Culture Night, the city's largest annual event, took place on Saturday, August 24. The festival was a great success. The city center was bustling with life and events on every street corner. Reykjavík City spent months preparing for the festival in collaboration with numerous partners.
Initial planning meetings for Culture Night begin in January. Discussions start with emergency services like police and fire departments, and partners such as Strætó Public Transport, e-scooter rental companies, tourism representatives, city businesses, and many others. Each year, lessons from the previous festival improve response and planning. Early summer sees full collaboration between the City and the many event organizers who make the festival great. Processing of applications for the Landsbankinn event fund begins. As the date approaches, safety measures, street closures, parking, maintenance, flag pole stands, bike racks, toilets, e-scooter parking, promotions, and more are reviewed. This popular participatory festival is a true collaboration between the public, institutions, businesses, and the City.
Street closures and monitoring
Preparation of the city center for Culture Night begins at 3am on Saturday. The festival area closes to vehicle traffic from 7am to 11pm to ensure pedestrian access during the day. For the Reykjavík Marathon, equipment must be set up and streets closed to clear the way for runners. As soon as the marathon ends, cleanup begins.
Closures include:
- 20 cars and about 400m of street closure equipment
- 57 directional signs
- 150-200 cones
- 150 traffic signs
- 100 accordion gates
We had a total of 12 manned closures and 63 unmanned closures.
Keeping the city center clean is crucial. A diligent team from Reykjavík City Maintenance quickly and efficiently collected trash and emptied bins. Many worked around the clock before and after the festival.
Staff who started their shift early Saturday morning finished at 2am Sunday. A new team arrived at 5am Sunday for cleanup lasting past noon.
An estimated 150 Reykjavík City employees were involved in preparing and executing Culture Night this year.
Youth supervision
From the afternoon until the festival ended—and in some cases much longer—a large group of staff provided assistance and advice to young people as needed. In total, 31 youth center staff were working on Culture Night: 19 from Reykjavík City and 12 from other municipalities. Four employees accompanied police teams and social workers, one worked in a shelter, and 26 people worked in the field in six youth center teams. The highly visible staff talked to young people in the city center and provided assistance where needed. Cooperation with the capital area police went extremely well.
Visits to Reykjavík City website
Visits to reykjavik.is last week totaled 196,412, making it the busiest week since tracking began. Saturday was the busiest day with nearly 70,000 visits. Users viewed 400,683 pages. Culture Night pages were viewed over 200,000 times, including 30,000 views in English. More than 83% of service users accessing Culture Night information do so via smartphone.