Crisis City:

FESTIVAL ARCHITECTURE
on the crisis of globalizing identities

Gabriella Morrone
ARC505 Thesis Preparation

Primary Advisor:
Brian Lonsway
Secondary Advisor:
Jonathan Massey

Crisis City Primary Faculty:

Julia Czerniak
Anda French
Brian Lonsway
Brendan Moran
Francisco Sanin
Festival Architecture

Working in the Crisis City Collaborative I will participate in a multi-disciplinary mode of research, critique,
and design by exploring a specific crisis existing in urban environments.

“The evolution of individual cities into a city system, which (Jeb Brugmann) just (calls) the City, has
radically changed the relationship between local and global affairs. Through the City, local conditions
and events, even at the margins of a provincial town, are amplified into global events and acceler
ated into global trends...”1

Globalization fosters growth but in turn leaves a wider margin for sameness. This creation of a singular sys-
tem through which goods, ideas, and strategies are shared is creating a more unified globe but at the same
time “flattening” the world and causing cities to generate standardizations. While the blending of society is
generally not a destructive occurrence, as seen through the sharing of ideas, materials and efficient solu-
tions, it is homogenizing national and local cultures.

Festivals are rituals, cultural events, entertainment, leisure, necessary recreation, social engagement, and
temporary architectures which translate identity of the city at its greatest form. As temporary events, festi-
vals are generated more from current conditions and desires, focusing less on long-term ideals and beliefs,
therefore demonstrating a community’s exiting identity. Festivals create an illusion of a fantasy and utopian
world for a brief period of time they allow users to escape from their realities and demonstrate their ideolo-
gies of particular beliefs. Architecture through festivals must relieve the problems of fractured landscapes
divided between the abstract borders of global and local environments. As places become increasingly
interchangeable festivals stimulate localization, diversity, and culture.

From imagination, screenwriting, shooting, editing, sound editing and viewing, films have the possibility to
be created in over six different countries. Inherently this process establishes the film industry as a global sys-
tem, where techniques, ideas, and modes of fabrication become fused together. Director-General Koïchiro
Matsuura of UNESCO states that,

“film and video production are shining examples of how cultural industries, as vehicles of identity,
values and meanings, can open the door to dialogue and understanding between peoples, but also
to economic growth and development.”2

Film festivals provide a stage for these dialogues and interlink the private identities developed in cinema
with the public identities formulated at film festivals. How can film festivals with an underlying global mar-
ket stop from becoming marginalized into a homogenized cultural event? How can architecture re-appropri-
ate the film festival to enhance local environments and traditions?

1 Jeb Brugmann, Welcome to the Urban Revolution: How Cities are Changing the World, 2nd ed. (New York: Blooms-
bury Press, 2010), page 5.

2 “Nigeria surpasses Hollywood as world’s second largest film producer,” UN News Centre, 5 May 2009. http://www.
un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=30707&Cr=nigeria&Cr1 (accessed September 21, 2010).
 on the crisis of globalizing identities

Berlin
Raindance
Toronto
Sundance Cannes Venice
Tribeca
Telluride
Shanghai
South by Southwest

The Global Film Festival Industry

‘A’ List Film Festivals
Independent Film Festival
This map looks at individual prominent film festivals and analyzes the past years award winners and their film origins.

Spaces of Film Festivals

Annotated Bibliography

Brugmann, Jeb. Welcome to the Urban Revolution: How Cities are Changing the World. 2nd ed. New York:
Bloomsbury Press, 2010.

Jeb Brugmann is an innovator in business, market, and government models specializing in formulating solu-
tions for local communities to gain from the benefits of globalization. Coining the term, the City, a network
of city systems reconnecting the local to the global in today’s rapidly changing world. Welcome to the Urban
Revolution focuses on the advantages of the urban environment through economies of density, scale and as-
sociation. Brugmann argues for local community urbanism and change through bottom-up design. How can
we achieve urban advantage without compromising identities?

Roche, Maurice. Mega-Events and Modernity: Olympics and Expos in the Growth of Global Culture. London:
Routledge, 2000.

Roche analyzes super events and how the processes of design and construction and the effects both socially
and politically ripple out into the entire world. The focus on large scale events demonstrates how mass culture
can so easily be shaped by one event. This analysis provides an understanding of how temporary events and
environments impact both a local and global community. Focusing on festivals and smaller scaled events, I
would like to study the effects of mass culture and also question whether events themselves are shaped by
mass culture and if this is creating a further layer of our global identity crisis.

Sassen, Saskia. “The Global City,” Edited by Koolhaas Rem. Sanford: Mutations. Actar, 2005.

With a focus in globalization and international human migration sociologist Saskia Sassen has coined the
term, global city. This article allows Sassen to define the global city model consisting of scattering of economic
activities, outsourcing, agglomeration economies, the inter-locational company, specialized service firms and
the rise of spatial and socio-economic inequality. The global city has emerged creating cross-border networks
between cities and nations which set the stage for cultural and social evolution. This provides a framework of
how global cities developed and begins to highlight its effect on global culture and identities.

Trumpbour, John. Selling Hollywood to the World: U.S. and European Struggles for Mastery of the Global
Film Industry, 1920-1950. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.

Trumpbour argues that through America’s development of television and film there has risen a cultural indus-
try. Prior to the twentieth century the United States had little global importance in regards to cultural genera-
tion. Today Hollywood is the third largest producer of films annually, but arguably still takes the number one
spot of dominance over the majority of the international film industry. Popular culture has peaked from its loss
of national control and its life without governmental restrictions has been a factor in the arising global film
industry.

Further Reading:

Florida, Richard. Who’s your city?: How the creative economy is making where to live the most important
decision of your life. New York: Basic Books, 2008.

Lechner, Frank J. Globalization: The Making of World Society. N.p.: Blackwell Publishing, 2009.

Sassen, Saskia. The Global City. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001.

Smith, Michael Peter. Transnational urbanism: locating globalization. Malden: Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2001.