SenCity Workshop: Sensing Festivals as Cities

Abstract

In order to sense the mood of a city, we propose first looking at festivals. In festivals such as Glastonbury or Burning Man we see temporary cities where the inhabitants are engaged afresh with their environment and each other. Our position is that not only are there direct equivalences between larger festivals and cities, but in festivals the phenomena are often exaggerated, and the driving impulses often exploratory. These characteristics well suit research into sensing and intervening in the urban experience. To this end, we have built a corpus of sensor and social media data around a 18,000 attendee music festival and are developing ways of analysing and communicating it.