Mid-August, half past eight in the evening. The bass does not come down the lane, it comes over the roofs, from behind, from where the stage has its back. From the back, music does not sound like music. It sounds like a pulse, a rushing, and every few minutes like a voice shouting something you cannot make out, followed by a cheer that arrives two seconds late. I stand in the doorway of my own place and count the occupied tables. It does not take long.

It is not the audience area that is being sounded. It is the whole of Steinberggasse, until midnight. There are perfectly pleasant sounds among it, whole sets I stop and listen to. And there are beats among it that take the floor with them, walls of guitar and throats screaming what is presumably magnificent twelve metres in front of the stage and merely loud thirty metres behind it. Whoever is sitting with us did not choose this. They wanted to eat.

The restaurants that are here all year round make an effort. All of them. That is not a courtesy phrase but an observation from fifteen years: not everyone succeeds in winning guests and keeping them, but everywhere it is attempted. Whoever pays a rent, holds a licence, employs staff and opens even when nobody comes is not only making an offer to guests. They are making an offer to the place. A lane without a Beiz is a corridor.

Town festivals used to be welcome occasions for us. People streamed into the old town, and at some point they streamed in to us too: for a beer before the concert, for something warm afterwards, for the toilet in between. A little extra, some said. Others had long since built those weeks firmly into their calculations, because without them they would not have carried the summer.

In recent years that has shifted. The events have become more professional, and that means above all: more commercial. A festival no longer finances itself through tickets and sponsors alone, but through the exploitation of its ground. Pitches are allocated, catering areas let, concessions put out to tender. Every square metre inside the perimeter contributes to the return. That is sound business and understandable cultural policy. It has only one side effect.

Because what emerges is a closed world. A scaffold of round timber, two storeys high, a wooden staircase up, containers in green and yellow, a canopy of sun sails in pastel shades. Beneath it a row of colourful signs: Himalaya Burger. Klaus Kimchi. Tenz Momo. Grill Wraps. Zurich Wine. Craft Beer Bar. Indian Vegetarian. Li-Beirut. Planted. And in the middle of it, white on yellow, the sign «Schlemmerei», the feasting zone, pointing the way into the festival's own catering area. It is well made, it is lovingly designed, and it is completely interchangeable. Exactly the same scaffold with exactly the same signs could stand in a hall on the Swiss plateau, in a car park in Basel or, as a colleague drily remarked, on the moon. The moon would have the advantage that nobody complains about the noise.

Of all events, the Musikfestwochen are a sad example of this, because they were originally the opposite. They began in 1976 as an ironic answer to the Lucerne music festival, which was felt to be elitist, with a budget of 1,500 francs, in a music venue on Neustadtgasse. Since 1978 they have stood in Steinberggasse, not as a foreign body, but because a handful of people from Winterthur felt their town could do with more music. The festival came out of the old town and took place in the old town. Today it takes place in Winterthur. That is a difference of one word and of an entire relationship.

It is hard to blame the festival for this. It grows, it pays fees, security, insurance, wages. All of it has become more expensive. So it exploits what it has: its ground. Only this ground is not merely ground. It is a lane where people live and work all year round. And so the peculiar constellation arises that an event which for decades filled the restaurants now empties them, for twelve days, in the middle of the season, with the rent running.

At the Albanifest it is different and yet comes to the same thing. That is the festival of the clubs and associations, the largest old-town festival in the country, and the clubs have honestly earned their right to it: they build up, they pour out, they clear away, and what is left over finances a year of gym hall, music stands or training camp. Only the resident restaurants stand right at the back of the queue. Directly in front of their own door a little Beiz selling the same thing, cheaper, with volunteers instead of employees and without fixed costs. By now almost all of them close on that weekend. Not out of defiance, but because in the end they paid out more than came in. A town festival at which the town's hosts lock up: that takes some doing.

In the end the question is not whether a festival may make money. It must. The question is how you tell that an event belongs to a place. Not by the coordinates. Not by the church tower in the background of the photos. But by who is involved, who earns alongside, and who is still there the next morning.

This week the timber structure is being taken apart, and that too is loud: drills from seven, beams dropping onto the cobbles, a forklift beeping in reverse, shouts from one storey to the other in between. The containers go back, the sun sail is folded, the signs vanish into the depot until the next deployment, somewhere. What remains is a lane with a few stains on the cobbles. And the restaurants, opening up as on any other Tuesday.