The annual arts festival Burning Man is underway in Northwestern Nevada. This year's theme of Metropolis highlights the event's city-like nature.
Writing for Next American City, Greg Scruggs has a series of posts about the event, the temporary city it forms and how the artists have responded to this year's theme.
"In addition to the bustling streets full of theme camps and villages that offer the above services (and many more, from fresh fruit to massages to movies to just about anything you can imagine), Black Rock City and the surrounding open playa is peppered with extravagant public art projects. The sheer space and lack of restrictions that Burning Man presents to artists leads to breathtaking works, whose size, scale, and interactivity cannot be replicated in other settings. The Burning Man LLC supports this public art through grants, as well as provisions for the basics of Black Rock City: a street plan with demarcated space for registered camps, portable toilets, the Black Rock Rangers who help mediate conflicts."
Read the full story: Building a City at Burning Man
Urbanist Thinking at the Temporary Metropolis of Burning Man
It's already disappearing. The temporary city that forms during the annual Burning Man event is fading away, as the tens of thousands of people who traveled out to live in the desert of northwestern Nevada for the past week have filed out of the void and returned back to the rest of the world. The event's organizers and volunteers are still erasing the traces of the event, from demolishing structures to removing fencing to picking up trash. Within another week or so, the entire city will have disappeared. It's an interesting way for a city to exist -- just a few weeks at a time, once a year. But it's been working for Burning Man and Black Rock City, the name of that temporary city that forms and disbands almost as soon as it comes to full life. On top of what's already a unique experiment in citymaking, the theme of this year's event was Metropolis, which spurred the tens of thousands of people and artists who make up the city to think a little more about how their "party in the desert" is actually a little city and community (the fourth largest city in Nevada during its run), and how it relates to their world beyond the desert.
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