Gastronomy as a social catalyst in the creative place-making process

Abstract

This paper examines the integration of gastronomy in the creative place-making process. The study is based on the interviews with the organizers of five gastronomy events: a cooking workshop, a gastronomy festival, a series of gastronomy events at museums, a gastronomy theatre performance and an intimate dinner event. The contextual analysis shows that gastronomy events can contribute to five important features defining quality of place: diversity, liveliness, innovativeness, creativity and openness/tolerance. The final phase of our study brings comparison with findings in art-based place-making studies and discusses on diversity, integration in development policies and replicability potential of analyzed gastronomy events.

Keywords

• creative place-making
• food
• events
• art
• community building
• quality of place
• urban geography