European Capital Of Culture Research Articles

Examining antecedents of residents’ support for the European Capital of Culture project – event’s sustainability perception, emotional solidarity, community attachment and brand trust

PurposeThe primary purpose of this paper is to investigate the effects on support for the European Capital of Culture (ECoC) project development of residents’ perception of the project’s sustainability, emotional solidarity toward tourists, community attachment and brand trust.Design/methodology/approachSurvey research was conducted among 303 residents of Novi Sad, which has been selected to be the ECoC for the year 2022.FindingsThe findings confirmed the positive roles of three aspects of the event’s sustainability and three facets of emotional solidarity in shaping local people’s support for the ECoC event development. Besides, findings show the positive effect of residents’ community attachment and ECoC brand trust in predicting their supportive attitudes for the event development. Finally, results highlight which areas of the event’s sustainability are still unsatisfactory from the residents’ perspective, making it easier for event practitioners to optimally focus their attention and resources on enhancing problematic areas of the event’s sustainability.Originality/valueThe present study contributes to existing tourism literature as it is the first to explore the role local people’s perception of event sustainability, emotional solidarity toward tourists, community attachment and brand trust plays in their support for the ECoC event development. In addition, a unique contribution lies in the confirmation of brand trust as a significant antecedent of residents’ support, as this relationship remained an unexplored area in tourism literature. Practical implications, specifically derived for ECoC event practitioners, which should also find their place in securing residents’ support toward the development of any cultural event that attracts visitors, are discussed in the paper.

Ask the people: Building tourism policies from the perception of residents: The case of Novi Sad European Capital of Culture 2022

Tourism destinations need to actively engage all their stakeholders that apart from tourists, service providers, investors, and other, also includes residents that are not always in the focus of decision-makers. However, they can be a strong opponent when showing resentment towards the tourism development or the proposed plans. Therefore, the paper analyses the perception of residents towards the urban spaces of Novi Sad. The city is awarded as the European Capital of Culture for 2021 and therefore reassess its urban settings and tourism policies with respect to the wishes of residents. Data for the research was collected by in-person interviews with 797 local residents. The results show the residents are primarily satisfied with the green/recreational areas, and the most visited point is the city centre. The essential urban markers are Petrovaradin Fortress, The Name of Mary Church, The Matica srpska, The Danube, and Serbian National Theatre. From the practical perspective, the results can enable authorities and tourism officials to identify spatially dependent attributes that are important for the destination image and residents' quality of life.

Using GANs to Generate Lyric Videos

Artificial intelligence (AI) technologies have become increasingly common in creative practices in recent years. The rising number of research initiatives that emerge at the intersection of AI and art prompts researchers and artists to analyze the creative and explorative applications of AI in the context of art. First, this paper describes a specific AI art piece, an AI-generated music video for a song called Initiation, illustrating how AI can be used for creative purposes. This art piece was created in the context of the opening of Esch2022, the European Capital of Culture. Then, the paper provides an overview of the potential implications of AI technologies on the general understanding and creation of art.

The first results of the excavation in the surroundings of St. George’s Chapel in Veszprém in 2022

In September 2021, in relation to the preparation of an archaeological impact study of the area, a team of the National Archaeological Institute of the Hungarian National Museum started a trial excavation on properties of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Veszprém in the Castle Hill of Veszprém. The research was carried out in the “European Capital of Culture 2023” programme. In February 2022, parallel with the probing, preventive fieldwork started, the first step of which was a full-scale excavation of the medieval St. George’s Chapel and its surroundings, including the neighbouring basement of the Great Seminary in the north. In the present study, we summarise the first results that have expanded our knowledge of this outstanding historical site.

Cultural mega-events in heritage-rich cities: Insights from the European Capital of Culture and broader policy perspectives

Cultural mega-events in heritage-rich cities: Insights from the European Capital of Culture and broader policy perspectives

“Force Majeure”: The Transformation of Cultural Strategy as a Result of Urban Shrinkage and Economic Crisis. The Case of Riga, Latvia

Cultural strategies have been commonly used to address the consequences of urban shrinkage, particularly in a post-industrial context. Proliferated growth-oriented models, such as “creative city,” have threatened the sustainable development of shrinking cities. Alternative cultural models that prioritize social inclusion, local sensitivity, and affordability are thus urgently needed. Using Riga as a case study, this paper explores the process of transformation to an alternative cultural strategy in a post-socialist shrinking city and identifies planning and governance tools that stimulate its development. Employing qualitative interviews and document analysis, the relations between emergent and deliberate cultural strategies are investigated. The results show how the organization of the European Capital of Culture 2014 during the severe shrinkage and economic crisis led to five elements of an alternative cultural strategy: (1) a shift from investing in cultural “hardware” to “software,” (2) a locally sensitive approach, (3) cultural decentralization, (4) strengthened civic engagement, and (5) inclusiveness. These elements of an emergent strategy were recognized by local authorities and stimulated changes in the deliberate cultural strategy. This study supports the idea that urban shrinkage offers municipalities an opportunity to reimagine traditional planning practices and emphasizes the important role of civic actors’ participation in coproducing public services and governance strategies.

User Evaluation of a Multi-Platform Digital Storytelling Concept for Cultural Heritage

Digital storytelling platforms have proven to be a great way of bringing cultural heritage closer to people. What lacks is a deeper understanding of the user experience of such systems, especially in multi-platform digital storytelling. For the last three years, we have been developing a project called Spotlight Heritage Timisoara, which is at its core a digital storytelling platform for the city of Timisoara (Romania), soon to be European Capital of Culture in 2023. The project consists of a website, mobile applications, and interactive museographic and street exhibitions. This paper presents a multi-platform usability evaluation study which employed semi-structured interviews, observations, think-aloud protocol, SUS questionnaire, Net Promoter Score and Product Reaction Cards to gather insights from 105 participants and reveal usability problems in the Spotlight Heritage context. We found out that the four platforms, i.e., interactive touchscreen table, desktop/laptop, mobile and Augmented Reality, have very good usability scores, are considered accessible and useful, work seamlessly together, and create user satisfaction and loyalty, across demographic groups, having the potential to bring people closer to cultural heritage.

Enjoyable events, excited audiences? Event experience during the Special Weekends of the European Capital of Culture Wrocław 2016

ABSTRACT Growing interest with different aspects of event experience measurement and meaning has resulted in establishing an Event Experience Scale (EES) which has been used for quantitative comparative research on events. The aim of this work is to compare event experiences of participants in multiple cultural events during Special Weekends offered as part of ECOC Wrocław 2016. EES is applied to capture variations across the social categories of participants and across different types of events. This study is based on quantitative data collected from January till December 2016, using self-completion online surveys. The size of the sample was N = 3402. The study fills a gap in event experience studies by comparing cultural event experiences happening over a longer period and grasping the changing contexts of events attended by varied audiences. Results support the importance of affective and cognitive dimensions and boost the importance of novelty dimension, at the same time, the study refutes previous studies on more positive event experiences of people with higher economic and social status.

The image of contemporary architecture of Wrocław depicted in recent tourist commercial and Internet media

The aim of the paper is to present the tourist and image potential of contemporary public architecture. Wrocław was chosen as the research subject, as it is a historical center with an extremely rich architectural heritage, which has enjoyed great interest among visitors for centuries. With the announcement of Wrocław as the European Capital of Culture 2016, and then the European Best Destination in 2018, its attractiveness increased significantly, which was reflected not only in the number of visitors, but also in the advertising materials themselves. Both before and after arrival, millions of tourists encounter a multitude of various advertising forms, both virtual and printed, which determine the direction of sightseeing and shape a specific image and perception of the city. In general opinion, Wrocław is considered a historic city, the most interesting places of which are concentrated around the Old Town and Ostrów Tumski. The Centennial Hall, built at the beginning of the 20th century, stands out from the „newer heritage”. The idea of the study, however, was to answer the question whether contemporary architecture is used in any way in the current tourist advertisement of the city. Another goal was to identify and list the most frequently appearing objects from the adopted group, and to analyze the manner of their presentation. Based on the collected materials, efforts were made to assess the role of the media in creating a tourist product in terms of promoting local architecture in recent years. At the same time, an attempt was made to evaluate the role of architecture in creating the city’s progressive brand. In the research, the author used the method of analyzing the existing statistical data, iconographic research and the method of analyzing the content of advertising materials, as well as scientific studies on cultural heritage and tourism in the city. The final part of the paper shows that modern architecture can be a significant element increasing the tourist attractiveness of the city.

Sound atmospheres in architecture: a case study in the South of Italy

ABSTRACT This essay explores sound atmospheres on the ground of the city of Matera, Italy, through the authors’ academic practices that work across disciplinary borders, i.e. architectural design and sensory experiences, storytelling/poetry and architecture. In particular, the authors carry out a research project composed of sound recordings, perception workshops and soundscape installations for students of architecture. A designer or architectural student’s curriculum should include the acoustic properties of architectural space that may shape a user’s esthetic judgment. Matera exhibits a long history of contradictions. Seventy years ago the city bore the label, “the shame of Italy” for the precarious living conditions of the inhabitants, but today the city is listed as a World Heritage Site, and European Capital of Culture 2019. The polarities of Matera present a basis to study the characteristic soundscapes of a modern city still engraved by the past. The research represents a first attempt at methodical sonic experiments on the vast scale of the entire city of Matera with the involvement of university students, researchers, teachers, and citizens that culminated in the production of five urban soundscape installations.

Culture and heritage as a means to foster quality of life? The case of Wrocław European Capital of Culture 2016

ABSTRACT Wrocław European Capital of Culture 2016, with its ‘Spaces for Beauty’ slogan, serves to show that cumulating financial resources and human effort to produce a large number of projects and initiatives in the field of heritage provides an opportunity to improve the quality of life for residents. This paper discusses two aspects of quality of life: access to and participation in culture as well as relations with urban space and built heritage. Both impact numerous areas of our lives, such as individual satisfaction, self-development, identity building, sense of belonging, sense of security, aesthetic pleasure, entertainment, learning, socialization of individuals and building social capital. This paper aims to bridge the gap between research on mega-events and the discussion on heritage, offering insights into the potential use of heritage as a development mechanism.

Internationalizing small-sized cities through mega-events: the case of Matera-Basilicata 2019 European Capital of Culture

ABSTRACT The paper is part of an ongoing thesis on the city of Matera (Italy). The research questions the effects and challenges of a double international recognition on urban space production: the mega-event ‘European Capital of Culture’ and the UNESCO World Heritage status. Using Matera’s bid book to become the European Capital of Culture, the paper focuses on the vocabulary used by the experts in charge of the application and questions the city models underlying the cultural programme. Through the use of an entrepreneurial vocabulary, the stakeholders of the Matera–Basilicata 2019 Foundation propose to transform the classic modes of bureaucratic management and the way of conceiving urban design. In this perspective, the challenge is no longer to invest in infrastructural components or public facilities but to create a new attractive image of the city. In this context, the Foundation in charge of the organization of the event acts as a company to promote new narratives and to provide new services for the city. The label ‘European Capital of Culture’ is therefore used to promote the city through a new urban vision, which reinterprets the local and historical urban representations.

Short-term gains and long-term challenges to learning from mega-event planning in the city of Genoa

ABSTRACT For decades, a mega-event strategy to urban development has been popular with developers and politicians as a way to deliver fast results that can help to regenerate areas of cities and boost a city’s global image. While this approach can deliver quick results in the short term, the literature has not yet investigated the lasting affects this has at an institutional level on city planning and decision-making processes over the long term. One interesting case to investigate this phenomenon is the city of Genoa, which hosted three large events over a period of 12 years to regenerate the city centre and reconnect it to its de-industrialized waterfront. While the 1992 Expo, 2001 G8 Summit and 2004 European Capital of Culture significantly altered the urban fabric of the city centre, this paper will take a closer look at the new approaches and strategies decision makers implemented in the planning of these events, analysing whether they continued to utilize these planning tools and approaches following the events. The paper finds that while the city improved in its planning of events through the process of hosting the three events, it struggled to maintain such innovative approaches as part of routine practice post-event.

A mega-event in a small city: community participation, heritage and scale in the case of Pafos 2017 European Capital of Culture

ABSTRACT Pafos’s ‘Open Air Factory’ strategy for the 2017 ECoC was a simple yet imaginative concept born out of a strong desire to re-draw the city’s small-town character, diversify its economy, and steer social and cultural development along new paths. In order to counter the city’s limited economic resources and cultural infrastructure, the event’s vision was based on the two assets that Pafos has in abundance: a rich cultural heritage and a community eager for change. This paper tracks the uneven path of community involvement during the ECoC bidding, planning, implementation and post-implementation stages, and looks at urban heritage as the shared field of convergence for the multiple modes and degrees of participation in the realization of a mega-event. The city’s small size allows for original insights into the opportunities and limitations of the intersections between community, heritage and scale in the case of mega-event-based urban regeneration.

European Capitals of Culture. Visual Standardization Through Generic Images

Cities representing European Capitals of Culture (ECCs) are chosen to promote the diversity and multiculturalism of a global city. But this multicultural and international character comes with the price of standardization, a concept enhanced by the EU through the idea of togeth- erness, and individuals belonging to the same cultural space. Therefore, the visual communication of those cities can be more homogenized, less descriptive and without particularities related to a culture of a specific geo- graphic area. Following Jewitt, Bezemer and O`Halloran (2016), this paper aims to employ a multimodal analysis of images used by the local authori- ties of Plovdiv and Matera (European Capitals of Culture in 2019) on their websites. Therefore, it aims to demonstrate how these two cities communi- cate use generic images, focusing on what Machin and van Leeuwen (2007) identify as characteristics of global images, namely timelessness, low mo- dality, decontextualization and also relying on generic attributes, models and settings. As a result, images become more symbolical and conceptual, causing national identities to diminish in the viewers’ eyes, making cities seem familiar, thus enriching the togetherness of globalization.

The characteristics of Great Cultural Projects and their impact on architectural and urban heritage (1850–2012)

This study examines Great Cultural Projects (GCPs) as an element of the developmental process of cities. For this study, GCPs are regarded as a global phenomenon rather than cases that must be analyzed independently. The study focused on four types of GCPs: world and international exhibitions, horticultural exhibitions, Olympic Games, and the European Capitals of Culture. The research sample comprised 183 GCPs globally, organized between the middle of the 19th century to the beginning of the 21st century. The study analyzed the influence of different GCPs on city structure and urban heritage and focused on the distinctive development of each GCP type. The study’s novelty lies in recognition of the four main types of GCPs’ potential for multidimensional urban development and their diversified impact on the transformation of modern cities, along with the identification of potential threats, benefits, and development opportunities related to different GCP types.

The role of events in developing the cultural side of a city: Assessing events organized by European Capitals of Culture

People today are continuously searching for new experiences, and thus the events organized by a city can play an important role in influencing peoples’ decision to visit a certain city. In this regard, the title of European Capital of Culture can offer a city competitive advantage and it can help it improve its cultural as well as its social side. Hence, through the events organized while holding the title of European Capital of Culture, cities can better promote themselves as cultural cities, but they can also offer citizens and tourists diverse and interesting experiences and entertainment opportunities. Thus, we focused our research on the city of Aarhus. The purpose of our research was to assess the way Aarhus promoted itself through its events while having the title of European Capital of Culture in 2017, in order to extract some guidelines that could be further used as frame of reference by other cities in their development and promotion strategies. After analyzing one of the events organized by Aarhus- GrowOP - the only opera festival in Denmark designed for children, our findings revealed that the city used cultural events as a way to develop itself and attract tourists. The event was well organized, it was in line with the concept of the entire program of the city and through it, Aarhus aimed at integrating new and young audiences into its cultural life.

Matera: the Sassi through Trade, Consumption and Tourism

The European Capital of Culture (ECoC) process-event has contributed to amplify the main transformations of the commercial structure in Matera. This paper proposes an analysis of the recent transformation of the historical Sassi neighborhood, aimed at pointing out the changes in trade and consumption practices, considering the effects that the development of tourism, one among the main drivers of the changes occurred, has produced in this area. Indeed, the Sassi neighborhood represents a definitely peculiar commercial and touristic landscape: from the year of designation of Matera as ECoC until today, the neighborhood – already a privileged destination for local tourism – has invested in a decisive reconversion of its commercial spaces, focused on the food & drink segment. These commercial activities are addressed mainly for tourists, therefore the first and most evident result is, actually, the exclusion of the residents. What are the characteristics of such a touristic change? What is the position of these places in the urban context? What are the functions that characterize them? Attempting to answer these questions will enable to highlight the specific characteristics of the Sassi and their development based on the most remarkable forms of touristification.

CROSS-BORDER IDENTITY AS A DAILY RESISTANCE TACTIC OF COSMOPOLITANISM IN A TIME OF GLOBAL HEALTH EMERGENCY: GORIZIA-NOVA GORICA GO BORDERLESS

Ulrich Beck represented cosmopolitan society as overcoming the nation-states as the container of the respective civil societies. In order to understand these profound changes, sociology itself appears inadequate, populated as it is by definitions that Beck considers as zombie concepts: “the conceptual apparatus of the sociology of modernity appears in crisis because it is inadequate to describe the situation of societies in which the borders of the nation-states that contained them have dissolved in an extremely rapid period. Rather than a definitive departure from that sociology, Beck’s invitation to the international community of sociologists is to recalibrate their concepts in a cosmopolitan perspective» (Porcelli 2005: 8). The social contract, which was at the base of the construction of what Anderson defined the imagined communities, sanctioned the renunciation by the populations of part of their prerogatives of freedom favouring the security guaranteed by the sovereign power. The present global health emergency seems to have proposed the same social pact: more security and less freedom, especially people segregated within the resurging nation-states by new borders and walls. The remaining residue of globalisation is its economic-financial globalism. Ethnographic analysis along border areas reveals a consolidated cross-border identity experienced in people’s everyday lives as a tactic of resistance against the erection of new self-containment barriers. This contribution aims to analyse the salient aspects of this phenomenon in the city of Gorizia, which for decades has constituted an integrated metropolitan area of the Italian and Slovenian zones, defining a specific cross-border identity shared by both Italian and Slovenian citizens. This identity has not given way in front of the walls that have been restored in recent months in order to contain the contagion and therefore could represent what de Certeau defined as a tactic of resistance that in the present case bears witness to the invention of an increasingly cosmopolitan daily life. In this respect, the main points of the project book submitted for the candidacy of Gorizia-Nova Gorica as European Capital of Culture 2025 will be examined. The title of the bid book itself specifies the cosmopolitan identity of the area under analysis: “Go borderless”.

Regenerating the Historic Urban Landscape through Circular Bottom-Up Actions: The Urban Seeding Process in Rijeka

The increasing pressure on urban resilience and the parallel interest in the preservation of the Historic Urban Landscape (HUL) have opened new frontiers of research that find, in the principles of the circular economy, good responses. Cities need to remake themselves from pure consumption to more resilient and circular centers, finding inspiration in their cultural and natural heritage and the history that generated it. The City of Rijeka, Croatia, one of the partners in the CLIC project (an EU-funded Horizon 2020 research project entitled “Circular models Leveraging Investments in Cultural heritage adaptive reuse”), represents an exceptional example of how to manage the change from an industrial port city to a more sustainable and citizen-oriented living space, looking at the potentials of the cultural and historical layers as opportunities for the population. The City of Rijeka, aware of such potentials, applied successfully as a European Capital of Culture 2020 (ECoC 2020), while unlikely facing the negative impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic. In Rijeka, thanks to the CLIC Heritage Innovative Partnership (HIP) program, the efforts to associate the circular economy and historic urban landscape benefit from an exceptional local awareness of the urban cultural and natural heritage, permitting the elaboration of the cultural corridor concept. By using the historical river of the city, the Rječina, as a connecting line of several heritage assets leading toward the Sea waterfront, the cultural corridor represents a space of culture creation based on continuity and proximity, where all citizens can securely reappropriate dismissed parts of the city, similar to the commons’ management practice. The cultural corridor has been imagined as a spatial implementation model that needs actions to be actuated. A set of actions was designed through the urban seeding process, tested in a workshop methodology, meant to address the HUL regeneration through an awareness-raising and cocreation approach by codesigning through situated learning, possible permanent or temporary actions, activities, assets to be replicated in the corridor and, per extension, in the entire city. This article will explain the way the cultural corridor concept and urban seeding were generated in the City of Rijeka, giving evidence of the motivations and the proposals made in parallel with the existing initiatives of the city and its cultural movements.