Community events, rural-urban interdependencies, and rural community development

Events and festivals provide the opportunity to break from the mundane, celebrate the eccentric, and re-consider ideas of community membership. Events and festivals are a regular feature of rural life which is often grounded in traditional relationships with the land and resource-based economies. Recently, events and festivals have also emerged as ways of attracting visitors to rural areas, acting as drivers of tourism as well as community and economic development. In this chapter, I consider the role of events through a lens of rural-urban interdependencies to discuss the ways that flows of people and ideas to and from rural areas may impact social and cultural practices in rural communities. I discuss examples of rural ice hockey events to illustrate how interdependencies - rather than divisions - may be a useful way to conceptualize rural-urban relationships and their impacts on social change and community development in contemporary rural contexts.