The age of experience: how is the events economy shaping city life?

Berlin’s September calendar was busier than that of a PR specialist trying to keep up with fashion and arts clients. Berlin Art Week, Gallery Night, Positions Berlin Art Fair, Soft Power Festival, Musikfest Berlin, the new design festival Currents… Berlin Art Week alone brought together 125 partners and more than 300 events, drawing around 200,000 visitors to the city.

After days packed with exhibitions, performances, fairs and openings, The Berliner’s description was spot on: “cultural overload”. On top of that came the Berlin Marathon and plenty more. In other words, event inflation. The line between abundance and excess is sometimes as thin as a five-day calendar.

In Istanbul, as in other cities, this density of events is no longer limited to September or to the art world. Design and makers’ markets, guest chefs, pop-up dinners, workshops… Cities are increasingly experienced through short-lived, temporary programmes. After “experience” and festival, we might say pop-up has become one of the words we hear most. Anything can exist anywhere, for a limited time. So, how many events are on your schedule, or in your city, this weekend?

The irresistible appeal of the temporary

Neither the fact that cities host more and more events nor our weariness with the words “experience” and “pop-up” is new, of course. But although an economic race seems to lie behind the rise in events today, the issue is tied to a broader cultural shift.

With the experience economy, experience itself took its place alongside products and services. And the event became one of the most useful formats of this new order. Rather than going to a restaurant, a park, a museum or a city, we started going to “events”. The tourist hungry for “experience” began checking whether the city had a jazz festival, or a concert in an abandoned building, before looking at the jazz bar that hosts live music seven days a week.

For those behind the scenes, too, the advantages of the format were clear: it has a set time and place, it brings people together, a story can be built around it, it can get people talking on social media and in the press, it can be sponsored, and it can be staged again a few days or months later. Every event promises an experience not yet lived, within a repeatable format; and so, as one ends, another begins.

Experiences staged in the city

Yet the real turning point comes less from the sheer number of events than from the way they have begun to affect how cities work. Events are no longer just individual programmes; they are becoming a tool that shapes how spaces are used, the flow of cultural and everyday life, and the way cities tell their own story.

This, naturally, is reflected in cities’ cultural and events policies too. From the 1980s onwards, the rebranding of cities through festivals, the Olympics and major cultural events came to be discussed under the heading of festivalization. In her 2013 article “The Eventification of Place”, Doreen Jakob opened a new debate on how the logic of the event had spread beyond the bounds of large festivals into smaller-scale areas of urban development and cultural production.

For Jakob, eventification did not simply mean more events; it described how urban space itself was increasingly turning into staged experiences.

When the city becomes an event venue

One of the best examples is in Milan. The Fuorisalone model, in which Milan Design Week spills out beyond the fair building, works like a form of organisation that changes how the city is used for a whole week. In 2026 the official guide listed more than 1,100 events, with over 1,300 across the city as a whole; more than 500,000 visitors spread out from galleries to showrooms, from historic buildings to courtyards and temporary venues. Districts and neighbourhoods such as Brera, Tortona, Isola, Porta Venezia and 5VIE became part of the network the event produced.

• Brera has even become a “brand” neighbourhood associated with design. In other words, the event is no longer a programme slotted into the city but a network of organisation that reaches from the ways the city is used to the identity of its neighbourhoods.

In Helsinki, the same idea is approached differently. Rather than setting up a single festival site in the city centre, Helsinki Design Week is designed, much like Milan, as a network spread across different locations. A two-year collaboration launched with the City of Helsinki to revitalise the area around Aleksanterinkatu is part of this approach.

• HDW Lab is a small but telling example: a former commercial space is turned into a temporary laboratory discussing the future of the city centre. Professionals, local players and Helsinki residents gather there to talk about how shops, ground floors and public spaces might be reused.

In this way the festival stops being an event where the city is talked about and becomes a tool for working on the city. So much so that last month Monocle even published a piece headlined “The real product on show at Helsinki Design Week was a better city”.

A second life for spaces

In Istanbul, too, repurposed industrial buildings such as Müze Gazhane and Artİstanbul Feshane are being conceived to host a range of events, from exhibitions to concerts, from theatre to workshops. In these cases the event becomes one of the elements that defines the building’s new function and the relationship it will build with the city. The city’s existing buildings, too, are increasingly being rethought as multipurpose cultural venues able to accommodate different kinds of events.

• In Europe, this approach appears in a more temporary form in practices discussed as temporary use or meanwhile spaces. In cities such as Berlin, Athens and Ghent, unused buildings and empty sites are opened up for cultural production, community activities and events. This way, before any permanent investment, different uses of a space can be tested through events; empty spaces are put to use while new cultural relationships take shape.

The Traces of Commerce project in Athens, which opened shops in a shopping arcade left empty after the economic crisis to temporary cultural use, is a concrete example. Under the project, the spaces were given to users free of charge, and in return they were expected to organise public events, workshops and seminars. An empty shop thus became a place where new relationships could form at neighbourhood level. In practices like these, the event is as much a way of reviving an unused space as a means of testing how it might be used in future. Two goals, one move.

Fine, but for whom, and for what?

Yet what the logic of the event brings to a city also carries a question in its pocket: which needs are being prioritised? As Jakob argues, events can give cultural production visibility and create new resources and relationships, yes. On the other hand, the same process can pave the way for a neighbourhood being marketed as a new experience, for social exclusion, gentrification and for disruptions to everyday life. In other words, the answer that is good for the city and the answer that is good for the event are not always the same.

For an example of how this tension plays out in daily life, we can look at London’s park festivals. Councils renting out parks to commercial festivals means that, during the festival and the preparation before and after it, local residents cannot use large parts of their parks for weeks. This in turn sparks debate about the extent to which public spaces remain accessible, and for what and for whom.

• An event measured in revenue and visitor numbers can, in this case, push another value into the background: the right, for instance, to spend time in a park without buying a ticket. And so, in the effort to stage more events, everyday life can end up constrained.

A similar tension can be seen in Edinburgh, where festivals set the rhythm of the entire city. During the August festival season, public spaces such as Princes Street Gardens are given over to events; setting up and taking down can keep the parks closed to everyday use for weeks. Research shows that these practices have prompted objections over the commercialisation of public space and local people’s access to it.

On this balance sheet, events are a useful format: they bring together the city’s different players, make empty spaces visible, change the story of neighbourhoods and generate economic activity, and on top of all that turn all of this into something measurable and programmable. But prioritising the design of a city more and more as an “events stage” does not always give the right answer. What is left once the event is over? Does the value created contribute not only to the cultural ecosystem but also to access to public space, to local businesses and to the daily life of neighbourhoods?

• Let us think about it: strengthening a city’s jazz culture, for example, takes not only a jazz festival but also keeping alive the bars that give musicians a stage all year round, and developing policies to support those venues.

Beyond visitor numbers and views, the value of an event in a city lies partly in the relationship it builds with the cultural and public life it belongs to. Yes, these are the days of events, the age of experience; but in the end, isn’t the real skill not just in making the stage bigger, but also in making sure the city goes on living to its own rhythm?