摘要：This special issue seeks to critically examine the relationship between events, urban spaces and mobility. Specifically, it seeks to explore how and why events enable and/or produce new spatial (re)configurations when staged and how these changes influence mobility, exploration, engagement and/or consumption across host environments – whether at an international, national, regional, city and/or community level. Events, irrespective of their size and composition, influence the way people move, explore, engage with and/or consume the urban environments that stage them (Giulianotti et al. 2015; Mhanna, Blake, and Jones 2017). They are often managed in private venues, yet are increasingly staged in public spaces like street, squares and parks (Smith 2016). Utilizing urban public spaces to house events, whether a beach, park or plaza, often requires temporary urban rearrangements, producing what are sometimes referred to as ‘Host Event Zones’ (HEZs). These are temporary designated areas where event activation activities take place (McGillivray, Duignan, and Mielke 2020). Sometimes HEZs are public and open to all, other times they are private and closed, requiring a ticket to access and the rights of sponsors and other commercial actors being protected by exceptional planning regulations. Beyond the demarcated boundaries of HEZs, events also extend their territorial presence and reach in a number of creative ways, including the emergence of ‘fringe spaces’. For example, food festivals have sought to engage peripherally located restaurants as a way to move visitors out of central urban areas (Duignan et al. 2017). In contrast, mega sport event organizers create strategically located ‘live sites’ and ‘fan parks’ to house non-sporting cultural and commercial activity, deploying tactics to circulate visitors to and contain them within global spaces of consumption (Armstrong, Giulianotti, and Hobbs 2017).
