The conventional approach to cultural events treats attendance as the primary measure of success. Events are planned for high-traffic days, promoted heavily, and considered failures if turnout is low. This creates a cultural landscape where only established artists with guaranteed audiences can justify holding events, where programming clusters around weekends and holidays, and where there is nothing to do on an ordinary weekday evening – cultural participation requires advance planning, checking what is on, blocking out the right evening, making sure enough friends are coming to make it worthwhile.
We wanted to test a different model: one where small attendance is the norm rather than a failure, where events happen frequently enough that people can drop by without planning, where any given night offers options even if some of those options are niche enough that only you and your friends and a couple of strangers show up. The goal is not to maximize attendance at individual events but to maximize the frequency and accessibility of events overall. A city where there is always something happening is fundamentally different from a city where things happen occasionally but draw big crowds when they do.
Testing the model
To pilot this, Public Policy Lab partnered with a local karaoke venue to hold a series of free community events open to the general public. We deliberately scheduled events on Sundays and Mondays – days when the venue was often unbooked, unlike the high-demand Thursday through Saturday nights. The venue provided the space, the screen, and the seating; we handled programming. This demonstrated something important: existing businesses can serve as cultural infrastructure during their off-peak hours with minimal additional investment. The venue was already there, already had the equipment, and was underutilized on slower nights. What was missing was simply the programming and the invitation to the public.
The pilot included film screenings of Pride and Prejudice, Spirited Away, The Odd Couple, and Shrek – selected to span different genres and appeal to different audiences – as well as poetry reading events. All events were free and open to the public, with no registration required. Promotion was minimal, essentially word-of-mouth among people we knew. This was intentional: we were not trying to draw crowds, we were trying to see whether a low-key, low-promotion model could still bring people out.
Small turnout as proof of concept
Turnout was small. The most attended event had about 16 people. Some evenings had six or eight. By conventional metrics, these would be considered disappointing. But by the metrics we care about, this was exactly what we were hoping to demonstrate. People showed up to a free event on a Sunday or Monday evening, with almost no promotion, to watch a film or listen to poetry with strangers. They did not need a big crowd to justify coming. They did not need it to be a special occasion. They just came because something was happening and it sounded interesting.
This is the model we want to normalize. When events are frequent and expectations are calibrated appropriately, six people at a poetry reading is not a flop – it is a poetry reading. Eight people watching Spirited Away together on a Monday night is not a failure to fill seats – it is a nice Monday night. The pressure to perform, to draw crowds, to justify the logistics through attendance numbers, evaporates when the baseline expectation is simply that something is happening and whoever wants to come can come. This also creates space for content that would never survive under a big-audience model: niche interests, experimental work, amateur performers trying things out. When low attendance is normal rather than embarrassing, people can take risks.
Scaling from pilot to city-wide programming
People will attend small, low-key cultural events if they are accessible and free – even without heavy promotion, even on off-peak days. Existing businesses can provide venue infrastructure during underutilized hours. Programming can be sustained with minimal logistics when the goal is frequency rather than spectacle. The next step is to replicate this across multiple locations, build a consistent calendar where there is always something happening somewhere, and develop the online directory so that anyone wondering what to do tonight can find an answer. The goal is a city where cultural participation is routine rather than occasional, where you can decide at 7pm that you want to go out and find something happening by 8pm, where events are planned around ensuring that something is always on rather than around maximizing attendance. The pilot showed this is possible. Now we scale it.
[Photos from events to be inserted here]