A sense of rurality: events, placemaking and community participation in a small Welsh town

This paper focuses on an event, the World Alternative Games (WAG), as a site for the development and maintenance of community. The research shows how a rural community uses its own interpretation of space to create new activities, inspire collaborative development and promote tourism within a particular locale. Drawing upon ethnographic research undertaken at the third edition of the WAG in 2016, it provides a social constructivist account of community participation. Activities, interactions and symbolic connections occurring in the spaces of Britain's smallest town shed light on the processes through which a sense of rurality develops in relation to an out-of-the-ordinary use of the rural landscape.