ABSTRACT
Urban events are an important form of new instantiations of public urban spaces. In this Chapter, I will discuss in some detail how events have produced public urban space in the City of Helsinki. A medium-sized European city, Helsinki is interesting case especially because it has witnessed a remarkable urban cultural change since the late 1980s, a process that culminated in the European Capital of Culture celebrations in 2000.1 Urban events have played important role in that change, providing a graphical illustration of Lefebvrean spatial dialectics. In events the ‘otherness’ appears momentarily in the middle of everyday spatial practices. Unlike many unusual and strange social spaces that one might imagine to be ‘other’ spaces or ‘heterotopias’ (Foucault 1986) – such as exotic tourist destinations, ethnic neighbourhoods or imaginary spaces of films and fairytales – Helsinki’s urban events have taken place in the city centre’s squares, streets and parks (Cantell 1999, Lehtovuori 2000b, 2001, 2005). In urban events, the otherness cannot be thought of as belonging to something else, to someone else’s life or to another city, country or time. It comes near to the often-visited places and can be felt by any participant in an event. Thereby urban events clearly show the complexity and richness of social space.
