Cities are experimenting the process of “festivalization”. From the Phytian games in Ancient Greece, music has been revealed as an occasion for celebration connected to the city but recently, the amount of music festivals has been growing at an exponential rate. These pop-up events acquire distinctiveness through being programmatic in nature, evaluating uses, movement flows and situations not considered in urban planning. For this reason, they can be considered as a new typology, finding themselves somewhere in between the theme park, the city and the garden. 
Among a catalog of the twenty-five most crowded festivals in the world, sixteen case studies are chosen to be mapped and studied through Kevin Lynch’s theory of the Image of the City. Glastonbury and Coachella are then compared in depth, mapping protocols and identifying possible invariant strategies.