Civil society events: Ambiguities and the exertion of cultural power

Cultural ‘events’ such as festivals and performances are increasingly used by civil society actors for a variety of goals, including the pursuit of social inclusion. Current debates around such events focus on their contradictions and associated failures, not least the illusory nature of their participatory character or their inadequacy in tackling structural dimensions such as inequality or poverty. This paper shifts the emphasis from what civil society events do not do, to what they do, illustrating how this production occurs not in spite of but through the promises that sustain events’ development. The analysis focuses on a case study of a local civic project promoted by ten non-profit groups in Milan from 2006 to 2010. As well as accounting for the growing number of civil society events, this paper highlights how events act as effective weapons of cultural power as they invite participation in pursuit of general goals, such as the promotion of social inclusion, while at the same time allowing events’ organisers to subtly control the specific meanings of the goals they are pursuing.

The growing prominence of ‘events’ in the repertoire of civil society actors (Sampson, Mc Adam, Macindoe, & Weffer, 2005, p.179) is the subject of increasing attention in both theoretical analysis (Wagner Pacifici, 2017, p.16) and empirical studies (Hutton, 2018), especially regarding the spread of festivals and other cultural events in urban transformation dynamics (Quinn, 2005). Studies of diversity festivals and artistic performances organised by cultural associations, non-profit groups and social movement organisations include two recurring focuses (Connell & Page, 2012): firstly, on their local impacts in relation to social objectives (Sharpley & Stone, 2012) and, secondly, on their participatory dimension (Grigoleit, Hahn, & Brocchi, 2013) – that is to say, the extent to which civil society events (CSE) really function as a form of bottom-up engagement, able to identify and respond to new social needs (Lamond & Platt, 2016).

Debates on CSE, both when studying their local social impacts and when addressing their participatory dimension, risk polarising scholars between seeing them as ‘apocalyptic’ or ‘integrated’ (Eco, 1964), as they – to a greater or lesser extent – can be included in two opposing camps. On the one hand, there are those who take seriously the potential for rupture associated with the original meaning of the event (Lamond & Platt, 2016) and see in the ability to produce events the highest expression of civic (Sampson et al., 2005) and political (Boltanski & Esquerre, 2017, p. 57) action, framing them as visibility procedures capable of questioning the current post-political order (Sarmento & Ferreira, 2016). On the other hand, it has been argued that the same initiatives are unequivocal symptoms of the depoliticisation of civil society: non-participatory spectacles (Richards, 2013) or ‘blockbuster arts events’ (McLean, 2014, p. 2158), to be disdainfully assessed as ‘efforts to enhance public life with hog roasts’ (Citroni, 2012). While similar critical positions are widespread in academic debates, CSE continue to grow in a variety of local contexts (Browne, Frost, & Lucas, 2019) and even the most traditionally festive are occasionally charged with political values; for example, the 2019 Rio de Janeiro Carnival characterised itself as an open critique of Brazil’s racist and neo-fascist drift (Lamond, 2019).

Simply dismissing such initiatives as naive or purely symbolic means that the possible significance of this expansion in number of civil society events remains unaddressed (Sampson et al., 2005). There are myriad interesting analyses covering various contextual elements that support the current spread of events in civil society (Lamond & Platt, 2016), including the unavailability of institutional channels for the expression of dissent, as in the case of the Rio Carnival (Lamond, 2019). However, although similar readings are correct and important in contextualising the spread of CSE, they miss a fundamental point regarding the implications of this spread, in particular the leeway and possibilities that events offer to civil society actors for exerting a subtle form of cultural power, particularly effective in ‘symbolic struggles for the production and imposition of the legitimate vision of the world’ (Bourdieu, 2002, p. 69). To be understood, this point requires us to accept the ambiguity inherent in the development and actual occurrence of CSE, in particular the facts that they are both participatory and spectacular in the way they unfold (Citroni & Pavoni, 2016), seemingly neutral and subtly partisan in their political meaning (Jackson, 1992), as well as promising in their intentions (Sharpley & Stone, 2012) yet often disappointing in their outcomes (Grigoleit et al., 2013).

In the analysis that follows, rather than starting from a priori definitions of what civil society is, what its functions are and through which tools these are effectively carried out, we will proceed in the opposite direction. We will start by analysing an events-based urban intervention promoted by civil society organisations, followed by a more general investigation of what task or function civil society performs today when it organises cultural events. This will show how the current diffusion of events, in addition to being supported by contingent factors, highlights the relevance of the Gramscian perspective that views civil society as the ‘area of consensus production and the struggle for ideologies’ (Finelli, 2018, p. 242). In particular, rather than merely pointing out what events do not do compared to what civil society used to do (Skocpol, 2003), or what it should do (Richards, 2013), or what events themselves promise to do (Sampson et al., 2005), this paper considers what events do: not separate from, but rather through the promises and the rhetoric that sustain them, whether these relate to their participatory dimension or to the positive impacts that they supposedly produce.

One of the most widespread expressions of these promises is the hypothesis that CSE can produce positive effects even for local communities and more marginalised and socially excluded groups, insofar as these local groups and communities participate in the events and so shape them (Harcup, 2000). This hypothesis is contradicted both by participatory events that produce social exclusion (Grigoleit et al., 2013) and by top-down events that manage to activate local communities at risk of marginalisation (McLean, 2014). Similar research results show the ambiguity that characterises CSE, which are rarely to be characterised in a purely positive or negative light, either in terms of the extent to which effective bottom-up participation can inform their development or with respect to their implications for local communities and marginal groups. The complexity of the processes related to the development of CSE pushes us to distance ourselves from every category that analyses their basic dimensions in dichotomous terms, whether related to participation or to the events’ impacts. In-depth analysis of a case study will show that adopting dichotomous categories, although useful when summarising what events fail to achieve, prevents us from grasping what they do achieve, how they function, and therefore their current significance in civil society’s repertoire of action.

In the following pages, the idea that the spread of events represents a significant turning point for civil society – whether for the better (Sampson et al., 2005) or the worse (Harcup, 2000) – will be openly called into question. Instead, it will be argued that events, with their multiple contradictions, highlight the topicality of the notion of civil society as addressed by prominent scholars of cultural power such as Gramsci (1975, p. 801). This general point is advanced through a situated study: the case chosen is that of an urban intervention promoted by ten different civic organisations, based in Milan, which used a variety of events to pursue goals they defined as promoting social inclusion (Citroni, 2015). The methodology adopted for collecting the empirical findings discussed in this paper derives from a variety of research techniques: semi-structured interviews with event attendees (123 interviews) and members of the observed groups (31), theory-driven participant observation of the everyday associational life of each of the observed groups and of 48 events; and finally discourse analysis of newspaper articles (45), internet blogs (12) and email conversations.

The case study will first be contextualised, introducing the emerging importance during the study period of the notion of social exclusion as a way to combat marginality and social inequality. The case study will then be subjected to a double analysis, centred on communication in relation to events and the in-depth investigation of two specific event occurrences, chosen for their relevance to the two recurrent dimensions of the debates on CSE, namely inclusion and participation. The events investigated in this paper are promoted by two of the ten civic organisations that together make up an urban intervention called the ‘Cuccagna project’ (Citroni, 2015). Analysing the events illustrates the two different ways of addressing the same goal of pursuing participatory social inclusion that are present within this one urban intervention. The analysis conducted is theoretically relevant: the research results do not sustain the polarisation of the debate on CSE, as they neither definitely show events regenerating civil society nor demonstrate that such a repertoire of action betrays its original mandate and neutralises its political function. Once one has recognised the intrinsic ambiguity of CSE, the relevance of events for civil society’s functioning as a battlefield for the implicit, taken-for-granted, shared meanings that define the boundaries of what is to be accepted (Boltanski & Esquerre, 2017) becomes clear.

The reasons for the current success of CSE are manifold (Vicari and Moulaert, 2009) and vary significantly across different local contexts (Vitale, 2009). Using Milan to investigate these reasons offers two advantages. The first relates to the fact that this metropolitan area’s general socio-economic characteristics are broadly representative of medium-sized European urban areas (Ranci, 2009). One feature worth highlighting is how well Milan has managed to convert its industrial structure into a service economy (Ranci & Torri, 2007), which now also includes a diversified ‘events economy’ (Ranci & Migliavacca, 2012, p. 231). Besides the mega-event that was Expo 2015, Milan has developed an array of smaller-scale events (op.cit.), tied to the metropolitan region’s most important economic sectors (design, architecture, fashion and culture) but also events set up by civil society actors. Indeed, starting from 2008, cultural events and similar temporary initiatives became the forms of action most utilised by voluntary organisations active in the Milan area (53% reported setting up events in the last 12 months), surpassing the delivery of social services (44% adopted this form of action in the same period) for the first time since this data was first collected (Citroni, 2014).

In addition to the general importance of the events economy, and within it the role played by CSE (Lamond & Platt, 2016), studying the Milan area highlights three factors to which the spread of CSE can be traced. Firstly, Milan has traditionally been perceived in the national context as a metropolitan area with a singular focus on work and the economy, with associated negative implications in terms of a fragmented social fabric and a lack of adequate opportunities for sociability (Foot, 2000). This image is the scenario that a variety of political and cultural ‘mobilisations’ have battled since the 1970s, especially through the development of so-called ‘new social movements’ (Melucci, 1996). Among other things, the novelty of these collective actions stemmed from the way they ‘practiced what they preached’ (Vitale, 2009, p. 153) with spectacular events and other ephemeral, highly symbolic practices (Bonomi & Moroni, 1994) that challenged the dominant ‘codes’ of action and discourse (Melucci, 1996). In Milan, events organised by new social movements provided opportunities to regenerate a local social fabric perceived as vulnerable (Fantini, 1994) due to the rapid socio-economic changes that were occurring (Ranci & Torri, 2007). Given the crisis of the once-dominant political cultures and their contentious repertoires of action in the 1970s, events became credible tools for evoking the idea of a ‘new’ sociality capable of restoring the human dimension of social relationships (op.cit.). In parallel with the new social movements, in Milan a ‘new spirit of capitalism’ has also developed, which now includes some of its previous opponents, such as those advancing artistic critiques of capitalism (Boltanski & Chiappelo, 2014). This has resulted in the fact that ‘many cities have experienced growing pressure to produce and stage cultural events of different sorts to promote themselves’ (Sarmento & Ferreira, 2016). Indeed, events allow the ‘framing [of] urban spaces as diverse and “green”, with lifestyle amenities and a festive public sphere capable of attracting a vaunted creative class of highly educated professionals’ (Lederman, 2019, p. 87). The current success that CSE enjoy and the fact that they are mobilised for opposing goals, such as promoting or contesting the neoliberal city (McLean, 2014), derive from the unique openness and ambiguity they allow when promoting general issues such as sociability, sustainability or creativity. Historically, events like the ‘urban festival served as an occasion for affirming shared convictions and identities’ (Browne et al., 2019, p. 1). Nowadays, in much more diverse contexts, events have adapted thanks to their ability to celebrate wide-ranging issues, thus managing to hold together possible contradictions and being potentially attractive for wide audiences in search of ‘authentic experiences’ within increasingly dematerialised economies (Johansson & Kociatkiewicz, 2011, p. 396).

The second general factor concerns the increased weight of the frame of social exclusion to address problems of marginality and inequality (Castel, 2004). This shift was particularly visible in Milan, historically and still today the wealthiest city in Italy, but also the most unequal (Ranci, 2009). This ‘double first’ has particular local resonance in an urban context that has historically been characterised by a longstanding and still active philanthropic tradition of social interventions to combat the problems faced by the most marginal urban social groups (Vitale, 2009). Since the 1990s, in Italy (Alietti, 2009) and with the encouragement of the EU (Levitas, 2005), the problems experienced by these marginal groups have been increasingly framed in terms of ‘urban social exclusion’ (Muster, Murie, & Kesteloot, 2006). The reframing of disadvantage in terms of social exclusion (Castel, 2004; Smyth, Reddel, & Jones, 2004) has in a seemingly neutral way brought about a new ‘emphasis on individual success and responsibility’ (Vanwynsberghe, Surborg, & Wyly, 2013, p. 2077) in local public discourse (Levitas, 2005). Meanwhile, at a local policy level, the focus has moved from material deprivation to access to the ‘spheres’ (Smyth et al., 2004) of work, welfare services and social capital networks (Levitas, 2005). This double shift conferred an unprecedented relevance on participation in local events (Sharpley & Stone, 2012) as the channel for accessing ‘spheres of integration’ (Muster et al., 2006) and local forms of social capital (Sampson et al., 2005, p.189). Under these new conditions, what Levy (1994) called the ‘industry of restoration of social ties’ has developed in Milan (Citroni, 2010 ), including a sub-industry of public engagement capable of producing participatory events (Lederman, 2019, p. 88).

This leads on well to the third factor that accounts for the current spread of CSE, which is Milan’s unique ‘third-sector regime’ (Savini, 2011, p. 951). This notion refers to both formal and informal regulations governing the relationship between non-profit organisations and local public institutions. Similarly to what has occurred in other European contexts (op.cit.), in Milan from the 2000s onwards these relationships were characterised, on the one hand, by conferring increasing responsibility for social welfare upon non-profit organisations, and on the other hand by progressive cuts to the public funds available for carrying out such tasks (Vitale, 2009). Non-profit groups have dealt with this unsustainable double-bind through the increased use of events (Citroni, 2014), as this allows groups to benefit from the increased numbers and enthusiasm of voluntary workers in Italy and elsewhere (Last, 2013) who are keen to contribute to events, and from events-based fundraising strategies (Vitale, 2009).

The intervention featured in the case study outlined below pursued its goals within Milan District 4: a vast area (covering 20.95 square kilometres and with roughly 150,000 residents) in the south-eastern part of the city, shaped like a wedge stretching from the city centre to the outskirts. It includes 15 historical neighbourhoods and is one of the nine administrative districts into which the city is subdivided. Characterised by small and medium-sized industrial factories until the end of the 1970s, the post-industrial transition in this area was twofold: the degradation of many of the former industrial areas and an increase in the economic value of a small number of old buildings, particularly those most centrally located or close to the new metro line, which was completed in 1992. These contradictory processes have accelerated in recent years, manifesting in District 4 Milan’s aforementioned ‘double first’. Indeed, in 2008 the area included both the largest number of run-down social housing blocks in Milan and the majority of the international urban regeneration projects developed in Milan in those years (Citroni, 2010).

The increasing socio-economic inequality in District 4 is a long-term process that dates back to the industrial crisis of the late 1970s (Mugnano & Zajczyk, 2008). From the second half of the 1990s, however, public discourse shifted from inequality to social exclusion (Levitas, 2005). In this vast urban area, such a shift was particularly visible in the way in which the main policies and private interventions combatting social marginality were framed (Vitale, 2009). For example, the three EU-funded urban regeneration projects that were implemented in this area included explicit goals of ‘combatting social exclusion’ (Mugnano & Zajczyk, 2008, p. 38). Similarly, the fourteen officially registered non-profit groups set up in the 1990s in District 4 included in their mission tackling conditions of social exclusion. The case study was chosen from among this number, as it officially framed its goals in terms of ‘countering social exclusion’ and ‘pursuing social inclusion’, drawing on different sorts of events as its main repertoire of action (Citroni, 2015).

The urban intervention chosen for this research began in 1992 as a ‘mobilisation’ of local residents who were attempting to preserve an old farmhouse from destruction by real-estate developers. Having achieved the preservation of the farmhouse, the group became a non-profit association in 1998 and adopted the new goal of promoting the re-use of the 400 m² of the former farmhouse and its grounds ‘for setting up both social and cultural initiatives that combat growing local social exclusion’. Formed by 30 citizens with previous associative and militancy experience, the association started to use the farm’s garden to organise parties, film projections, concerts and other convivial occasions that succeeded in generating visibility at a city level (Vitale, 2009). From the start, the project used temporary social and cultural initiatives not just as valuable occasions in themselves, but as tools to address major social issues. The project’s website identified these issues as ‘the growing social fragmentation and exclusion’ and the spread of ‘fake urban sociability made up of non-places’. Making this strategy as public as possible through different media (Oliver & Meyer, 1999), the original group worked with other local non-profit organisations from 2004 onwards, forming a second-level association¹ that included six non-profit organisations and four informal groups. In 2006, on the basis of a detailed project proposal, they won a public competition through which the local municipality assigned them the right to manage the former farm for the next twenty years. The project committed to restructuring the farmhouse within two years and to starting specific initiatives in order to combat aspects of growing local social exclusion. Moreover, the project agreed to pay an annual rent to the local municipality, with the constraint that they might use no more than one-third of the entire space for commercial purposes. This was a public-private partnership agreement typical of the ‘third-sector regime’ (Savini, 2011) and through which major urban policies – including those concerning the temporary re-use of abandoned public spaces – are delegated to private subjects (Vitale, 2009), thus removing the need to apportion public funds to these spaces and projects (Levitas, 2005). The conditions set by the public-private partnership led to a focus on temporary sociability as a lever of social inclusion, thus making events the fundamental repertoire of action for the project (Citroni, 2015).

During the author’s five years of empirical study, this urban intervention succeeded in collecting the funds required for the conservation and restructuring of the ancient farmhouse. This outcome was publicly attributed by the intervention’s main protagonists to the events they set up. For example, in a local radio interview carried out during the party celebrating the second anniversary of the intervention, when the journalist asked the six presidents of the formal organisations that made up the Cuccagna project where they got the money to reconstruct the farmhouse, they responded:

Its ability to raise the necessary funds for restructuring the farmhouse, together with the high number of attendees at events, were seen as an indicator of the success of the Cuccagna project, although not everyone agreed with this vision. Indeed, the polarisation mentioned above regarding CSE overall also emerged here at the level of a single intervention. As well as supporters who saw the events as a panacea for the Cuccagna project, there were critics – especially among those who initially started the intervention in the 1990s – who deplored the betrayal of the project’s original spirit and what they argued was a heightening of local conditions of social exclusion that corresponded with the increase in large-scale events (Citroni, 2015). These events had succeeded in attracting media visibility to the Cuccagna project (op.cit.), but at the same time they moved it away from the original idea of civil society self-organising in order to address local needs. Those holding such positions struggled to make their voices heard, both acting outside the intervention (for example, distributing flyers in the neighbourhood or writing articles in the local newspaper) and especially within it, by setting up small-scale events, planned as opportunities to involve everyday citizens in self-organising processes to address local social needs.

Indeed, as detailed elsewhere (Citroni, 2015), this polarisation was visible within the internal composition of the protagonists of the Cuccagna project, which could be traced back to two distinct views: a militant one, that of the activists who originally promoted the recovery of the farmhouse by collecting signatures and who mainly participated in the project as unpaid volunteers; and a non-profit position taken by the third-sector professionals who joined the project in a second phase, offering, first, the project-management skills for writing the winning project bid and then the management skills to continue its development. Those with these two distinct stances held different views on what goals of social inclusion the Cuccagna project aimed to produce and on how to pursue them. Both continued with their visions and made them visible through setting up events, despite differing significantly among themselves. In the sections that follow, as well as stressing the differences between the opposing visions that coexisted in the Cuccagna project, the focus will also be on their shared pursuit in the course of events as they actually develop. The selected cases exemplify how, irrespective of the contents being promoted, once one has accepted the intrinsic ambiguity of events, it becomes clearer how they are particularly well-suited tools to ‘influence the goes-without-saying, the shared ways of thinking’ (Boltanski & Esquerre, 2017, p. 58) and thus to pursue those ‘political fights’ that takes place on ‘the boundary between what can and cannot be said’. In this case, the unspoken assumptions in question centre on what ‘participatory social inclusion’ actually is.

After this thorough contextualisation for the civic intervention we are going to study, it is now time to focus in detail on some of its components. The first is Movimento Centrifugo (Centrifugal Movement – MC), which consisted of ‘seven events […], aiming to promote a new type of urban tourism and rediscover seven squares and their inhabitants, making them the centre of city life’.² The name summarised its official aim: a centrifugal movement that inverted the usual flow of Milan’s cultural life by attracting people from the centre to the periphery – which, it was supposed, they had never explored – and to give local organisations and activities a central role in the cultural urban dynamics of the city. The MC events took place during the summer, in busy streets, public spaces, and parks throughout the peripheral neighbourhoods of the city. Each event began in the early afternoon with workshops and shows for children, followed after dinner by a free open-air film.

Although there was some communication via Facebook and newsletters, the main publicity that supported MC was a press release, disseminated through an article – composed by copying large passages from the press release – which appeared in the local pages of a national newspaper. This media communication of the event was centred on two topics: firstly, it described the pursuit of social inclusion in terms of including the outskirts of Milan within the city’s urban and cultural life, depicting these areas as unexplored, potentially interesting neighbourhoods that the rest of the city was unfairly starving of social and cultural attention. This was very different from how these places were generally perceived: impoverished, even dangerous places that needed to be made safe (Foot, 2000). MC challenged people’s assumptions and put forward an alternative reading of these peripheral zones as rich in possibilities and deserving of further exploration, maintenance and cultural investment.

The second element featured in MC’s communication was the idea that the shift it aimed to bring about would be pursued in a participatory fashion, through citizens’ bottom-up engagement:

The ways in which the meaning of social inclusion and participation were adopted by MC could easily be criticised, for example because of the predefined way in which social inclusion was addressed or due to the assumption that participation implies enjoying a spectacle. But direct empirical evidence reveals these dimensions to be more nuanced than could be expected from an external point of view.

Indeed, careful ethnographic observation focused on how the contents of the event’s advertising translated into supposedly participatory practices in real life. As expected, there was no shortage of differences between the event’s format and its informal unfolding. For example, although not scheduled officially, during one MC event, on 8 July 2008 in Milan, the film projection was unexpectedly preceded by the intervention of a local activist who, when thanking the organisers, underlined how MC was

This intervention shows how the ‘spectacular’ official format of the event did not prevent something relatively unexpected happening ­– an event within the event that risked undermining the official meaning of MC. In fact, although the activist judged the event to be coherent with what his own organisation did, his speech conveyed a different notion of Milan’s urban periphery from that officially proposed by MC: not a place full of interesting elements to be discovered, but a place lacking the most elementary resources and in need of assistance. Unsurprisingly, both the newspaper article that gave visibility to the event and the extensive documentation uploaded to the website of the promoting group omitted any kind of reference to the activist’s intervention. But it would be wrong to draw rapid conclusions and to affirm that the spectacular nature of the event silenced the bottom-up activist’s participation.

Rather than simply contrasting the relationship between bottom-up participation and the spectacular dimension of the event, it is also possible to explore their subtle and deep synergy, in at least two different ways. Firstly, from the interview given by the event organisers to the researcher after the event we know that the activist did not intervene in spite of the event but thanks to it, asking and obtaining permission before doing so. Secondly, and more conceptually, grassroots participation and the events’ organisers rely upon each other to take shape and be heard: indeed, the bottom-up intervention confirms to the organisers how participatory the event actually is, while the media reach of the events and the public it succeeds in gathering allow the activist to enjoy visibility s/he and their organisation would otherwise not be able to attain. Thanks to this synergy, close observation revealed that MC was both a participatory and a spectacular event, in which the participatory and spectacular dimensions coexisted, drawing upon each other and even providing mutual reinforcement.

At the same time, this coexistence does not mean the two parts were balanced: in the case of MC, the spectacular or predefined dimension dominated the participatory one, given that both the contents and the actual staging of the event were predefined by the organisers, whose agreement was required before participants could intervene in what happened. This combination reveals the specific idea of social inclusion pursued by events like MC in terms of both promoting access to cultural contents for those generally excluded from them and understanding participation as simply enjoying a show. This way of understanding the Cuccagna project’s goals is pursued subtly through events: not in spite of, but thanks to their generic emphasis on inclusion and participation. Indeed, such generality ensures, on the one hand, that CSE are not an easy target for critics and, on the other hand, it allows indirect control over the type of social inclusion pursued, as will become even clearer after considering the events introduced in the next section.

Analysing a second example helps us delve further into the ambiguity of CSE, which does not, indeed, pertain uniquely to their participatory dimension, but also to the dimension of social inclusion/exclusion. We will illustrate this here through an event called Sabati Aperti (Open Saturdays – SA), a series of public open-air gatherings that took place once a month for twelve Saturday afternoons in the grounds of the Cuccagna farmhouse. According to the first mailing list that promoted and publicised them, SA were set up to develop an ‘inclusive public space, where citizens self-organise to develop the Cuccagna project, with face-to-face meetings, exchanges of ideas and discussion’. The idea of setting up SA events was first proposed during informal meetings of volunteers and activists of Cooperativa Cuccagna, one of the six organisations in the Cuccagna project. Cuccagna staff members then supported this idea by hiring a participatory consultant with the official role of ‘developing the participatory process in the Cuccagna project’.

While MC was sustained by a media campaign through websites and the local press, SA was not, and news was spread mainly through word of mouth, email exchanges and occasionally leaflet distribution. In this communication it was explicitly stressed that SA meetings were designed as occasions to ‘make contingent participation count in the shaping of the Cuccagna project through processes of self-organisation’, as stated in the leaflet. Similar declarations assumed and anticipated possible criticisms concerning their ephemeral character and their inadequacy for bringing about medium- and long-term processes. At the same time, in the SA publicity nothing detailed was said concerning the events’ contents and shape. Instead two aspects were underlined: that these occasions were open to everyone and that they were not simply convivial occasions, but focused on the development of the Cuccagna project. For example, in an online communication on the Cuccagna project website, this event was described as the ‘official open door to inclusivity and exchange’ and oriented towards ‘developing the Cuccagna project through proactive citizenship’.

The SA events took place in the meadow of the Cuccagna farm, with the participatory expert introducing them to their attendees as, for example, occasions to ‘both propose topics from the bottom up, framing the issues deemed relevant in your own ways, and occasions to not just discuss, but proactively and collectively develop these issues, share them and make them the common ground for new projects’ (author’s fieldnotes). These processes unfolded thanks to the work of the participatory expert who acted as the events’ host: he welcomed people, inviting them to sit in a circle, he followed his brief introduction with a round of introductions, and he collected wishes and proposals written by the participants on sticky notes. These notes were then mounted on a whiteboard and grouped together based on possible connections. These groupings corresponded to the units of work that participants wanted to form and self-organise. They then gathered in smaller groups to discuss and decide how to direct their desired interventions towards topics such as ‘public art’, ‘gardening’ or ‘helping the vulnerable’.

In the case of MC, the participatory pursuit of social inclusion aimed to promote access to cultural contents by people in social categories traditionally excluded from it; in the case of SA, however, the same general goal of the Cuccagna project referred to the development of empowerment processes to autonomously address local social needs, as shown in the following chart:

The general goal of the Cuccagna project therefore developed into two significantly different approaches (as specified in the chart), which were both pursued by exploiting the ambiguity of CSE. Indeed, just as MC was both a spectacular and participatory event – spectacular because of the participation, and vice versa, as explained above – in the same way, in SA ‘inclusion and exclusion come together; more precisely: the latter makes the former possible’ (Tissot, 2014, p. 1189).

This point is reinforced by close observation of the participation in SA by Carmela, an elderly lady from the neighbourhood who took part in all the events but without ever speaking publicly. Owing to the confidence gained with the author during several informal exchanges backstage of the official event, one evening, unprompted, walking back after the event, she openly explained the reasons for her silence:

SA encouraged its attendees to participate in the development of the event through settings close to what Habermas called the ‘physical representation of the public sphere’, with a ‘logocentric’ (Berger, 2009) emphasis that risked excluding those who did not feel at ease in speaking publicly. For example, someone like Carmela systematically avoided exposing her thoughts to the intimidating judgments of other participants, yet still came to what she deemed an important occasion for the participatory development of the Cuccagna project. Carmela's tenacity, evinced in her steadfast attendance, was what drove her to continue to participate; others would not have done so and, from this point of view, it is no coincidence that roughly the same group of people continued to take part.

Carmela exemplifies a contradiction that recurs in many events-based civic interventions, relating to being motivated by inclusive intentions aimed at curbing ever-wider inequalities, yet ending up reinforcing either the same divides (Grigoleit et al., 2013) or, as in this case, other variables, here related to possessing the skills required to be an active participant in this type of occasion.

SA illustrates a contradictory blend of inclusive intentions that produce exclusionary implications that is similar – in shape, though not in contents – to that observed in MC, with respect to the distance between the emphasis that its communication put on bottom-up participation and the situated way it took place, coming close to the predefined format of a show. In other cases, similar contradictions refer to events’ social impacts (Grigoleit et al., 2013) or to the type of urban diversity they sustain (Tissot, 2014). Such tensions are generally read by scholars of events-based civic interventions with reference to the polarisation between supporters and critics of CSE. Indeed, the latter believe that the contradictions indicate that the promises that sustain the current spread of CSE are merely illusory, given that in fact what these occasions produce is distant from or even contrary to their objectives (Grigoleit et al., 2013). For their advocates, meanwhile, contradictions show how CSE work effectively as radical participatory devices which are open to the contributions of participants to the point of going in the opposite direction to that planned by organisers (Sarmento & Ferreira, 2016).

However, few scholars of CSE take these contradictions seriously, that is without making them the occasion either for demystifying the (supposedly) real intentions of the events’ organisers or for praising this repertoire of action, for example its truly participatory nature, open to developments that could not be foreseen in advance. In fact, the contradictory nature of CSE emerges so recurrently that it could be considered a feature intrinsic to this repertoire of action, which emerges out of what can be labelled as events’ ‘double nature’: that is their taking shape both at the communication level, in the discourse that anticipates them and establishes their meaning, and at the level of their situated occurrence, including the ‘presence experiences’ (Ploger, 2010) of those who take part in them. As these levels follow two distinct grammars of action, it is inevitable that there will be a certain distance and possible tension between them, just as it is not possible to have complete coincidence between collective representations and their situated uses (Swidler, 1986). Indeed, generally speaking, communication adopts vague, indeterminate words, attractive to a wide audience, which are necessarily specified only when the events actually take place, through apparently irrelevant details (Tissot, 2014).

The distance that separates these two levels, and especially its cautious management by event organisers, offers significant possibilities and leeway to civil society actors: the power to promote general ‘processes of meaning-making’ (Spillman, 2002, p. 4), or values and worldviews – for example on social inclusion (Grigoleit et al., 2013), urban diversity (Tissot, 2014) or public spaces (Sarmento & Ferreira, 2016) – while subtly controlling their meaning; or if CSE organisers so desire, the power to control meanings by promoting them through events. For example, in Politics of the Street, Jackson (1992) analyses the Toronto Caribbean carnival and shows us how something as significant as the boundaries of an ethnic community that lives within a national state are negotiated through the definition of the route to be followed by the carnival parade. In a similar vein, Tissot (2014) has shown how the outcomes of a local urban conflict among different stakeholders and civil society actors take shape subtly by engendering local consensus around a specific idea of urban diversity that is promoted and legitimised in seemingly irrelevant, tiny events, such as free neighbourhood guided tours. In these events, as in those considered in this paper, it is the co-existence of openness and closure in CSE that makes them effective tools for subtly exerting cultural power in order to make acceptable, and therefore legitimise, specific worldviews.

This interpretation of CSE is only possible once any easy polarisations have been rejected, instead assuming that occasions like SA are both inclusive and exclusionary, just as MC is both participatory and spectacular. Realising that these polarities are not dichotomous, and not mutually exclusive, allows one to grasp the subtle way in which events work: they allow indirect control over the meaning of wide-ranging worldviews, narratives or values through their pro-active promotion, in the setting up of occasions in which the public is encouraged to participate as a general audience.

Assuming that CSE are intrinsically ambiguous does not mean, however, that they are all equal. On the contrary, thanks to their ambiguity, CSE are able to pursue worldviews that are necessarily partial, as exemplified by the differences between the two events highlighted here, despite sharing the same goal of pursuing participatory social inclusion. As shown above, MC – consistently with the non-profit component of the Cuccagna project – intended this goal as practising a form of light, convivial participation in predefined cultural contents and fleeting urban encounters. SA, meanwhile, clearly showed the different way in which the militant component of the project addressed the same goal, with its emphasis on self-organisation as a method of tackling specific local social problems. These approaches are not only different, but also in conflict with each other, as both try to establish themselves as the legitimate, ‘natural’ way to pursue the Cuccagna project’s goal of participatory social inclusion.³

The starting point for the investigation explored here was the author’s dissatisfaction with the polarisation that characterises current debates on the spread of CSE. Indeed, both admirers and critics of this repertoire of action can easily find empirical evidence to support their arguments, and this is true not only in general, with respect to the various CSE, but, to a certain extent, also with reference to any one single event. The recurrent character with which such ambiguity manifests itself in the most detailed empirical analysis of CSE needs to be taken seriously, not as an avoidable obstacle to events’ development, but as a feature that is intrinsic to their functioning.

In this paper this has been done by focusing on an events-based civic intervention that was embedded and acted out in a local context characterised by a rapid increase in the number of CSE, due mainly to three factors: first, a local civil society particularly sensitive to the lack of opportunities for sociability (Foot, 2000); second, the recent emphasis on social exclusion – meaning lack of access to social networks – in the local public discourse on poverty and marginality (Vitale, 2009); and third, the new establishment of a ‘third sector regime’ that is assigning ever more responsibility to non-profit actors but without sustaining them with adequate funds, and thus promoting a search for visibility and economic resources through events. This contextualisation allowed the subsequent analysis to be developed, shifting the focus from CSE as a ‘dependent variable’, deriving from other factors, to looking at them as an ‘independent variable’ (della Porta, 2008), to be grasped with respect to the implications produced for other factors. The analysis here focused on two events, selected because they exemplify the variety of ways in which the same goal of participatory social inclusion was pursued by different actors within the same overall non-profit civic intervention.

The analysis highlighted how the selected events were involved in contradictory dynamics, with respect to both their participatory nature and their outcome of social inclusion/exclusion. This focus on ambiguity allows one to grasp not just what the CSE in question failed to achieve but also what they achieved through – not in spite of – such failures: the subtle control of the participatory social inclusion pursued by the overall civic intervention they were part of, and particularly control of the specific meaning of this general goal. Even when the events failed to live up to their promises and betrayed the rhetoric sustaining them, simply the fact they took place meant they succeeded in presenting themselves as a legitimate means to pursue the overall goal of participatory social inclusion. A tacit conflict concerning the very meaning of participatory social inclusion took shape in the coexistence of the events that took place here.

In accounting for the current spread of CSE, together with the relevance of contingent contextual factors such as those illustrated in section ‘Milan District 4 and the Cuccagna project’, it is worth considering the possibilities that this repertoire of action offers to civil society’s ability to affect public discourse and exert cultural power. In particular, this research has highlighted the potential of CSE to promote worldviews in a subtle way: not denying or repressing alternative visions but, on the contrary, promoting openness and participation with respect to general values, while at the same time in the end retaining control over their meaning. To the disappointment of both supporters and critics as far as the aforementioned polarisation is concerned, the spread of ‘events’ in civil society does not represent a radical change. On the contrary, this repertoire of action clearly highlights the significance and topicality of a robust approach to civil society: one that acts in terms of a battlefield where different worldviews struggle in unacknowledged combat as each strive to present themselves as the most legitimate.

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Sebastiano Citronihttp://orcid.org/0000-0002-6373-3725