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"How can we assess the ability of a place to respond to challenges like migration, recession and disease? Places which seem similar can respond very differently, and with varying degrees of success, to external threats and to the interventions designed to manage them. In this ... work, drawing on decades of research, Sandra Wallman explores how we can measure and compare the resilience of communities, looking in detail at neighbourhoods in London, Rome and Zambia. Each locale is examined as a system which is more or less open or closed; open systems tend to be more resilient when faced with external challenges. As well as being a fascinating study in its own right, the book includes detailed accounts of the research methods used, as well as a user-friendly typology for classifying local systems, making it an invaluable tool for students, researchers and policy-makers."--Publisher's website

Despite their ubiquity and cultural prominence, the academic study of arts festivals has long been neglected. The burgeoning festivals industry is, however, firmly embedded in both the arts funding and weekly calendar of European cities, and there is no doubt that festivals are fast becoming a defining feature of urban life in the twenty-first century. An assessment of their nature and impact is more pressing than ever before. The contributors to this volume explore the modern urban festival and the difference it makes to the experience and management of diversity in the city. Their research reveals an unsettling coupling of the celebration of local diversity with institutional amnesia, in which the memory of a festival hardly ever outlasts its funding. This book documents a key phenomenon of our time, the supplanting of community-based remembering with the repetitive structures of events whose historic and interpretative depth is lost amid a spiraling velocity of 'festivalization'