Guest editorial: Evaluating cities of culture

Funding

In our original call for papers, we invited articles that dealt with the ways evaluation has been used – and perhaps in some cases, misused – in policymaking. This Special Issue is one of the outputs of the Cities of Culture Research Network (CCRN), funded by the UK’s Arts and Humanities Research Council and operating from 2019 until 2021. CCRN’s main aim was to create an interdisciplinary space where academics, postgraduate researchers and local, national and international policy-makers could pursue a better collective understanding of CoCs, while specifically exploring the conditions and procedures required to create productive links between evaluation and new policy development. CCRN included ECoC, UKCoC and London Borough of Culture projects delivered by British cities and connected UK researchers with their counterparts in Aarhus (Denmark) and Galway (Ireland).