Global Downtowns

7. When the Film Festival Comes to (Down)Town: Transnational Circuits, Tourism, and the Urban Economy of Images

7 When the Film Festival Comes to (Down)Town: Transnational Circuits, Tourism, and the Urban Economy of Images William Cunningham Bissell Urban si tes ha ve l ong s erved a s c oncentrated n odes w here c ultural l ife, communications, c apital, a nd c ommunities a ll c ome together to a ttain a certain density and power, exercising influence far beyond city limits. Th e image of downtown certainly testifies to t he iconic reach and centralizing force that cities possess, attracting people to the core even as images of downtown radiate outward, broadcasting its allure into a fa r-flung sphere. Over a c entury ago, Georg Simmel (1950 [1903]: 419) argued, “It is in the decisive nature of the metropolis that its inner life overflows by waves into a far-flung national or international arena,” and this combination of material power and media projection has taken on heightened intensity of late. Within the g lobal economy, as A rjun Appadurai (1996) notes, financescapes and mediascapes coincide with other cultural flows. Anthropologists and urban analysts have emphasized the heightened role of media images and the imagination in contemporary cultural production of late, linking these domains to cities as centers of communication and technology as well as sites of symbolic and cultural capital (Hannerz 1996; Larkin 2008; Malaquais 2006; B. Weiss 2009; Zukin 1995). Others, of course, have focused on urban visual cultures and the mediated metropolis (Wong and McDonogh 2001), noting, “the city is constructed as much by images and representations as by the built When the Film Festival Comes to (Down)Town 161 environment, demographic shifts, land speculation, and patterns of capital flight and investment” (Fitzmaurice 2001: 20). But while cities get staged and marketed through media images, film plays a role well beyond image making or representation, as mass tourism, heritage and leisure industries, and cultural spectacles powerfully intersect in processes of urban restructuring. Initial efforts to map global cities often emphasized the importance of capital flows and finance rather than other aspects of urban existence, based on the assumption that the “world economy” plays a central role in shaping the “life of cities” (Sassen 1991: 3). Global cities, it seemed, were global only in certain ways (and many sites were simply left out of the picture). As Jennifer Robinson notes, “there are a large number of cities around the world which do n ot register on i ntellectual maps t hat cha rt t he r ise a nd fa ll of global and world cities” (2002: 531). John Rennie Short and his colleagues take this point further, arguing, “There is a first-world elitist bias to the globalization literature. Globalization is written from the metropolitan centre” (Short et al. 2000: 317). Cities located beyond the dominant frame were overlooked, while cultural dynamics were consistently downplayed. In this chapter, I address this imbalance, foregrounding the nexus between urban restructuring, cultural heritage, and economic development in the western Indian Ocean. Focusing on the ethnography of a film festival in Zanzibar city, I explore how the transformation of local urban worlds is intrinsically linked with transnational processes of place making and political economy. For m ore t han a de cade n ow, t he Z anzibar I nternational F ilm F estival (ZIFF) has played a key role in refashioning the local urban economy even as it works to resituate Zanzibar city within a broader map of transnational cultural cir cuits. In ta ndem w ith o ther ev ents a nd d evelopment e fforts, ZIFF has sought to foster a cultural renaissance even as it feeds off the restoration of the built environment. Initiatives to rehabilitate the city from its socialist past have entailed using history a nd heritage to dema rcate a r enewed center, splitting it off from surrounding neighborhoods and rapidly expanding periurban zones. The remaking of downtown is always an exercise in the spatial expression of social inequality, as investment capital, value, and co mmerce beco me co ncentrated i n cen tral d istricts. R ising dema nd and desirability in a renewed core produce dislocation as buildings are converted and poorer or more vulnerable city residents get pushed to the outskirts , trying to find viable space in sprawling informal settlements on the urban margins. 162 William Cunningham Bissell As restoration of the colonial core of the city has progressed in Zanzibar, neoliberal...