INSTANT CITY - PERFORMATIVE ARCHITECTURE AND CITY LIFE

Abstract

This article analyses Roskilde Festival as an Instant City. For more than
40 years, Roskilde Festival has had many thousands participants for a
weeklong festival on music, performances and cultural experiences in a
layout designed as an urban environment. During the last ten years, increasing
emphasis has been laid on creating a vivid, and engaging social
environment in order to create a lab for social, and architectural experiments.
These goals challenge the city planning as well as the urban scenography.
The article addresses the research questions: What kind of city
life and social experiments are taking place in the instant city, and how
can it be characterized? It also emphasizes the relation between city
life, urban design, and the aesthetics of architecture and urban spaces.
The question here is, in what way architecture and urban scenography
are used as tools to support the goal of an experimental and social engaged
city environment? The analysis shows that the specific city life at
the instant city, Roskilde Festival, can be characterized by being open
minded, playful and inclusive, but also by a culture of laughter that
penetrates the aesthetics and the urban scenography.