Cobos sees festivals as useful lenses to understand the social fabric of cities by revealing what is latent in everyday life.²⁰

The role of festivals as agents of inclusion has also been subjected to various criticisms. Festivals can commodify otherness and exoticise minority cultures by reducing them to spectacles.²¹ This is a form of domination and may serve to reinforce prejudices and inequalities rather than reducing them. There is also a danger that festivals dilute and over-simplify cultures into a form that is deemed non-threatening and palatable for ‘the white eye’.²² Following this line of argument, festivals can act as ways that migrant communities seek to demonstrate their value of their culture(s), with cultural forms only gaining legitimacy when they are consumed by white hosts.²³ There is also a danger that cultures are trivialised by focusing on ‘shallow’, ‘banal’, or ‘thin’ signifiers and by promoting a weak form of tolerance.²⁴ Johannson and Kociatkiewicz remind us that the vibrancy and multivocality of festival spaces is carefully staged to ensure cities can compete successfully in the experience economy.²⁵ Even when encounters between different groups take place at festivals, these may not result in any meaningful changes in attitudes. These encounters cannot be separated from—or resolve—embedded discrimination and power imbalances.²⁶ One of the other key criticisms of festivals as ways to progress inclusion is their temporary status. Pinochet Cobos eloquently covers this in her analysis of festivities in Santiago, Chile: ‘the effervescence of the festival offers glimpses of a social encounter that cannot last’, adding that ‘these events, both memorable and ephemeral, are unable to erase a condition of exclusion and marginality’.²⁷

Multicultural festivals take varied forms, and the one analysed here has music at its heart so it is important to consider the inclusivity of music festivals, and the ways these events have been used to help achieve more inclusive societies. In the UK there is a long tradition of staging music festivals to challenge the status quo and to promote progressive causes.²⁸ As Griffin, Bengry-Howell, Riley, Morey, and Szmigin note, music festivals are linked to the ‘counter-cultural ideas of 1960s hippie culture and the free festival movement’.²⁹ This movement began in the 1970s, and involved staging festivals that combined music, art, and culture in a variety of locations including at Stonehenge and Windsor Great Park, but latterly in urban locations too. The most famous example is perhaps Rock Against Racism, an anti-racism ‘carnival’ that attracted over 80,000 people to London's Victoria Park in 1978. Gilroy explains the enduring impacts of this festival: ‘for almost three decades the lingering effects of Rock Against Racism made it absurd and uncool to be a racist in Britain’.³⁰ Other free festivals were also staged in London's parks during the 1970s and 1980s as part of campaigns for greater equality, employment, and peace. But the character and purpose of music festivals has undergone a significant shift over the past 30 years. The rise of the experience economy and a formal festival industry means the proliferation of expensive, ticketed festivals. These events exemplify the dilemmas and conflicts highlighted by Finkel and Platt: ‘contemporary festivals now often exhibit complex and uneasy tensions between the socio-economic strategies of commercialised neoliberal cities and the cultural needs of diverse communities’.³¹

Growing concerns over safety and security—and the reconstitution of music festivals as income-generating vehicles for local authorities and the music industry—have reduced the number of free, and fence free, festivals. Large music festivals in the UK now tend to be relatively exclusive events controlled by two or three global entertainment companies—particularly Live Nation, but also AEG Live and Superstruct. Frith, Brennan, Cloonan and Webster's history of British live music 1985–2015 is tellingly subtitled, From Live Aid to Live Nation,³² and Morey, Bengry-Howell, Griffin, Szmigin and Riley suggest that this company has been largely responsible for the corporatisation and monopolisation of the festival industry.³³ Corporatisation affects the capacity of festivals to act as vehicles for expressing, affirming, and trangressing identities: with consumption the primary basis for the construction of identities.³⁴ According to Griffin, Bengry-Howell, Riley, Morey and Szmigin, ‘major music festivals are now highly commercialised [and] bounded spaces in which the experience of freedom is commoditised’.³⁵ Their inclusivity credentials have also been undermined by programming issues. Line-ups tend to be very male dominated³⁶ and some artists have been accused of perpetuating prejudice by espousing homophobia or misogyny.³⁷ The sexual harassment or violence experienced by women and LGBTQIA+ people at music festivals challenges the idea that these are inclusive settings.³⁸

Festivals and Inclusive Public Parks

Festivals can assist social and cultural inclusion by changing the meanings and dynamics of the public spaces used to host them.³⁹ When they are staged in parks, streets, or squares festivals can enhance the publicness of host spaces by ensuring marginalised communities are represented, by encouraging different groups of people to use them, and by providing opportunities for those groups to interact. In this article, we are particularly interested in festivals staged in urban parks. These are complex spaces that perform multiple roles and cater for diverse audiences, and so parks are highly contested spaces.⁴⁰ As archetypal and pioneering public spaces, parks are often considered to represent democracy, citizenship, and communality. This is highlighted through the designation of many UK parks as ‘people’s parks’ and their roles as sites of assembly and protest. For example, several London parks including Hyde Park and Burgess Park hosted Black Lives Matters demonstrations in 2020. But parks are asked to serve various other functions, too. As urban green spaces, they generate various ecological benefits, and provide quiet(er) places where citizens can unwind and relax.⁴¹ As spaces of leisure, they function as ‘elective or choice spaces’ where people can linger without having to spend money.⁴² Today, there is also heightened interest in staging events and programming activities to attract a wider range of users. Festivals provide flexible ways of transforming parks, and making them more relevant to potential users, but outcomes are complicated by other motivations, particularly the growing need to generate commercial income.⁴³

To compensate for local authority budget cuts, hiring out parts of public parks to event organisers is an increasingly common way of funding public parks—particularly in London.⁴⁴ A wide range of parks now stage commercial music festivals: with the largest and most lucrative events staged in Brockwell Park, Finsbury Park, Gunnersbury Park, Hyde Park, and Victoria Park. These events can detract from the publicness of parks by introducing ‘symbolic, regulatory, financial, and physical barriers’⁴⁵ disrupting everyday use, and antagonising residents.⁴⁶ Fencing off park space is particularly controversial and can be detrimental not only for those left outside the fence, but also for those contained within. For instance, the organisers of an event staged in Clissold Park explained that they had discontinued their event because it was increasingly restricted: ‘we … cannot bring ourselves to organize a free community festival inside a great big steel box! It just doesn’t feel right’.⁴⁷ The impacts of fenced off festivals are exacerbated when multiple events are staged over the summer period when park spaces would, ordinarily, be heavily occupied by everyday users. By temporarily handing them over to private companies and limiting access to those willing and able to pay, music festivals can make supposedly public spaces more exclusive.

London's Finsbury Park is a pivotal case of the disputed privatisation and monetisation of public space because every year it hosts a series of commercial music festivals that now generate enough income to pay for annual maintenance of the park.⁴⁸ A group of volunteers that represent the interests of park users, The Friends of Finsbury Park, have campaigned against these events, and have challenged the local authority's right to hire the park to festival promoters. Wireless—the UK's largest urban music festival—is particularly contentious because of its size (50,000 attendees per day for three days), the length of time it occupies park space (two weeks to set up and one week to take down), and because of the noise, congestion, litter, damage, and antisocial behaviour it generates. Many local people resent the way they are excluded from large sections of Finsbury Park over an extended period during the summer months. However, like many other examples of programming, this festival has both inclusionary and exclusionary effects. As a festival that showcases grime music, and one enjoyed by teenagers, Wireless is an event that celebrates London’s black and youth cultures.

One criticism of the new focus on lucrative, ticketed music festivals is that more radical, free music festivals that are linked to progressive causes such as anti-racism and LGBTQIA+ rights are being squeezed out of parks; a problem that is particularly pertinent to Finsbury Park. An anti-racism festival, a carnival, and various events celebrating LGBTQIA+ communities used to be staged here, but the park is now occupied by expensive music events for much of the summer. There are some exceptions to this finance driven programming. In 2019, a free festival celebrating UK Latin American music and culture was staged in the park for the first time: La Clave Fest. This was a very apt and timely event because Finsbury Park is well used by Latin American Londoners, and because a local Latin American market was threatened by (re)development. The 2020 edition of La Clave Fest was cancelled because of the Coronavirus pandemic, but the festival returned in 2021, with a new name: Latino Life in the Park. For some, this gendered name may seem an awkward fit with inclusivity, but festival organisers are adamant that neutral alternatives (e.g. Latinx) do not reflect the language used by Latin American communities.

Latin American Communities in London

Mass migrations from Latin America to the UK date back half a century, but the UK Census does not include ‘Latin American’ as a distinct category in its list of ethnic groups.⁴⁹ As a result, the precise number of Latin Americans living in the UK is unknown. The most recent estimations feature in the Towards Visibility report, which states that in 2013 the UK was home to 250,000 Latin Americans, with more than half residing in London.⁵⁰ This means that Latin Americans are the capital's eighth largest non-UK born population, and the second fastest growing non-EU migrant group.⁵¹ As one of the largest ‘hidden’ communities in the UK, London's Latin American diasporas are shaped by transnational and trans-local contexts and a distinct series of migration histories. They represent a diverse range of communities with different origins, skills, and migration experiences. Despite their internal diversity, Latin Americans are considered to be a coherent ‘community’ based on shared cultural characteristics (including languages) and geographical roots, rather than because of their ethnic homogeneity.⁵²

In the 1970s, Latin Americans escaping from political oppression in Colombia, Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay arrived in the UK in large numbers. Over the next two decades, London continued to receive voluntary migration from various Latin American countries, as well as family reunion and asylum applications from Colombia and Ecuador.⁵³ By the 1990s, London hosted large Latin American clusters in Southwark and Lambeth and, later, in Haringey. The most prominent business clusters that emerged were markets located in Elephant and Castle and Seven Sisters. Both made a significant contribution to their surrounding urban milieu, generating job opportunities but also social and cultural capital for migrants. Their users and proprietors span different age groups and ethnicities, allowing these markets to accommodate a diversity that has generated significant social value.⁵⁴

In the twenty-first century, Latin American migration to London has increased, with new residents coming directly from Latin American countries and, following the 2008 financial crisis, through onward migration from the EU.⁵⁵ Shaped by this crisis, neoliberalism, and the UK's ‘hostile environment’ policies, this period represents a turning point in London's migration history.⁵⁶ In the early 2000s, profit-led regeneration projects proliferated, which had a significant impact on London's Latin American communities. Following a typically neoliberal trajectory, this ‘regeneration’ has involved the displacement of people from migrant spaces, while capitalising upon their culture.⁵⁷ Austerity driven cuts from local government budgets and government policies meant the ‘new’ migrants of the twenty-first century found it more difficult to access public resources. English-speaking skills are the primary challenge faced by Latin American in London,⁵⁸ but funding for English for Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL) tuition is no longer available.⁵⁹ There is consensus about the significance of diminishing local support and ESOL funding in exacerbating the racial inequalities faced by the members of the diaspora.⁶⁰ Hostile immigration policies reinforce barriers such as access to information, language education, affordable housing, legal status, and health services, and the combined effects of ‘super-diversity and super-austerity’ mean that Latin Londoners' lives are increasingly precarious.⁶¹

Although nearly 70% of Latin Americans in London are employed, financial precarity is prevalent: half are university graduates, yet the majority work in menial jobs and earn less than the London living wage.⁶² Access to jobs is mainly through word of mouth, but combined with the lack of employment alternatives, inner-diaspora solidarity can translate into a form of dependency. Limiting interactions with other groups reinforces language barriers and labour exploitations that trap Latin Americans in a vicious circle of precarity. This contributes to inner-group tensions between different groups and promotes what Patiño-Santos and Márquez Reiter call ‘banal interculturalism’—‘a form of knowledge’ that adopts the discriminations between Latin groups and reinforces the normality of othering.⁶³ Banal interculturalism polarises Latin American sub-groups, hindering collective action.

Internal conflicts—emanating from limited support and the scarcity of jobs (and their monopolisation by certain groups)—restrict Latin American Londoners' capacity to contest their precarity. Overcoming banal interculturalism can help to generate the visibility and political leverage required to break the vicious circle of precarity and exploitation experienced by Latin American Londoners. It is perhaps unrealistic to expect a common identity to emerge amongst such a diverse set of people, but there is evidence of solidarity as well as internal tensions. In response to cultural commodification and displacement, resistance has become pivotal to Latin American place-making in London. From the Elephant and Castle Shopping Mall in Southwark (demolished in 2021), to Haringey's Pueblito Paisa (London’s last remaining Latin market, saved from demolition in 2021) resistance to ‘regeneration’ projects renders inclusive forms of migrant city-making feasible.⁶⁴

The Latino Life in the Park festival took place less than two miles away from Pueblito Paisa (known locally as Latin Village) and the 2021 edition happened two weeks after the Latin Village was saved. During this campaign, the market accommodated events that advocated Latin rights to the city by celebrating self-defined aspects of Latin American culture. Demonstrating the social and cultural value of the space, these events brought different Latin American groups together, but they also united a wider spectrum of local communities, organisations, and small-scale traders. Together, in ‘salsa/samba shutdowns’, they occupied the area while cooking and sharing food, and dancing to music. Utilising the in situ practices of Latin Americans' own culture as a political tool against their exclusion from planning processes, the Save Latin Village campaign obtained a trans-local visibility that translated into support from a wider set of stakeholders, including the United Nations.⁶⁵ Following their victory, the 2021 Latino Life in the Park festival was set in a context in which, on the one hand, banal interculturalism hindered collective demands for political visibility amongst Latin Americans and yet, on the other, festive insurgencies—resistance nurtured through music, dancing and cultural events—proved to be a successful way for Latin urbanism to overcome internal tensions and to carve out Latin places in the city.

Staging festivals and events that celebrate Latin London corresponds with London's current cultural policies. Inclusive London, the Mayor of London’s social inclusion strategy, includes a commitment to providing events that are specially aimed to benefit Latin American communities: ‘We will also explore events that reach newer groups or those we do not yet work with, for example Latin American communities’.⁶⁶ In the analysis that follows, we analyse one such event: the 2021 edition of Latino Life in the Park. This festival is organised by Latino Life, a company that produces media and events for UK audiences interested in Latin music and culture. Latino Life in the Park was established to help showcase talent unearthed through Latino Life's annual Latin UK Awards. The organisers are keen to emphasise the quality, diversity, and authenticity of their festival and pledge to avoid clichéd, diluted or decontextualised forms of Latin culture.

Research Methods

Research for this study was primarily conducted during the Latino Life in the Park festival (21 August 2021) using a combination of qualitative methods. The two authors were present in the park for eight hours on the day of the festival, making fieldnotes, taking photographs, and talking informally with festival attendees and participants. We interviewed eighteen different groups of people, each involving two to five people, and observed many others. Filming and filmmaking were also used to document the festival. Three additional people were employed to capture film footage of the festival and to interview some of the approximately 30,000 people who attended. Using multiple cameras allowed the researchers to understand what was going on at different times in different parts of the festival site. We deliberately recruited a lead filmmaker who was familiar with Finsbury Park and the communities that use it. Film footage was supplemented by filmed interviews in the days following the festival with festival organisers (×2) and other stakeholders, including a journalist covering the event, and other event professionals. The aim was to produce a short documentary film about the festival that would not only provide a research output, but also a research tool to help understand the festival better. Following Reyskens and Vandenabeele, we used filming to analyse ‘material and sensory practices’, and to record the ‘qualitative unfolding of movements, flows, rhythms, and gestures’,⁶⁷ but we also wanted to create a film that would communicate research findings to wider audiences.⁶⁸ This film provides a visual accompaniment to this article and can be viewed online (Figure 1).

FIGURE 1 Festivity and inclusivity: Latino Life in the Park. This documentary was produced by the authors in conjunction with Tamanna Jahan, a local filmmaker. View the documentary on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Bsrkhq_VVs.

Our research was also supported by a series of wider research exercises. The decision to focus on Latino Life in the Park was based on observations undertaken at the 2019 edition of the festival (then known as La Clave Fest), and an extended interview with the lead organiser during one of the Coronavirus lockdowns in 2020 when the festival was cancelled. The research also forms part of a wider research project. Since 2019, the researchers have been studying Finsbury Park and the socio-spatial impacts of the events hosted there. Between December 2020 and December 2021, the researchers conducted forty site visits to observe park use. These supplementary activities established the context and justification for the case study, but also helped us to understand how an annual festival corresponds with the everyday life of Finsbury Park.

In the following sections, we discuss some key findings from our observations and interviews at the festival. We tease out the ways Latino Life in the Park can be understood as an inclusive festival, but also one that affects the wider inclusivity of Finsbury Park.

A Free and Fence Free Festival

The most significant characteristic of Latino Life in the Park that contributes to its inclusivity is the fact it is free. Other music festivals staged in Finsbury Park can also be linked to inclusivity in that they celebrate Black British Music (for example, Wireless) or LGBTQIA+ communities (for example, Sink the Pink). But the inclusivity credentials of these festivals are undermined by the high prices and limited availability of tickets. Latino Life in the Park is one of a limited number of large-scale music events in the UK that remain free to enter. The organisers maintain free entry by keeping costs low, by generating income through sponsorship and concessions, and by applying for grants, for example, from the Arts Council. The Mayor of London currently provides £15,000 per year, as the festival ‘celebrates the on-going contribution of Latin American, Spanish and Portuguese (Latin) culture to London life’.⁶⁹ The local authority, Haringey, do not provide funding, but they do allow organisers to use Finsbury Park without having to pay commercial hire fees. Even though the festival is free, organisers are committed to paying performers and stewards, which is important given the precarity faced by London-based artists and musicians.⁷⁰

Free entry ensures that people from a wider range of socio-economic groups are able to come, something that is particularly important in places like Finsbury Park where there is very high income inequality in surrounding neighbourhoods. Free entry also encourages incidental engagement from wider audiences (such as those with families and elderly people), as attending for short periods becomes a realistic option. However, the lack of income from ticketing represents a significant challenge for festival organisers: it makes them reliant on more precarious income streams (such as bar revenue and grants), and challenges the long-term viability of the festival. Free entry has some other disadvantages too: it exacerbates the negative impact of poor weather, as many attendees, and also some vendors, do not turn up when it rains.

Latino Life in the Park is remarkable not only because it is free, but also because it is fence free. The lack of festival fences was refreshing; it blurred the distinction between the festival and the park, and people appreciated the openness of the site (see Table 1). The absence of fencing and invasive security created an inviting space, something that our interviewees felt contributed to the inclusivity and appeal of the festival.

TABLE 1 COMMENTS FROM INTERVIEWEES ABOUT THE OPENNESS OF THE PARK DURING THE FESTIVAL

This event is very unique. It's very unusual that it’s all open. You don’t have any barriers so the division between the park users and attendees blurs. It’s very accessible.

We live in different parts of London and it's our first time in Finsbury Park. We really enjoy it because it is very open and easy to find.

The park is very open. The event is very well organised, easy to navigate within. Since it is so open and free, the park makes the event very inclusive.

It’s a really good park to host it. It’s open and central.

Finsbury Park is great for these kind of open events.

Thanks to this abundance of options and the openness of the space, the event can make everyone this happy. It’s family oriented and very welcoming.

The openness of the festival was appreciated even by groups that have campaigned against major festivals. A representative from the Friends of Finsbury Park, which opposes staging large scale events here, told us that they liked the Latin festival because it was ‘free, fun, family oriented and didn’t take long to set up and take down’. Portable stages and no perimeter fencing meant that temporary festival structures could be more efficiently assembled and removed from the park. For fenced, commercial music festivals of a similar size, a venue takes up to two weeks to assemble, and a week to dismantle. This generates opposition from local people who feel that rendering large parts of Finsbury Park ‘off limits’ is incompatible with the park's status and history as a people's park. In the case of Latino Life in the Park, mobile stages were erected the day before the festival and removed the day after. This ensured the festival only had a limited effect on other activities that normally take place in Finsbury Park, something that we noted during our observations. The festival was staged on a Saturday within the school summer holidays—when the park is normally at its busiest—so minimising disruption was important. The popular parkrun event (a free timed run staged every week involving several hundred participants) was able to go ahead as normal, even though it was scheduled on the same day as the festival. On the following day the main festival site was occupied by people playing football, highlighting that these spaces had already reverted to their everyday function. Many of the players were wearing Latin American football shirts, which suggested that Latin life in the park was continuing, even if Latino Life in the Park had ended.

Behaviours and Encounters: What People Do at the Festival

It is important to examine what people actually do during festivals, in particular how people interact with and encounter others.⁷¹ There is strong evidence that interactions between people from different groups lead to increased awareness of difference and more tolerance of others, reducing prejudiced attitudes.⁷² At Latino Life in the Park, we witnessed multiple social interactions, not only within groups but also between them. There was consensus that interacting was part of Latin culture. For example, one interviewee told us ‘we are Latin, of course we will interact with other people’, a view shared by another interviewee: ‘we are Latinos, we mingle with everyone’. There was a sense that Latin communities were more open to talking to other people—‘We’re not scared of it like the Brits'—including encounters with strangers: ‘We interacted with other people, look: we’re dancing with this lady we just met!’ These interactions were particularly welcome given the restrictions imposed during the Coronavirus pandemic. One interviewee, who moved on his own from the Middle East to the UK two years ago, told us: ‘I spent a very lonely year because of COVID. Now I take every chance to meet other people and attend events’. We were surprised how many people attended the festival alone, and the capacity to interact with others may have been one of the explanations for this.

Several factors helped to nurture interactivity at Latino Life in the Park. A wide range of activities and installations were on offer—musical performances on three stages, but also a youth football tournament, street food, and various other stalls. This was a festival that encouraged people to participate, interact, and socialise, meaning that people moved within the festival site and encountered lots of different people. The design of the festival and the way it was integrated into the park setting also prompted social interactions. This was a key finding generated by our observations at the festival. Providing temporary seating areas and large open spaces between stages encouraged people to socialise rather than simply listen to music. This reflects wider research highlighting the importance of fringe areas in festival settings.⁷³ The strong association between Latin American music and dancing also encouraged participation and interactivity: people had come to dance, rather than simply to watch or listen to performances (Figure 2). One person asked if it was okay if she did the interview while dancing, adding ‘sorry, but I have to dance!’

FIGURE 2 Social interactions and participation at Latino Life in the Park: Photo credit: Andrew Smith.

Our observations also revealed that Latino Life in the Park encouraged interactions and exchanges between people because of the flexible way it was programmed. The relative lack of control over the venue meant that people could co-produce the festival by staging their own mini events and performances. For example, we saw people erect their own gazebos or tents and play their own music via their own sound systems. Some festival goers staged their own dance performances and other groups within the festival site were not only eating their own food, but also preparing it. This created additional sociabilities that would not have occurred at more formal festivals. These ‘events’ blurred the distinction between participants and attendees, and encouraged social gatherings within the wider festival. The boundaries between the festival and the park were also blurred, creating a festive park rather than merely a self-contained festival site. Loose programming meant people still felt like they were in a park, and this allowed them to do what they might normally do here, albeit in a more intense and sociable way. This corresponds with the notion that festivals involve an intensification of, rather than an escape from, everyday life.⁷⁴

Although our observations and conversations suggested the festival was generally an inclusive and welcoming place, there was still some evidence of conflict and division. We encountered a park user on the fringes of the festival audibly complaining about ‘all this foreign music’, which suggests that not everyone was in the mood to celebrate Latin American London. After 7pm Latino Life in the Park became a little edgier, and a little less family friendly, especially near the contemporary music stage. Heavy drinking, drug taking, and some fighting meant this part of the site felt more like some of the commercial, contested, music festivals staged in Finsbury Park.

Visibility and Diversity: Who Is This Festival For?

The festival's inclusivity was also exhibited in the range of people who were present. Lots of people from London's Latin American communities were there, with a striking range of nationalities on display. Brazilians and Colombians dominate London's Latin communities, but other nationalities were represented: particularly Mexicans, Peruvians, Venezuelans, Panamanians, and Costa Ricans. These nations were visibly and materially represented not only on flags, football shirts, and symbols on other types of clothing, but also on signs advertising various foods. As one interviewee told us: ‘The event is very versatile, it also represents the different colours and generations of the Latin cultures’. Visible expressions of national identities could be interpreted as evidence of the banal interculturalism that tends to divide, rather than unite, Latin American diaspora. But the convivial atmosphere, the mixing between different groups, and people's pride in their Latin roots, suggested this event generated solidarity rather than division. In our interviews, few people mentioned specific nationalities, but expressions of a shared Latin identity were common, best summed up by one person we spoke to: ‘I’m here because I am Latino'.

As discussed above, London's Latin American communities face considerable challenges, and are less visible than other minorities. Finsbury Park was a particularly relevant venue for Latino Life in the Park because this park is used regularly by Latin American communities. Every weekend, Latin Londoners gather in the areas dedicated to baseball and volleyball. They celebrate religious holidays, cook and share Latin American meals, and come together in free salsa lessons in some of the park's under-used spaces. Using these sites for activities other than their given functions can be understood as ‘tactical’ ways of practicing everyday life in the park.⁷⁵ Using de Certeau's terminology, these are isolated, but imbricated actions, which address the needs of Latin American communities not met by the intended organisation of space.⁷⁶ Latino Life in the Park supports Latin life in the park by bringing activities and participants out of the margins allowing them to be more formally and more visibly acknowledged. In this sense, Latino Life in the Park celebrates the everyday life and regular users of the park, rather than representing an exceptional transformation that disrupts Finsbury Park’s identity. This links to work by Bakhtin, Lefebvre, and others who suggest that festive spaces are inherently linked to, rather than separate from, their everyday status.⁷⁷ Rather than de- and re-territorialising park spaces, Latino Life in the Park accentuates, intensifies, and publicises park activities, whilst providing additional opportunities for social interactions.

The public setting for the festival meant that Latin communities—and some of the issues they face—were made more visible. For example, the festival included an exhibition of posters highlighting the issue of knife crime, which was organised by the Ibero American Association and the Metropolitan Police. Cultural festivals can commodify minority groups, reducing them to mere spectacles and diluting cultures to a form acceptable to the majority. We observed Mariachi bands, Peruvian country dancers in traditional dress and women wearing extravagant carnival costumes, plus stalls selling sombreros, which suggests that this criticism could be levelled at the Latino Life in the Park festival. However, these elements made up a very small part of an event that included contemporary British-Latin American music and very non-stereotypical and complex representations of Latin culture. Many of the more traditional or stereotypical aspects were not actually part of the formal programme: they were performers and vendors who came along on the day, in line with the spirit of co-production discussed above. It would be unfair to criticise these participants for representing something that the ‘white eye’ has commodified.⁷⁸

The festival also attracted lots of people who had no links with Latin American communities but who were attracted by posters or the videos they had seen on social media or who had serendipitously stumbled across the festival while in the park. Reflecting London's diversity, many of these were from other migrant groups (including people from Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and South Asia), as well as a diverse range of British people. One interviewee told us that the festival ‘represents all of us, we’re the Kurds, Turks, Latinos in Haringey and this is our community’. Another highlighted the international composition of the people attending: ‘Look, they are Polish, we are from India, that guy is Turkish and we have other people to meet near the main stage’. The football and food elements seemed to be particularly effective ways of attracting those without Latin heritage. Latino Life in the Park fostered multi-culture, but also inter-culturalism, by facilitating dialogue between cultures and a sense of solidarity between the Global Majority.

There was also considerable diversity in terms of the age of festival goers: young and middle-aged people made up the bulk of the audience, but lots of elderly citizens also attended. Some people brought their own chairs to ensure older people could enjoy the festival comfortably. The festival was deemed by our interviewees to be ‘family oriented and very welcoming’, which added to its inclusivity. One group told us: ‘other events are more party oriented. This is family inclusive’. Pre-festival outreach work in the local community (such as putting on music workshops in schools) also helped to encourage a wide range of children and families to come to the festival. The range of ages and ethnicities represented was important as it facilitated the types of encounters and interactions with people from different groups that tend to be missing from many public spaces. One additional benefit for the host park was that the festival attracted people from a range of locations inside and outside London—many of whom had not visited Finsbury Park before. Their experiences may help to counter some of the negative representations of the park and its surrounding neighbourhoods. One interviewee told us ‘It’s my first time in Finsbury Park, it’s surprisingly good’. We also spoke to some (mainly young) people who admitted they do not usually come to the park, but had because of the festival. Positive experiences of Finsbury Park mean people are more likely to return.

Conclusions

The case study analysed here advances understanding of the role that festivals can play in the quest for more inclusive public spaces. Over the past thirty years, London's parks have become popular settings for fenced music festivals, but Latino Life in the Park illustrates how festivals and parks can be integrated in a more coherent and progressive way. This case highlights the value of creating a festive park—not merely a festival in a park—an environment that fosters social exchanges and inter-group encounters. In the case analysed here, the distinctions between the park and the festival were blurred, encouraging interactions between different cultures. This can only happen when financial and physical barriers to public participation are minimised; in other words, when festivals are free and fence free. The relative lack of security and control also facilitated co-production, as attendees could shape the event and curate their own festivities. This made the event more inclusive, but it also encouraged interactions and exchanges between festival goers. Inter-group encounters have a positive effect on knowledge about, and attitudes towards, difference and these perhaps represent the most significant impact of the festival.⁷⁹ There were other effects, too. Peoples' positive experiences at the festival—and the foregrounding of the park during the event—enhanced perceptions of the venue, which may prompt them to visit again in the future. The efficient assembly and disassembly of stages—and the lack of fences—meant that the festival didn't interrupt everyday use to the same extent as commercial music festivals. Put simply, rather than closing it down for an exclusive event, the festival opened the park up to wider audiences.

An obvious recommendation to make is that London' parks should stage more free, and fence free, festivals that celebrate the city's diversity. But the difficulties sustaining free festivals (for organisers), and the incentives to hire out spaces for more lucrative events (for park authorities), suggest this is unlikely. A more realistic option is to ensure that existing free festivals are better protected: from funding cuts, from pressures to impose fences and entry fees, and from being squeezed out by more lucrative events. The Mayor of London's recent promise to help develop new events for the city’s Latin American population provides grounds for optimism and it is important that these are planned and organised by Latin communities themselves.⁸⁰ The way a festival is produced and programmed seems like an essential way to maximise inclusivity. Other free music festivals staged in London such as the Walthamstow Garden Party have pioneered ways of delegating festival programming to community groups by inviting participation through open calls and through ongoing outreach work that is supported by a festival, not pursued to support a festival.

One potential benefit of staging festivals in parks is that they can make urban green spaces more welcoming for marginalised groups. But this does not adequately reflect the findings of our research: Finsbury Park was already somewhere that many Latin American Londoners communities felt comfortable. So, unlike some festivals, which deliberately aim to disrupt established identities, the key effect associated with Latino Life in the Park was to highlight the existing diversity within Finsbury Park. The festival is best understood as a celebration of the park's inclusivity, rather than as a temporary vehicle or a policy initiative for realising more inclusive space. The Latino Life in the Park festival represents an intensification⁸¹ and visibilisation⁸² of the ways the park normally functions, reaffirming Citroni and Karrholm's perspective on park events, which they see as ‘procedures of visibilisation’ that foreground everyday experiences by bringing them to a larger audience. This is particularly important for London's Latin American communities given their noted invisibility.⁸³ By comparing the park during the Latino Life festival and at other times, we have been able to show that the festival is not necessarily an agent of disruption, or de-territorialisation that subverts spatial practices. Instead, we have shown that the festival reinforces the park's status as an inclusive space; and instigates greater awareness of, and engagement with, diversity. Celebrating existing diversity seems like a more sustainable way of supporting inclusivity goals than using festivals to temporarily disrupt established practices.

Our work responds to Citroni and Karrholm’s calls for more work on the interactions between urban events and everyday life, and for further research on how events engage with the public dimensions of the spaces in which they occur. Festivals such as Latino Life in the Park help to produce urban public spaces by ensuring that a wide variety of people visit, by supporting a wide range of activities, and by nurturing the social interactions that epitomise publicness. However, despite the positive contributions outlined above, it remains unclear how much the festival really assists London's Latin American migrant communities. As with other festivals, the belonging and inclusivity experienced during a festival does not necessarily last, and the reality of exclusion and marginality soon re-emerges for many Latin Londoners. The Latino Life in the Park festival certainly provides an opportunity to celebrate Latin identities and cultures, and many festival goers mentioned the pride that they felt when attending. One question that emerges from our research is: do these effects assist Latin American Londoners in their daily lives? Answering this question requires further research, including more detailed interviews with a wider range of Latin Londoners. Subsequent studies might usefully draw on recent work that suggests festivals can nurture long-term effects by creating more permanent cultural networks and clusters.⁸⁴ Our study provided some evidence that festivals help migrants feel more at home. For example, several interviewees explained how important the festival was in helping them to settle when they first came to live in London. The fact that Latino Life in the Park is part of a series of Latin music events also helps to ensure its effects are not limited to one day a year. The festival creates solidarity between Latin communities, and our research suggests that this may help them to deal with various challenges, including the threats posed by gentrification. The successful campaign to save the nearby Latin Village from development involved salsa/samba shutdowns, highlighting the significance of festivity in nurturing solidarity, resilience, and resistance amongst London's migrant communities.

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Dr Goran Vodicka, who was employed as a Research Fellow on the FESTSPACE project 2019–2020, and Tamanna Jahan, who directed and edited the ‘Festivity and Inclusivity’ film.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This research was produced as part of the FESTSPACE project (2019–2022), which was funded by a grant (no. 769478) awarded through the Humanities in the European Research Area (HERA) Joint Research Programme dedicated to Public Spaces: Culture and Integration in Europe.

Notes on contributors

Andrew Smith

Andrew Smith is Professor of Urban Experiences in the School of Architecture and Cities at the University of Westminster. He leads the University's interdisciplinary Research Community dedicated to Sustainable Cities and the Urban Environment. His research addresses city events and urban tourism and he has a strong interest in urban regeneration and public spaces, particularly public parks. From 2019 to 2022 he was a PI on the HERA-funded FESTSPACE project, which examined how festivals and events affect the inclusiveness of public spaces.

Didem Ertem

Didem Ertem is a PhD Student in the School of Architecture and Cities at the University of Westminster. She received a bachelor's degree in architecture from Istanbul Technical University and a Master's degree in City Design and Social Science from the London School of Economics and Political Science. Her current studies focus on inter-ethnic informal events and convivial practices in Finsbury Park. She is interested in anti-racism studies, migration and citizenship, and public space.

Notes

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2 Panikos Panayi, Migrant City: A New History of London (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2020).

3 Judy Ling Wong, ‘London: A National Park City, United Kingdom’, in Why Cities Need Large Parks: Large Parks in Large Cities, ed. Richard Murray (London: Routledge, 2021), 292–301.

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7 Bernadette Quinn, Alba Colombo, Kristina Lindström, David McGillivray, and Andrew Smith, ‘Festivals, Public Space and Cultural Inclusion: Public Policy Insights’, Journal of Sustainable Tourism, 29.11–12 (2021), 1875–1893.

8 Najmeh Hassanli, Trudie Walters, and Janine Williamson, ‘You Feel You’re Not Alone: How Multicultural Festivals Foster Social Sustainability Through Multiple Psychological Sense of Community’, Journal of Sustainable Tourism, 29.11–12 (2021), 1792–1809.

9 Mayor of London, Inclusive London: The Mayor’s Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion Strategy (London: Greater London Authority, 2018).

10 Quinn, Colombo, Lindström, McGillivray, and Smith, ‘Festivals, Public Space and Cultural Inclusion’.

11 Ruth Fincher, Kurt Iveson, Helga Leitner, and Valerie Preston, ‘Planning in the Multicultural City: Celebrating Diversity or Reinforcing Difference?’, Progress in Planning, 92 (2014), 1–55; Hassanli, Walters, and Williamson, ‘How Multicultural Festivals Foster Social Sustainability’.

12 Penny-Panagiota Koutrolikou, ‘Spatialities of Ethnocultural Relations in Multicultural East London: Discourses of Interaction and Social Mix’, Urban Studies, 49.10 (2012), 2060.

13 Pettigrew and Tropp, ‘Intergroup Contact Theory’.

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19 For example, Jan Morris reminds us to ‘beware of big festivals … they seem to be riddled with obscure political squabbles’. Jan Morris, Allegorizings (London: Faber & Faber, 2021), 153.

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34 Morey, Bengry-Howell, Griffin, Szmigin, and Riley, ‘Festivals 2.0’.

35 Griffin, Bengry-Howell, Riley, Morey, and Szmigin, ‘Discourses of Freedom’, 480.

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45 Smith, Vodicka, Colombo, Lindstrom, McGillivray, and Quinn, ‘Staging City Events’, 228.

46 Smith, ‘Events in the City’.

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55 Two-thirds of London’s Latin American residents have arrived since 2000. Mcilwaine and Bunge, ‘Towards Visibility’.

56 Patiño-Santos and Márquez Reiter, ‘Banal Interculturalism’.

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59 Patiño-Santos and Márquez Reiter, ‘Banal Interculturalism’.

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63 Patiño-Santos and Márquez Reiter, ‘Banal Interculturalism’, 228.

64 Roman-Velazquez and Retis, ‘Narratives of Migration’, 170–188.

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71 Fincher, Iveson, Leitner, and Preston, ‘Planning in the Multicultural City’.

72 Pettigrew and Tropp, ‘Intergroup Contact Theory’.

73 Hassanli, Walters, and Williamson, ‘How Multicultural Festivals Foster Social Sustainability’.

74 Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991).

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76 De Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 37–38.

77 Michail Bakhtin, Rabelais and his World (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984); Lefebvre, The Production of Space.

78 Hall, ‘The Whites of their Eyes’.

79 Pettigrew and Tropp, ‘Intergroup Contact Theory’.

80 Mayor of London, Inclusive London, 154.

81 Lefebvre, The Production of Space.

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83 Mcilwaine and Bunge, ‘Towards Visibility’.

84 Booth, ‘Negotiating Diasporic Culture’.