Roskilde Festival is the largest music and arts festival in Northern Europe, and also one of the oldest. Year after year, it reinvents itself, adapting to new challenges and the changing demands of the attendees. In 2023, the festival’s newest vision called Utopia invites participants to envision and create a better future, in a time marked by uncertainty. And the first step is to doing that is to experiment!

Talking about experimentations, the camping at Roskilde Festival is a good test bed to push towards a more exciting and sustainable future. This is what the Collaborative Camping Initiative is for: getting the chance to involve everyone in the planning and transformation of how camping is done at the festival.

Planning a festival actually takes a year, so it is now that these discussions have to take place if we want to implement changes for Roskilde Festival 2024. A first workshop was organized in May before the 2023 edition of the festival with various employees and volunteers of the festival from different departments.

The workshop had several objectives:

• To connect and get an overview of what everyone is working on, so that we can embark on the journey as a united group.
• To generate initial ideas for development projects that we should start after this year’s festival.
• To identify specific areas of focus and observations to be made during the upcoming festival.

The agenda for the day included a welcome and introduction, presentations by the planning department about the future limitations and changes to the camping area, and working in smaller groups to assess ongoing activities and plan for the future. The small groups focused on the four bottom lines of the festival which are: environment, art, social aspects, and economics.