My topic is ephemera--the ephemera of urban life--the temporary, the occasional, the fleeting. Spectacles, pageants, rituals, celebrations, and events of all sorts will attract my attention, but I also cast my net even more widely to include other, smaller phenomena, the ephemera of daily, weekly, and seasonal life. I pay particular attention to designed and managed ephemera, ephemera that occur with some identifiable and understood regularity. I argue that no such ephemera are too small (or too big) not to deserve our attention as planners, as urban designers, and as citizens. I argue that ephemera make an important contribution to the life of the city as well as to the imaging of the city, but I also argue that ephemera may be components of imaging that actually work their influence more outside the realm of the media than inside that realm.

One does not normally think of ephemera as an important element in planning and urban design. Why? Is it because we feel that something that is ephemeral is fleeting and insubstantial, perhaps frivolous, only to be considered after the more serious matters of urban life are resolved? As planners we are trained to be instrumental, single-minded, and calculatingly rational in our actions, but not to be playful or experimental or to pay attention to emotions and feelings. We have surrendered to the discourse of economics; "value" has taken on a narrow meaning incorporating only costs and benefits that can be readily measured. Yet, our memories and images of places, our views of their importance and meaning, our impressions of their quality and value, are shaped by ephemera. Surely we would be remiss not to notice

As I have thought about urban ephemera, I have thought about Olympic Games and World's Fairs; about New York ticker tape parades and inaugural pageantry; about holiday festivities and days of mourning; but I have also found myself thinking about flea markets and street fairs; about neighborhood festivals and street decorations; about seasonal plantings and temporary kiosks that appear and disappear throughout the year; about electoral campaigns and the arrivals and departures of conventions; about the beacon at the top of the old John Hancock building in Boston, tracking the weather and whether or not the Red Sox game has been canceled. I have found myself intrigued with the "Standing the Pillar" ceremony held once every seven years at the Kamisuwa and Suwa shrines in Nagano, Japan, as well as with the Passion Play held every ten years in Oberammergau, Germany, fulfilling a vow made in 1633 in the hope that God would protect the town from further ravages of the Black Plague.

Linking all of these examples is the sense of creating and affording surprise balanced by the expectation of return and routine. The life of the city becomes a bit less predictable and more becomes possible, if only for a moment. Yet, in the regularity of these events lies, perhaps paradoxically, a key to their power. Even the Olympics, which any single city usually gets to host only once in a lifetime, are experienced, I would argue, as a kind of "time-share" ephemera. But an even more important link among them is the contribution they all make to the unique images of the places from which they come.

Urban ephemera are organized, momentary, repeated urban public presentations. They include parades, festivals, celebrations, outdoor performances, and rituals of all kinds. Because they impress themselves upon the public images of cities in small ways and large, city designers and planners should add ephemera planning to their list of tools.

Hitherto commentators have viewed these events either as grist for tourist promotions or they have taken alarm at their possibilities for public pacification. The tourist promoters mistake the shows for the life within the festivals while the social alarmists mistake communal fun for a social drug. More recently other critics have levelled their criticisms from the standpoint of the corporate media. But do corporate media images really dominate the reputation of cities so much that city dwellers must accept their portraits. The workings of ephemera reveal the absurdity of such a stance.

With the exceptions of Worlds Fairs and Olympic Games, most ephemera are events where local people play before local audiences. If some of them catch the media's attention, and if they thereby catch the public's fancy, they may attract tourists. Surely the Mardi Gras at New Orleans and the Rose Bowl Parade are such events. Boston's infectious First Night and the Head of the Charles Regatta are, for all their crowds, not tourist attractions. There are many such locally significant public events around the world: the long standing Las Fallas festival of Valencia, the newly altered Daimonji Festival in Kyoto, and the new WaterFire spectacle of Providence, Rhode Island. The fact that city residents carry on these events year after year, often as volunteers, is the key to their energy and dynamism. In all the cases the city government offers support, as do local businesses, and the media report and publicize. Thus, like all aspects of urban planning, urban ephemera are mixed affairs, full of possibilities for both local apathy and local conflict as well as for local pride.

In the end, ephemera carry important benefits to their cities, especially by encouraging the residents to represent themselves, and by encouraging the residents to come together in ways that make them esteem their community. For planners, there await here all the familiar issues of land use politics, but there also await a potential that has only been occasionally tapped by planners and designers as part of their professional activities.