European Capitals of Culture: Success Strategies and Long-Term Effects
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Coherence and ownership of vision
Coherence and ownership of vision is an area that has improved considerably since the inception of the Programme. While most of the early ECoC editions did not develop a special vision for the ECoC (tending, rather, to showcase what was already established and widely recognised in their locality), since the 1990s, ECoC hosts have become more sophisticated and ambitious in their ECoC proposals (see Chapter 3), in part due to greater demands for specificity by the European Commission.68 However, with new regulations and pressures, new challenges have emerged as well. The most common challenges to attempts at developing an ECoC vision are as follows:
Failure to set and sustain a vision or mission statement from the beginning The issue of ‘authenticity’ and how to ensure local ownership The wide range of goals and their potentially contradictory nature
Failure to set out a vision of the host city’s ECoC journey from an early stage The importance of ECoC cities mapping out a clear vision for their ECoC journey is noted in a considerable proportion of published material, and was reiterated by most of the contributors to the study’s first expert workshop (ICC Workshop I, April 2013). An important point raised in this regard was that this necessity was accentuated due to the excessive emphasis on providing specific programming detail at the bidding stage. Workshop contributors claimed that bidding cities would spend so much time identifying specific areas of programming to illustrate their capacity to deliver, that they would fail to spend the time required to reflect on why such activity was relevant in the first place. For instance, Beyazıt and Tosun (2006: 10) indicate that their analysis of Istanbul 2010 reveals “a lack of vision-oriented comprehensive action plan [sic]”, and that, as a result of this, the programme constituted a series of events without a strategy or objectives to support it. Confusion between the specifics of programming and the need for an overarching strategic vision is considered widespread and an important challenge is to ensure the coherence, distinctiveness and sustainability of programming. As noted in Chapter 7 (‘Recommendations’), this is an area where the European Commission could still play a more defining role and where clear knowledge-transfer mechanisms can be most helpful. The Study Workshop I participants highlighted the detrimental effect of placing too much emphasis on event detail at the bidding stage, before a sound mission statement has been defined and fully developed, validated and appropriated by key stakeholders. Such detail, and the expectation that final programming should adhere to original event proposals from the bidding stage, hinders the city’s ability to develop a sound vision afterwards, and forces organisers to compromise in order to keep often disparate events as part of the programme (ICC Workshop I, April 2013). Commission representatives, meanwhile, have indicated that the bidding requirements are more nuanced than what is suggested by previous workshop participants, that the main emphasis is on clarity about the ‘concept’ for the year, and that the Selection Panel understands that bid ideas can evolve over time (ICC Workshop II, June 2013). Regardless of these caveats, the current ECoC Application guidelines (European Commission, 2012) require cities to provide specific information about events, and request that cities ‘substantiate’ how they plan to meet a range of Programme objectives. In this context, it is not surprising that cities spend considerable time thinking of detailed programming examples, which may, in turn, limit their capacity to consider carefully enough the overarching vision, or result in specific event programming promises that may eventually contradict or limit the credibility of the overarching vision.
68
See Chapter 2, in particular, for greater clarity on bidding guidelines from Decision 1419/1999/EC onwards.
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