Participatory event platforms in the urban context: the importance of stakeholders’ meaning of “participation”

Event organizers tend to seek collaboration with different actors, both as a way to reach legitimization and as a possibility to reach out for resources that would otherwise be unavailable or too costly to achieve. In this chapter, we examine how participation is interpreted and enacted in iterative urban events. We argue that the institutional logics informing stakeholders’ views and meaning of participation affect the governance of participatory cultural events and the evolution of the activities proposed by event organizers. Based on the longitudinal analysis of an iterative participative cultural initiative (IPCI) taking place in Milano since 2012, our work contributes to the understanding of how IPCIs are structured and evolve. The emphasis on the interplay between different institutional logics associated with the meaning of participation and the governance and activities related to the cultural initiatives sheds light on the specificity and the intrinsic fragility of IPCI where participation becomes overtime a resource—if successfully managed—or liability in itself. At the same time, though, it highlights the incredible potential of participative models in creating distributed value across very different stakeholders.