Experiencing Events: Animatingcity spaces through Fan Zones

Dr David McGillivray & Stewart Arthur

Workshop coverage Fan Parks and Fan

Zones: Historical context

Locating pseudo events

Methodological preoccupations

Germany 2006 – Key ‘themes’

Glasgow 2007 – Key ‘themes’

Revitalising public space

Power space Consuming space Conclusions References

Fan Spaces: Historical context 2004 European

Championships in Portugal first ‘pilot’ of Fan Park concept/Fan Embassies

2006 FIFA World Cup attracted 13 million visitors across 10 Fan Parks from Berlin to Munich

2008 UEFA European Championships in Austria/Switzerland hosted Fan Parks in each city

UEFA’s signature European soccer tournaments also on board

Inception of Champions League fan zones in Glasgow 2002

UEFA Cup Final (2007), Glasgow, Scotland – ‘fan zones’ hosted in city centres

Now a central institutionalised contractual obligation with hosting sporting ‘mega events’ and ‘hallmark events’ (HCA)

However, they contain a local, national and international ‘politics’ – my focus

Locating Pseudo-Events (Boorstin, 1961) Fabricated or manufactured events containing the

following characteristics: They’re not spontaneous but planned They are planned so as to be reported or disseminated

easily (media-friendly) They are governed by spectacle - the focus of the lens is

on securing the ‘dramatic’ moments: The cameras were specifically selecting “action shots”, which

showed a noisy, waving audience (Boorstin, 1961: 260) They cost money to create – and the ‘creators’ have an

interest in their successful promotion and delivery Fan Parks/Zones are ‘pseudo events’ created to

serve specific function for organisers

Methodological pre-occupations• Two ‘cases’:– Germany 2006 World

Cup ‘Fan Parks’– Glasgow 2007 UEFA

Cup Final ‘Fan Zones’

• Participant observation:– Presence at Germany

2006 & Glasgow 2007– Visual recording of ‘Fan

Parks’ & ‘Fan Zones’

• Documentary ‘discourse’ analysis (Jupp, 1993): – Media sources – official

and unofficial• Newspapers, TV

coverage, press releases

• Interviews:– Germany 2006, ‘vox

pox’ interviews– Glasgow 2007,

stakeholder interviews

‘Fan Parks’: Contained consumption

Germany 2006: Key ‘themes’ Fan Parks at each host city Deliberate and intentional strategy to ‘welcome’ the world to

Germany Overcoming national stereotypes “Symbolise their acceptance in the international community” (Allison &

Monnington, 2002: 107) Typically held outside of city centre business districts – in

municipal spaces (e.g. Olympic Park, Munich) Designed to manage ticketless ‘fans’ and create global

ancillary ‘pseudo-event’ (Boorstin, 1961) spectacles alongside ‘real’ event

Spaces designed to encourage ‘performance’ and facilitate consumption – a performance guided by corporate sponsors and communicated virally to the watching world

Extremely successful – the template for subsequent sporting events (e.g. 2008 European Championships, Beijing Olympics)

Glasgow 2007 UEFA Cup Final: Creating Carnival

Glasgow 2007 UEFA Cup Final : Scotland with Style

Glasgow 2007 UEFA Cup Final: Key ‘themes’

• City Marketing Bureau (DMO) in lead role to exploit fan parks to reinforce brand identity – Glasgow: Scotland with Style

• Cosying up to valuable sporting brands (UEFA) to lever own brand aspirations:

Clearly an event like UEFA, with its high brand values, with its global TV audience and the high profile economic impact…that’s pretty high up on the agendawhen they unveiled the actual brand identity, we were delighted…so not only did he get it in Macintosh colours, he got it in Macintosh font and Macintosh design

• Locating ‘Fan Zones’ in city centre civic space (George Square) to exploit business potential and animate the city streets:• Colour, vibrancy, edgy – and valuable destination imagery guaranteed

• Citizens (or consumers?) invited to participate – but only as props on a stage designed for incoming mobile capital

Glasgow 2007 UEFA Cup Final : Key ‘themes’• Fan Zones managed spaces with control and consumption as

defining metaphors:We’re agreed on let’s entertain the fans but it’s a control mechanism. And that’s vital for the safe operational delivery of the event

• Event owners (e.g. UEFA) policy priorities to include fan events as ancillary events become important supplementary brand vehicle:

In 2003 and in subsequent contracts with host cities, the establishment and delivery of fan zones was part of the agreement. So you had to make sure that fans were bussed in from the airport, bussed to the ground, decorate the City with the UEFA branding, allow the partners/sponsors the platform and finally, you must deliver these fan zones

• Prime city (public) spaces given over to UEFA and its sponsor family as a ‘condition’ of winning main event:

we’ve just got to facilitate what UEFA want. That’s it – we’re contracted to do it…we have to make sure that any anti-ambush marketing plans are put in place… to ensure that their brand is protected George Square is our number one prime civic space and UEFA would expect to do something in a city’s number one, prime city space

Glasgow 2007 UEFA Cup Final : Key ‘themes’ But, securing city benefits within the strictures of Host Contract

Agreements is possible: we put together a brochure which I know you’ve got with photographs and a DVD. If you look at that you’ll see how many times we got Glasgow: Scotland with Style logo in there on the images and the photographs

We got Glasgow: Scotland with style in 8-foot high letters that wasn’t going to get anywhere near the UEFA brand. So it’s those sort of ‘covert’ approaches that are necessary.

We’re not going to put people in areas of the city that don’t have facilities. The whole idea is that they come here and they eat, they shop, they drink, they use the taxis, they use the hotels and all of a sudden the city gets £20 million economic impact.

You get very good images, you get very good quotes…That is just a marketing dream and what happened between 2002 and 2007 in that five year period is that the percentage of German and Spanish tourists’ post-2002 greatly increased. I think you’re in the region of 30-40%. And we worked hard behind the scenes with the airlines, with the route development fund, the city council and the airports (BAA) to then encourage operators from these countries to fly in which helps again

Analysis 1: Re-vitalising public space? Fan Zones/Fan Parks as a revitalisation of ‘public space’

Placement of ‘festivals of fun’ in central civic spaces (parks, city centres, squares)

Attracting families, visitors, locals to share spontaneous space – generating ‘communitas’ and enhancing ‘celebrations of sociality’ (Chalip, 2006)

‘Public’ display of identity – whether local, national or globalised – bonding, linking and empowering social capital

BUT they attract specific sorts of performer, as the event space created correlates with a pre-defined subject position that enacts ‘self-observation and self-regulation’ (Rose, 1999: 45) – embodied behavioural codes This is a commodified space – branded and enclosed for only some

‘publics’ in an openness that conceals exclusivity Investment follows these pseudo events in place of less spectacular

‘local’, ‘rooted’ and, some might argue, meaningful rituals

Analysis 2: Power-space (Koskela, 2000)• Disciplinary techniques now found in ‘fields of play’

(Danaher et al, 2000)• Fan Parks/Fan Zones manufacture and accentuate drama

and spectacle BUT within a predominantly ‘disciplined set of spatial practices’ (Frew & McGillivray, 2008: 181):– Which correspond to contemporary restructuring of urban

public space – from sites of production to consumption• Audience is objectified, normalised and spatially located,

‘policing consumption’ (Koskela, 2000: 245)• This reflects the idea of ‘perceptual space’ (Lefebvre, 1991)

– spaces which naturalise visibility, gating, branding… • Control and containment the dominant discourse – is this a

feature of the specifics of travelling sports fans?

Analysis 3: Consumption space Fan Parks/Fan Zones an example of consumption-biased

spaces (Lowes, 2002) The civic (public) colonised by consumption logic and the

privatisation of space: e.g. Carlsberg’s investment in ‘branded spaces’/Glasgow’s blanket

control of advertising space Platform for corporate partners to dictate policy Cities’ promotional discourse reinforces shift from citizen to

consumer as the focal point of policy – Fan Zones are symbolic spaces which are saleable

YET, these public spaces hosted by local authorities accountable to citizens - who ‘owns’ these spaces? Who has the right to control and experience them and when?

Conclusions• These ‘pseudo events’ now a

matter of policy – reflecting a deepening interest in the production of contained, rationalised and safe spaces of consumption

• They serve a place marketing and city branding function which dictates that they become ‘managed spaces’

• But, as ‘civic’ spaces become ‘branded’ spaces (for consumers), so specific disciplinary practices are enacted to secure urban entrepreneurial outcomes

• Citizens are (unless staging) passive spectators as they consent to civic spaces being gated for the purposes of hosting events

• Rather than being ‘lived spaces’ for the city’s residents they become privatised spaces with place marketing value

• The performances staged thereafter are distilled, edited, imprinted and ‘packaged’ and circulated to further reinforce the aspirational branded identity pursued by the city’s place marketing agencies

The question for public policy makers is whose spaces are these, for who are they secured (by cameras, barriers, police, stewards) and who is excluded or marginalised in the process?

References Cloke, P & Perkins, H.C. (2002) Commodification and Adventure in New

Zealand. Current Issues in Tourism, 5 (6), 521-549 Frew, M & McGillivray, D (2008) Exploring Hyper-Experiences:

Performing the Fan at Germany 2006, Journal of Sport & Tourism, 13 (3), 181-198

Graham, S & Wood, D (2003) Digitizing surveillance: categorization, space and inequality, Critical social policy, 23 (2) :227-248

Jupp, V and C. Norris (1993) Traditions in Documentary Analysis. Social Research: Philosophy, Politics and Practice. M. Hammersley. London, Sage

Koskela, H (2000) ‘The Gaze without Eyes’: Video Surveillance and the changing nature of urban public space, Progress in Human Geography, 24 (2), 243-265

Marcuse, P (1997) Walls of fear and walls of support. In Ellin, N (ed), The architecture of fear, New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 101–14.

References Mellor, R (1997) Cool Times for a changing city. In: Jewson, N & MacGregor,

S (eds) Transforming Cities: Contested Governance and New Spatial Divisions, London, Routledge.

Mooney, G & Danson, M (1997) Beyond ‘Culture City’: Glasgow as a ‘Dual City’. In: Jewson, N & MacGregor, S (eds) Transforming Cities: Contested Governance and New Spatial Divisions, London, Routledge.

Philo, C & Kearns, G (1993) Culture, History, Capital: A Critical Introduction to the Selling of Places. In Kearns, G (ed) Selling places: The city as cultural capital, past and present, Pergamon Press

Stevenson, D (2003) Cities and Urban Cultures, Open University Press, Maidenhead

Websites http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/scotland/glasgow_and_west/6658581.stm

(accessed 25/11/08) http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/scotland/glasgow_and_west/6664731.stm

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