Developing context-sensitive sustainability guideline for temporary outdoor urban events

Abstract

Glasgow is an eventful city. Events have been widely used as means and facilitators of city’s urban regeneration. For the 850-year anniversary of the city in 2025, Glasgow City Council and its partners planned to organize more than 500 events across the city. This initiated a great partnership between event stakeholders and organizers to integrate city’s sustainability agenda into their planning and leave a lasting legacy. Thus, a need for a holistic guideline for sustainable event management was recognized. This guideline aims to consider the whole life cycle of events and provide insights on role of city officials and infrastructure in supporting the conduct of sustainable events. Scotland currently provides funding for events and cultural activities that justify their positive impacts. However, neither the country nor the city includes a context-sensitive approach to their consent process. Hence, it is the event organizer’s responsibility to analyse their site and implement strategies that are well tailored to their specific location. The goal of this study is to guide both event organizers and city officials in recognizing the potential of their site and prevent negative impacts or risks.

This research gains a city-wide perspective on sustainable events. It analyses Glasgow’s portfolio of outdoor events, their distribution and timeline to form place-based policies. A panel data methodology has been chosen in conducting surveys from various event organizers (without filtering scale and type) to localize the sustainability index based on expert opinions. The results of this survey were analysed and compiled with previous plans and best practices to publish the final guideline. In conclusion, event organizers of Glasgow shared the same concern as the author in including pre-event and post-event in sustainability and emission management of the event industry. Outdoor temporary events show a high potential in revitalizing public spaces and neighbourhoods of Glasgow and should be balanced across time and space. Mentioning behaviour change possibility of events led to proposing climate and environmental-based events near the river and natural features. In order to reduce the indirect emissions of event, a more efficient supply management and logistics is needed. Increasing socio-economic impacts of events in their context rely on diversity and participation principles. Overall, Glasgow has the potential to tell its story of deindustrialization and sustainability rethinking with the help of its events, if its event organizers form partnership forums and circular portfolio.