YasenFest: Community festival as a tool of organic place branding and creative community engagement

Keywords: community engagement, creative cultural production, local identity, urban periphery, place branding, spatial representations, memoryscape, place as palimpsest
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Saturday
Session Start / End Time: 2/26/2022 03:40 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/26/2022 05:00 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 74

Abstract

Post-Socialist urban peripheries as well as many other residential areas around the World are often described as placeless and lacking local identities and imageries. Placelessness is a kind of social exclusion while place and cultural landscape may be seen as core terms of regional geography helping to turn the inevitable spatial differentiation into the multiplicity of intertwining localized spatial meanings. Yasenevo in the outskirts of Moscow (Russia) is a fine example of Soviet modernism mass housing residential area considered standardized and non-authentic.
Basing on the previous research on local identities of Yasenevo dwellers the festival of local community and neighborhood cultures “YasenFest” was organized in late 2021 in the Cultural center “Vdokhnoveniye”. It included a photo exhibition, Yasenevo board game presentation, freestyle rap contest, family competitions and games, etc.
Creative community engagement and organic (identity-based) place branding are regarded as the keys to turn placelessness into signified places, stimulate territoriality, spatialities of people and try to create cohesive communities. I try to single out how the place-based approach of community geography may be implemented within the scale of microgeography, how memories or the absence of shared memories help or resist territorial cohesion, how standardized mass architecture may become a unique shared attribute of a place, how the locally rooted place-based ‘twists’ may be added to rather standard / universal cultural agenda, and finally how the multiplicity of local social groups and the multiple formats of a community festival may create the place as a palimpsest of identities.