Professor Ian Woodward: Making raves in hygge’s cosy capital
Making raves in hygge’s cosy capital: Urban surfaces, convivial atmospheres, and the civic life of Distortion Festival
A research seminar with Melbourne Centre for Cities Visiting Fellow Ian Woodward.
This paper explores Distortion, Copenhagen’s long-running street festival, to ask how rave is made—and contested—within a city more often imagined through the gentle glow of hygge. Drawing on some years of qualitative fieldwork and presenting a series of theoretically-charged field vignettes, the presentation traces how Distortion’s festival atmospheres rise from the hard textures of the city —its edges and corners, nooks and leftovers, contested socio-cultural ecologies, and layered histories.
A wake-up call to Denmark’s summer festival season, Distortion momentarily folds parts of the city into something porous, warm, and shared, even as competing claims to space, quiet, and streets bite back. In the event’s temporary remakings, Copenhagen’s streets become stages on which civic ideals are performed, negotiated, and contested.
Ian Woodward
Professor, SDU Business School
Syddansk Universitet/University of Southern Denmark