The uses and misuses of the evaluation of cities and capitals of culture

Since the 1980s, culture-led regeneration has gradually become absorbed into mainstream city planning and urban policy, with a growing acceptance of the value of culture in transforming environments, economies and communities. Cultural mega-events (Jones, 2020), like the European Capital of Culture (ECoC), the UK City of Culture (UKCoC) and other national and international City of Culture (CoC) initiatives across the globe, have often been seen as effective catalysts and accelerators for urban regeneration strategies through the
delivery of a focused and intensive programme of cultural activities, usually lasting a year. 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 tocreate 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).
As part of our work on CCRN, we noted a research gap in critical studies on evaluation (Bianchiniet al., 2022). Evaluation studies and impact assessments are often portraying CoCs as producing positive socio-economic effects, improving the image of cities and attracting tourists and inward investment. While there are many isolated studies about the impacts of CoC programmes, they generally neither explore medium and long-term effects (with the
possible exception of Garcia and Cox (2013)) nor the often-complicated relationship between evaluation and policy making.