Tourism, Cultural Heritage and Urban Regeneration by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783030419059
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

7.6 Winter Cities and Everyday Transformation

The Winter Cities initiative represents the recognition of the season as a key part of that landscape and a generator of local cultural heritage. From its start, the city of Edmonton has marketed itself and the region as a winter destination; carnivals were held here and around the province through the Depression and WWII to boost morale and spending. A 1937 event offered ‘fun for all, and buying opportunities galore’ (Walker 2013). Ominously, though, while winter tourism and branding strategies commonly advise ‘embracing’ the season as medium of magical experience, traditional winter stories around the world often involve monsters and witches such as the Snow Queen whose cold embrace can transform or consume humans. Herva (2014) notes that these ideas, while to some extent based in colonial ‘othering’, also suggest the haunting of the present by relegated possibilities to rethink or broaden perspectives on these relationships. Cree and Anishinaabe winter stories featured the Wetigo or Wendigo, a cannibal giant of ice, a figure of psychosis that evolved in the colonial era to stand for the newcomers’ greed and cruelty (Brightman 1988). In turn, non-Indigenous participants in a present-day storytelling event will encounter new interpretations of their own memories and knowledges.

Appadurai (2003) reminds us that the production of locality always involves colonization through seizure from prior inhabitants in events later routinized and legitimated, one strand of which is the historical complex of the European fur trade celebrated in the FCV. In terms of relationality, we know that the ravine is year-round home to both human and non-human animals. Although pre-contact, fur trade and industrial habitats and economic systems have been superseded and replaced by heritage versions, residual spaces such as the ravine still host complex human networks including transient homeless people, mostly Indigenous (Rossi and Vanolo 2013; Sorensen 2010). The tent structures that house FCV activities, reflecting and embodying these dynamics, occupy a destination that incorporates both actual and imaginary or mythical phenomena transformed from the everyday through narrative and magical effects. Of course, heritage tourism today is typically imbricated in material and economic transformation of urban space. In Edmonton, while some evidence shows increased participation in winter city festivals, in general, instrumental benefits of such events are often exaggerated and under-researched, as are impacts such as social cohesion and sense of place (del Barrio et al. 2012; Edmonton 2019; Mair and Whitford 2013; Quinn 2005). Visitors to the FCV number in the tens of thousands, but it is unknown whether those people experience a new sense of identification with city or community, or otherwise feel their everyday lives transformed through neighbourhood regeneration programmes.

Nevertheless, while urban transformation through property and land interventions often result in problems such as inequitable gentrification, the festival at the least opens space for participation and cultural citizenship and education, suggesting incremental transformation through redefining or relabeling place and histories over time. Diverse practices and imaginings in a mobile fragment of space and time can juxtapose celebrations of heritage with present-day consequences of those histories in terms of resilience and reconciliation.

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