Curator Statement

Urban Festival was never meant to replace the street. It was a way to keep city arguments public when halls were closed and travel was thin. The curatorial job was to treat webinars as rooms: give them a theme, a host who knew the neighbourhood of the topic, and a record people could return to.

Empowering the Civic is an awkward phrase until you watch who speaks. Officials sat next to backyard builders. Civic technologists sat next to poets. The Visualisation Studios asked nine cities to draw futures from lived routes, not from a single master plan. The My-IUDF bootcamp treated the Integrated Urban Development Framework as a working document, not a shelf object.

We kept the music nights and the Instagram takeovers because a city is not only policy. Culture is how people rehearse belonging. The archive now sitting here is a curatorial aftercare task: keep the logos honest, keep the session pages readable, and leave the original URLs standing so a citation from 2020 still lands.

If you are arriving late, start with the 2020 Programme note on SAST timings, then walk the galleries. The later circuit write-ups on Past Events are part of the same civic conversation, not a different festival.