Festival Cities
For a few weeks each year these cities stop being themselves: rooms triple in price, the population doubles, and a programme takes over squares, courtyards and railway sheds. Book a year ahead or come deliberately in the other eleven months — both are legitimate ways to visit.
A festival changes a city's population, prices and behaviour for a fixed number of days, and the interesting question is what the other eleven months look like.
Some of these cities were remade by the event. Cannes had a film festival imposed on it in 1939 as a French answer to Mussolini's Venice — the first edition was cancelled by the invasion of Poland on its opening day — and the town has organised itself around the Croisette ever since. Bayreuth exists in its modern form because Wagner built a theatre for his own work and his descendants have programmed nothing else since 1876. Avignon's festival began in 1947 with three plays in the papal courtyard, staged deliberately to take theatre out of Paris.
Others host without being altered. Edinburgh's Fringe grew from eight companies who turned up uninvited in 1947 and is now the largest arts festival in the world, but the city underneath is a capital with a parliament and a legal system, and it closes over the event rather than depending on it.
And a third kind is the festival that is not an event at all but a season of the year: Rio's carnival is organised by neighbourhood schools for twelve months in advance, and New Orleans runs Mardi Gras through parading societies that exist all year and are, in effect, the city's social structure.
Go during, and you see the machine. Go outside, and you see what pays for it.