The Venice International Film Festival and the City: Building a Cultural Tourist Destination by Juxtapposition

This chapter aims at discussing the role that a cultural event can play in the development of what some studies have called ‘creative cities’, questioning the heuristic usefulness of this definition for the historical analysis of a model case: the city of Venice and its Film Festival. The literature on creative cities, in fact, has offered several explanations on how creativity becomes clustered in cities, and how it is used to foster economic and innovation activities (Landry, 2000; Scott, 2000; Florida, 2002). Nevertheless, with our case study we show that a cultural event like the Venice Film Festival that was born within the ideal framework (political, economic, urban, and social) to concur with the development of Venice as a creative city, has ended up completely isolated from the wider urban environment.