Internship Maurice Prijs, Edinburgh, August 2012

City events in Edinburgh and Utrecht

 Utrecht has got a large tradition of events in its city. Every year the city is nominated and several years awarded for its contribution of creating a great atmosphere among eventorganisers, crowd and inhabitants. All of them need to feel comfortable with events. The city is in the race to become Europe's Cultural Capital in 2018. Nevertheless there will always be problems and conflict to create that atmosphere were people with different backgrounds and ideas will feel comfortable. Organisers wants to attract for example as much people as possible to make a profit, the crowd is coming from all over the Netherlands and want to have fun and finally the inhabitants prefer to spend a nice and often quite weekend. Big events like festivals attracts a lot of crowd and are a reason for people to visit the city, eat, drink and sleep there. It is good for the city's attractiveness and economy. On the other hand, the city needs to respect the inhabitants and take care of it. Inhabitants, and of course also voters, do not like big events every week or weekend and for example the grass and trees in the parks need to be protected.

As I said before, events are as important for the city as the welfare of inhabitants is. That can be a paradox and that paradox needs to be managed by the city of Utrecht. In case there are two paradoxes, the first one is control and chaos and the second one demand and ability.

With those two paradoxes in my mind I went to Edinburgh from the 30th of August – 04th of September. The welcome in Edinburgh was very good and everything was perfectly organised so that I could do some good research about my paradoxes. In my opionion both cities have more in common than I first thought. Working together with collegues from another city creates a great atmosphere because there is a lot that both parties have in common. Speaking about the work you are involved with creates a good base for further development. In my opionion it helps if you speak the foreign languages very well.

We are able to speak a lot about the content of the work and the way everthing is managed in both cities. In general a lot is based on institutional behavour. We do our work in a certain way, because they taught us to do it like this. Having your our experiences, theories, listening to foreign collegues and espcially looking around in the field gives you a great overview about the topic.

I really enjoyed my stay in Edinburgh, am very thankful for all the information the people from the City of Edinburgh gave me and I am sure I am a bit "wiser" now.