Plant a Seeed

Many cultural institutions are currently looking for expert support in developing a sustainability strategy. Climate balances have to be drawn up, fields of action have to be identified, and raw material cycles have to be analyzed. A new, additional topic: Reducing the energy consumption. Often organizations are looking for support from external consultants, especially since these consulting costs are subsidized. But sustainability in practice does not mean actionism. It requires more than just day-to-day consulting. An unspecified consultancy trying to transfer industrial production processes to the very individual production of an event or other cultural formats will fail, not noticing the special features of cultural work. However, their fields of action and measures must be considered individually. In addition, internal skills and knowledge, especially of technical staff members, are often overlooked.

 

Sustainable event management requires technical, methodological and content-related knowledge of cultural organizations and event companies as well as experience in dealing with the specific processes on site. Sustainability management is change management. This includes the will to transform as well as the commitment and empowerment of the organization and all of its resources. Therefore, it makes sense to anchor sustainability aspects in education and teaching. 

 

Sustainability issues have been incorporated into the teaching content of the Theater, Event Technology and Management course at the Berliner Hochschule für Technik for some years now. This is also necessary. The bachelor's degree program is unique in Germany. The undergraduate engineering program qualifies students, after one year of professional experience, to become technical managers of temporary large-scale events such as public festivals and competitions, as well as venues such as concert halls, opera houses or theaters. The seven- semester course therefore combines technical engineering knowledge with social skills and event management methods. Sustainable solutions are in demand in all three content areas of the course, such as reducing material consumption in construction planning, prudent event logistics, or dealing with re- and upcycling of stage design elements. With the Sustainability and Logistics seminar, the topic is now part of the curriculum since the summer semester of 2022, enabling students to develop methods in practical teaching research projects and validate them using real large-scale events. The research-based learning at an applied university obliges the students to apply the methods of empirical social research and to develop field-specific new methodological approaches by preparing research papers in cooperation with practice partners. 

 

 

In the seminar "Theater and Event Management I” in the third semester, the basics of sustainable event management are taught by explaining the most important fields of action. In the seminar "Theater and Event Management II” in the fourth semester, which builds on this, the focus is on the various implementation options for a sustainability strategy using case studies from the cultural landscape such as theaters or opera houses and the creative industry such as festivals or sporting events. The compulsory seminar in "Event Logistics and Sustainability” takes an in-depth look at the topic of sustainability and links it directly to the most important field of action in the sustainability management of events: mobility. In climate assessments of events and venues, it is regularly found that the movement of materials and visitors accounts for more than two-thirds of the CO2eq- emissions in the climate balance. This seminar is therefore also home to the teaching research projects, which are based on cooperation and research projects with companies and organizations. 

 

This results in a practice-oriented research design

 

Earlier research about the sustainability of large-scale events (Getz & Anderson, 2008; Hall, 2012; Sakschewski et al., 2010) are losing importance in view of the many individual projects that have now been recognized. For example, the sustainability of large-scale urban events has been the subject of research on several occasions, such as Katholikentag 2008 (Stauch, 2016). Individual projects have been implemented by the organizers themselves, such as at the Wacken Open Air (Hübner, 2016), and many smaller festivals, such as the Wilde Möhre Festival in Brandenburg, have combined numerous individual measures into a sustainability strategy. In the late summer of 2022 two large urban events were the subject of research in our discipline: two large concerts, each with around 20,000 visitors, which were accompanied by the University of Bochum in cooperation with the sustainability agency "Edelweiss-Society" (Wilmsmann, 2022), and the Labor Tempelhof (https://labor-tempelhof.org) 2022 with concerts by the Ärzte and the Toten Hosen, which was implemented by the circular economy organization Cradle to Cradle with the support of the agency for sustainable change The Changency. 

 

The research project of the Berliner Hochschule für Technik on the sustainability of large-scale urban events as part of the teaching research project examined the possibilities and potentials of sustainable event management on the basis of two events in the summer of 2022. A mixed-methods approach was developed in order to examine the effectiveness of interventions in five fields of action. The aim was to investigate the extent to which the sustainability of large urban events can be measured and visitor behavior can be changed through individual measures and their communication in terms of sustainability. 

 

The first practical project took place from the 9th to the 14th of August 2022 at the Berlin Parkbühne Wuhlheide during five consecutive concerts of the Berlin band Seeed. Together with the agency The Changency, which initialized the project, students developed a concept to create a valid data basis for a scientific study. 

 

The Parkbühne Wuhlheide is an open-air venue in the southeast of Berlin with a maximum capacity of 17,000 visitors. The five consecutive concerts, each sold out, provided excellent conditions for conducting field research under laboratory conditions. The same visitor structure, the same venue, the same band and very similar weather conditions enabled precise measurement of the effectiveness of communication measures and interventions with very little disruption. 

 

The second practical project, in cooperation with mediapool Veranstaltungsgesellschaft and the Lollapalooza Festival, about a month later at the Olympiastadion and Olympiapark, had a comparable number of visitors. Over two days of the event (September 24th and 25th, 2022), about 70,000 visitors watched a line up of different bands and solo artists, including Kraftklub, Machine Gun Kelly, Die Fantastischen Vier and Seeed. Again, different methods were used to minimize method-inherent bias by matching. 

 

The mixed methods approach tries to reduce bias of the specific method, like a positive response in interviews. In concrete terms, this means that the visitors were asked about their eating habits (vegan, vegetarian or omnivorous) and at the same time the ordering behavior at the snack stands was observed on site to check whether the information provided and the actual orders corresponded. In addition, we compared the amount of garbage disposed of with the degree of filling and the composition of the garbage can contents according to photo documentation. In the next step, the results of the two practical projects will be compared and contrasted in order to make statements on the sustainability of large-scale urban events. 

 

 

 

Because of their direct practical relevance, teaching research projects place high demands on data validity and research design. But the processes of large-scale events, however, do not adhere to teaching timetables. They are difficult to integrate into the often rigid teaching system of an applied university. In addition, there is a lack of scientific mid-level staff for concept, communication, planning and administration. As a consequence, such extensive projects can usually only be implemented through the commitment of the teaching staff and at the expense of the students due to the planning effort, the amount of data collected as well as the effort of evaluation. 

 

Therefore, a clear separation between teaching and data collection was important in the organization of the teaching research projects. The concept development integrated into the seminar, in which measures, indicators and measurement methods were determined by the students, was evaluated within the teaching process. The practical implementation, the observations and measurements during the events, on the other hand, was carried out by student assistants whose activities were rewarded. These were financed by the practice partners on the basis of the cooperation agreements. The evaluation of the data in turn flows into the teaching in the following semester. 

 

Conclusion 

 

The results from the teaching research project create an important basis for planning measures for sustainable event management at large urban events on the basis of valid data. The effectiveness of individual measures could be examined very precisely and a carbon footprint for large urban events could be created. The media impact, but also the interaction with the band and event organizers, showed how receptive the concert industry is to sustainable transformation. 

 

Both for the students who were conceptually involved in the project in the seminar and for the students who measured and counted on site, the concerts were important experiences and sometimes a lot of fun. As teaching research projects, these formats are also important laboratories for the integration of sustainability into cultural management teaching and research, and thus into the training of future technical directors and researchers in the field. 

 

The cooperation partner for the summer semester 2023 is Hertha BSC, a Bundesliga club. This means that league soccer will be the focus of event logistics and sustainability. Here in particular, a critical approach to accounting methods and measurements by the students will be necessary. 

 

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