Leveraging physical and digital liminoidal spaces: The case of #EATCambridge festival

This paper conceptualises the way physical and digital spaces
associated with festivals are being harnessed to create new spaces
of consumption. It focuses on the ways local food businesses
leverage opportunities in the tourist-historic city of Cambridge. Data
from a survey of 28 food producers (in 2014) followed by 35 indepth
interviews at the EAT Cambridge food festival (in 2015) are
used to explain how local producers overcome the challenges of
physical peripherality and why they use social media to help
support them challenges restrictive political and economic
structures. We present a new conceptual framework which suggests
the development of place through food festivals in heritage cities
can be understood by pulling together the concepts of ‘event
leveraging’, ‘liminoid spaces’ (physical and digital) and modes of
‘creative resistance’ which helps the survival of small producers
against inner city gentrification and economically enforced
peripherality.