Navigation
- Home
- European Capitals of Culture
- Institution of European Capitals of Culture
- ECoCs contributions to Europe connected through culture
- Europe under construction
- Candidate cities
- Imprint
Monitoring
A compound of tools, experts and procedures are used to monitor the progress made by cities once they have been designated the title to become European Capital of Culture.
Following steps matter in this procress:
- the role of the jury and its recommendations
- the report provided by the city itself
- independent sources of information
- final decision to award the Melina Mercouri prize
In all of this, it is not clear to what extent the views taken by artists are taken seriously into consideration and have as much weight, if not more than that of the experts serving on the Jury. Somehow accountability to whom remains at best at a level of recommendation as many evaluation reports show. A base line for judgement could be established as to what has happened between the pre-evaluation and final evaluation report, and what is known about what the city has undertaken since the title has been designated. While the first phase takes about one year, the second one stretches over five years and is indicated already by the budget in place when starting out on preparations.
There are many ifs and buts, open questions and final outcomes only for sure once a continuity has been established successfully. It is expected to hinge necessarily so on having hired an artistic director in time to see through the artistic and cultural programme, but very often this is not the case.
One reason for this relative weakness is that the European Commission does not have much power and the Jury itself is but an extended arm thereof without being linked to an Institution of European Capital of Culture. The latter would have the recognition of both the European Commission and the cities which have been, are and shall be European Capitals of Culture, and to which a definite contribution should be made in following categories (a first proposal with the need to work out further):
- reporting and documentation
- resource allocation
- involvement of citizens
- engagement of artists
- role of the cultural sector
- vision
- creative process
- communication
- learning out of failure / experience
- degree of synthesis attained in time to start the crucial year
Naturally this has to be counter checked with other proposals to ensure a substantial contribution is made. This will have to include above all two further aspects:
- cultural governance and responsibility for what is happening to culture in Europe so as to underline what interpretation of the term 'capital' pre-exists before entering the decisive year
- European dimension is about capitalizing on the Extra European value but how has it been used to instigate a process with signficant ramifications for the whole of Europe
« Procedure for the designation | Melina Mercouri Prize for Riga and Umea in 2014 »