INSTANT CITY: PERFORMATIVE ARCHITECTURE AND CITY LIFE

This article analyses Roskilde Festival as an Instant City. For more than 40 years, Roskilde Festival has had many thousands participants for a weeklong festival on music, performances and cultural experiences in a layout designed as an urban environment. During the last ten years, in- creasing emphasis has been laid on creating a vivid, and engaging social environment in order to create a lab for social, and architectural experi- ments. These goals challenge the city planning as well as the urban sce- nography. The article addresses the research questions: What kind of city life and social experiments are taking place in ‘the instant city’, and how can it be characterized? It also emphasizes the relation between city life, urban design, and the aesthetics of architecture and urban spaces. The question here is, in what way architecture and urban scenography are used as tools to support the goal of an experimental and social en- gaged city environment? The analysis shows that the specific city life at the instant city, Roskilde Festival, can be characterized by being ‘open minded’, ‘playful’ and ‘inclusive’, but also by ‘a culture of laughter’ that penetrates the aesthetics and the urban scenography.