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Toronto’s annual African music festival will not take place this summer after organizers and the city failed to find an alternative venue for the event that couldn’t secure a permit due to capacity issues.<\/p>\n
Music Africa of Canada, which runs Afrofest, cited concerns over reduced capacity at Woodbine Park, the festival’s longtime home.<\/p>\n
Organizers said the city told them the park’s operational limit would be capped at 5,000 people per day, even though its long-standing capacity is 17,000.<\/p>\n
The city disputed that restriction in a statement on Thursday, saying “there are simply no events with attendance exceeding 5,000 people per day that are scheduled to take place at Woodbine Park this year.”<\/p>\n
In any case, organizers said Afrofest typically draws as many as 40,000 people in a single day, which would leave thousands of people waiting outside the gates.<\/p>\n
City officials said they worked with organizers to explore alternative venues but factors such as availability and cost ruled out a change of location. <\/p>\n
This would have been the 38th year of the festival, one of Canada’s longest-running African cultural celebrations and the largest free African music festival in North America. The festival had been scheduled for mid-August.<\/p>\n
Organizers said they ran into delays securing a permit for the event and did not receive final direction from the city until June \u2014 leaving little time to find a new site.<\/p>\n
Even with planned safety upgrades, including ticketing and fencing, organizers said thousands of people would likely still show up expecting to get in, creating a risk they could not responsibly manage.<\/p>\n
The city said it will work with organizers in the coming months to prepare for next year’s event, acknowledging Music Africa’s “determined effort” to find a solution.<\/p>\n
“The additional lead time will allow Afrofest and the city to work together in the coming months on event planning for the 2027 festival, including locating a suitable venue,” Pat Tobin, general manager of economic development and culture, said in a statement. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Listen to this article Estimated 2 minutes The audio version of this article is generated by AI-based technology.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":836787,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[194291],"tags":[49,48,3302],"class_list":["post-836786","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-toronto","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-toronto"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/836786","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=836786"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/836786\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/836787"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=836786"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=836786"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=836786"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}