This article offers a way of understanding not only Festival Cities, but also the Creative City paradigm and to some extent the practices employed through the convergence of culture and urban planning that has come to dominate the logic of urban space. In its exploration of the 20th century’s nascent administrative imaginary of urban cultural festivals it is in part, a genealogy, but I hope it offers more, that it elaborates a re-reading of the urban predisposition towards a culturalized identity and the curation of affective urban space, which despite the economic downturn, continues to privilege its own legibility. In so doing, this article argues that the city promotes not only its cultural capital, but also its administration.