European Capitals of Culture: Success Strategies and Long-Term Effects
____________________________________________________________________________________________ (impacts, in selected areas). This effectively means that the main bulk of this study is about what has been considered important to make the ECoC a success, both in terms of input, output and impacts. The area for which less evidence is available is in terms of the actual relationships between both areas (what the model represents as arrows), so the most this study can do is infer some cause-and-effect relationships, but with clear limitations. These and other significant gaps in evidence are pointed out within the relevant Chapters and Sections of this study. Finally, beyond these areas of specifically ECoC-related evidence, the study has also considered a selection of contextual factors about respective host cities. This assessment has been undertaken in order to determine whether it is possible to talk of clear ECoC city typologies, an exercise already attempted at the early stages of the ECoC Programme (Richards, 1996). The chosen contextual factors are as follows:
Population size of the ECoC host (city and, where relevant, region) at the time of hosting the title Geographical location (North, South, West or East Europe, as defined by the UN Stats office) EU positioning in the context of successive enlargements (EU-12, EU-15, EU-25, EU-27, accession countries, non-EU members)
Secondary research: Document mapping and literature review Due to the very wide scope of the subject of study (effectively, up to 2019, 60 host cities in 30 countries over 34 years), the study has focused on secondary data. This has required a three-stage approach:
Document mapping: Involving an extensive search and validation of all available published material on the ECoC Programme since its inception, and some basic codification to assist in the distribution of core reading by respective area specialists. The following pages offer a summary of the main results of such mapping.
Literature review: Assessment of all valid material, involving detailed quantitative and qualitative data mining to populate core indicators, followed by their statistical or content analysis6; and, in parallel, identification of key quotes and summary of findings against each research question. The remainder of this study presents the analysis of such findings.
The objective of the document mapping exercise was to compile a representative list of key references pertaining to the ECoC Programme, covering the entire history of the initiative and using a broad and well-designed typology to accurately classify materials gathered. As it was not within the scope of the exercise to consider material relating to failed ECoC bid cities, only materials concerning host cities were evaluated – with analysis focused to a great extent on documents relating to the actual delivery and impacts of ECoC programmes as opposed to bid documentation (the latter providing instead an ancillary component to the other elements of the document base). The material gathered via the literature review was used by the research team to identify evidence of impacts as well as long-term effects7 for host cities up to 2008, and medium-term effects for host cities during the period 2009 to 2011. Cities from 2012 onwards were also analysed, mainly from the perspective of key defined objectives and approaches (or commitments) to evaluation that future research can test them against.
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Find a detailed list of core indicators by Chapter in Appendix B. Defined as effects that are discernible more than one year after hosting the title.
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