I am very pleased to share my latest article, “Lights that Gather: Attendance Motivations and Emotions in Light Festivals as Night-time Practices”
In this piece, I explore a question that often remains in the background of urban cultural analysis: why do people attend light festivals, and what do they actually experience when they do?
The study is based on the case of Lumina, a light festival held in Cascais, Portugal, and combines survey data collected across two editions with ethnographic observation. Rather than approaching these events through their economic impact or their role in city branding, the article shifts the focus toward the lived experience of those who attend them.
What emerges quite clearly is that light festivals cannot be reduced to cultural consumption or visual spectacle. They are, fundamentally, social and affective practices. People do not go only to “see the lights.” They go to be together, to feel, to interrupt the ordinary rhythms of everyday life.
The night is central here. Light festivals depend ontologically on darkness. It is precisely this nocturnal condition that allows the city to be reconfigured, not only visually, but socially and emotionally Spaces that are familiar during the day acquire a different texture at night, becoming sites of encounter, intimacy, and aesthetic engagement. The city is not just illuminated; it is temporarily rewritten.
In this sense, these events operate as what could be described as affective interventions in urban space. They produce atmospheres that invite participation, but also guide it. Light, sound, and movement create environments in which people slow down, wander, and interact differently. The festival becomes a kind of suspended moment, a rupture in the continuity of everyday urban life
At the same time, motivations to attend are far from homogeneous. They are structured by life stage, social relations, and everyday constraints. Younger participants tend to experience the festival as a space of sociability, where friendships are reinforced and new encounters become possible. For others, particularly those in mid-life stages, the festival becomes a family-oriented activity, a way of spending time together that combines leisure with a certain idea of cultural value. Among older participants, attendance often takes on a more reflective dimension, sometimes even solitary, connected to memory, nostalgia, or a personal relationship with the city.
What this suggests is that light festivals are not simply events, but relational infrastructures. They organize how people come together, how they move through the city, and how they experience both others and themselves in urban space. They offer, even if only temporarily, alternative ways of inhabiting the night.
However, these experiences are not neutral. Light festivals are also embedded within broader processes of aesthetic capitalism and urban governance They are used to activate spaces, attract visitors, and project particular images of the city. The atmospheres they produce may feel open and inclusive, yet they often operate within selective frameworks that privilege certain forms of participation and visibility over others.
This tension is important. On the one hand, light festivals create moments of collective experience, fleeting but meaningful, where the city feels shared. On the other, they are part of a wider transformation of urban culture, where experience itself becomes curated, designed, and, to some extent, commodified.
What interests me most in this work is precisely this ambiguity. Light festivals gather people, but they also organize how gathering happens. They produce intimacy, but within structured environments. They open up the night, but in very specific ways.
Understanding these dynamics is essential if we want to take the night seriously as a domain of urban life. Not simply as a time of consumption or regulation, but as a space where social relations, emotions, and urban imaginaries are actively produced.
Open Access: https://sociologicamexico.azc.uam.mx/index.php/Sociologica/article/view/1900
Manuel Garcia-Ruiz 