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It is well known that culture is a catalyst for change, helping economies respond to societal problems and demands and that culture is where people turn to in moments of crisis. In this case study around designing and implementing evaluation methodologies/frameworks for Coventry UK City of Culture 2021, it is suggested that in English public policy and within publicly invested arts there is a maturation of thinking around recognising/measuring the public value of culture including its social value. The purpose of this paper is to chart the recent policy of justifying cultural expenditure with social value claims and highlight challenges for evaluating activity within Coventry UK CoC 2021 as a change in wider policy is taking place.

This paper provides creative insights into the design and implementation of the evaluation methodologies/frameworks for Coventry UK City of Culture 2021. The authors of this paper as the collective team undertaking the evaluation of Coventry's year as UK City of Culture 2021 bring first-hand experiences of challenges faced and the need for a cultural mega-event to evidence its value.

The case study aims to address the concepts of measuring value within cultural events and argues that a paradigm shift is occurring in methods and concepts for evidencing the aforementioned value.

The case study within this paper focuses on the build-up period to the UK City of Culture 2021 year and the thinking and logic behind the creation of the evaluation/measurement framework and therefore does not include findings from the actual cultural year.

It is acknowledged that there are papers examining measuring and evidencing the “value” of cultural mega-events, the authors bring real-life first-hand experience of the concepts being utilised by them on the ground in the delivery and evaluation design of Coventry, UK City of Culture 2021.

This article explores the cultural politics of civic pride through Hull's year as UK City of Culture (UKCoC) in 2017. It unpicks some of the socio-political meanings and values of civic pride in Hull and critiques the ways in which pride, as an indicator of identity and belonging, was mobilised by UKCoC organisers, funders and city leaders. It argues for more nuanced and critical approaches to the consideration and evaluation of pride through cultural mega events (CMEs) that can take account of pride's multiple forms, meanings and temporalities.

A multidimensional, mixed methods approach is taken, incorporating the critical analysis of Hull2017 promotional materials and events and original interviews with a range of stakeholders.

The desire for socio-economic change and renewed identity has dominated Hull's post-industrial sense of self and is often expressed through the language of pride. This article argues that UKCoC organisers, cognisant of this, crafted and tightly controlled a singular pride narrative to create the feeling of change and legitimise the entrepreneurial re-branding of the city. At the same time, UKCoC organisers overlooked the opportunity to engage with and potentially reactivate the political culture of Hull, which like other “left behind” or “structurally disadvantaged” places, is becoming increasingly anti-political.

Through the case study of a relatively unresearched and under-represented city, this paper contributes to cultural policy literatures concerned with critically assessing the benefits and shortcomings of Cultural Mega Events and to a more specific field concerning Cities of Culture and the political cultures of their host cities. This paper also contributes to an emerging literature on the centrality of pride through the UK's post-Brexit Levelling Up agenda, suggesting that pride in place is becoming figured as a “universal theme” of the neoliberal city script.

The Hull City of Culture 2017 volunteer programme is widely celebrated and remains a key legacy of the designation. A 2019 master's project found that volunteers experienced a multitude of intangible personal benefits from their time volunteering with the programme. Taking an interpretivist stance, this article aims to capture these sentiments; what volunteering has meant to the volunteers themselves and what legacy it has left them, both as individuals and as residents of the city.

To investigate legacy over a longer period, the original qualitative research was supplemented with a similar number of interviews taken in 2021.

The 2019 focus groups were largely positive towards Hull City of Culture, and the effect it had on the volunteers and the city of Hull overall. Participants highlighted various intangible benefits and legacies, namely, personal well-being, perceptions of the city and a sense of community. The world in which the 2021 interviews took place is almost inconceivably different, yet the volunteers' feelings about their time with Hull City of Culture and its later iterations are remarkably similar to the earlier findings. Despite the changing circumstances, they too expressed positivity about the programme and its effect on them individually, and the city more widely.

The continued experience of intangible benefits from volunteering with the programme demonstrates an important legacy of Hull City of Culture 2017.

The rise of arts and culture is transforming citizen politics. Though new to many social scientists, this is a commonplace for many policy makers. We seek to overcome this divide by joining culture and the arts with classic concepts of political analysis. We offer an analytical framework incorporating the politics of cultural policy alongside the typical political and economic concerns. Our framework synthesizes several research streams that combine in global factors driving the articulation of culture into political/economic processes. The contexts of Toronto and Chicago are explored as both enhanced the arts dramatically, but Toronto engaged artists qua citizens, while Chicago did not.

This paper aims to investigate the European and Latin America urban cultural policies that could enhance cultural and creative sustainable tourism products development.

The methodological framework is based on a comparative case study regarding the importance, dynamics and policies associated to cultural and creative tourism in four Ibero-American cities, namely, Brasilia, Buenos Aires, Lisbon and Madrid.

This exploratory analysis underlines the growing importance of cultural and creative tourism in the four capital cities. On one hand, cities reveal different tourism impacts and, on the other hand, they are associated to different cultural and creative sector structures. Cities cultural and creative performance put in evidence that sustainable cities index, global talent competitiveness index and cultural and creative cities monitor, tend to position Madrid in the first place followed by, Lisbon, Buenos Aires and Brasilia.

In general, and despite the importance of space in the creative process, there is little research on the geography of the creative industries and there is a lack of cross-country comparative studies so that it is difficult to assess the particularities of each model of creativity.

Cities could enhance more efforts in investing, not only in the traditional cultural infrastructures but also on the new forms of culture, new technologies, new makers, new audiences based on their attributes, activities and labels, in a framework of urban sustainable policies based on “innovation,” “inclusiveness” and “interconnectivity.”

The originality of the paper lies in the comparative analysis of four cities based on cultural and creative sector and tourism interconnections. Simultaneously, it lies in an exploratory model application.

The interaction between the culture and tourism industries is naturally concentrated in cities. However, the effect of their co-agglomeration on urban tourism development depends on their level of integration. This study aims to answer the following questions: Can culture–tourism co-agglomeration promote the development of the tourism economy? Is the effect of culture–tourism co-agglomeration on tourism development moderated by culture–tourism integration? Does culture–tourism co-agglomeration have spatial spillover effects?

Taking 262 prefecture-level cities in China from 2009 to 2019 as the research sample, this study measures the degree of culture–tourism co-agglomeration using a co-agglomeration index and measured culture–tourism integration using a coupling coordination degree model. Using a threshold model and a spatial econometric model, this study examined the effect of culture–tourism co-agglomeration on urban tourism development.

Culture–tourism co-agglomeration had a positive effect on the urban tourism economy, and the effect differed according to geographical location and city grade. Moreover, culture–tourism co-agglomeration’s effect on the urban tourism economy was affected by the level of culture–tourism integration. When the level of culture–tourism integration crossed the threshold, the positive effect of culture–tourism co-agglomeration on the urban tourism economy will be enhanced. Finally, culture–tourism co-agglomeration had positive spatial spillover effects on surrounding cities.

This study integrated culture–tourism co-agglomeration, culture–tourism integration and urban tourism economy into the same research framework and innovatively analyzed the effect of the scale and quality of culture–tourism interaction on the urban tourism economy.

文化产业和旅游产业之间的互动性使其天然地在城市中集聚发展。然而, 文化和旅游协同集聚对城市旅游发展的影响取决于它们的融合发展水平。本研究旨在回答以下问题：文化和旅游协同集聚能否促进旅游经济的发展？文化和旅游协同集聚对城市旅游发展的作用是否受到文化和旅游融合发展水平的调节影响？文化和旅游协同集聚对城市旅游发展的影响是否具有空间溢出效应？

本文以2009-2019年中国262个地级及以上城市为研究样本, 采用协同集聚指数测度城市文化和旅游集聚水平, 采用耦合协调度模型测度城市文化和旅游融合发展水平, 并通过构建面板门槛模型和空间计量模型, 检验文化和旅游协同集聚对城市旅游发展的影响。

文化和旅游协同集聚对城市旅游发展具有正向的促进作用, 而且这种影响会因为地理位置和城市等级的不同而存在差异。此外, 文化和旅游协同集聚对城市旅游发展的促进作用还受到文旅融合发展水平的影响, 当文旅融合发展水平跨越发展门槛后, 文化和旅游协同集聚对城市旅游发展的正向影响得到增强。最后, 文化和旅游协同集聚对周边城市具有积极正向的空间溢出效应。

本文将文化和旅游协同集聚、文化和旅游融合发展、城市旅游发展纳入统一框架, 创新性地分析了文化和旅游互动发展的规模和质量对城市旅游发展的影响。

The UK city of culture (UKCoC) scheme developed out of Liverpool’s year as European Capital of Culture in 2008 and is synonymous with urban renewal. The purpose of this paper is to examine the challenges of bidding for this scheme.

The authors conducted semi-structured telephone interviews with bid team members from four out of the five short-listed cities for the 2021 award. Respondents were situated across the country and, at the time, finalising their Stage 2 bids. Thematic analysis was conducted to analyse the responses.

The UKCoC scheme is a top-down scheme which is delivered “in place”. The danger of the top-down vision is that local people cannot often conceptualise what it might mean within the context of their own locality. The findings here suggest that bid team members are attempting to do this despite obvious time pressures. The research presented here suggests that cities are reconciling the top-down, criteria-led nature of the scheme with a real reflection on how to make that work for their locality which is distinctive.

The UKCoC scheme has proved to galvanise communities to reflect on the nature of their places and think about what makes them unique in comparison to the other bidding cities. The bidding teams acknowledge the challenges of bidding but there is a sense that competing is worth the investment.

This paper offers a unique insight into a recent competitive placemaking scheme and reflects on how placemaking can potentially be reconciled as both top-down and place-based.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the process by which Istanbul is transforming into a world city, examining the impact of the recent growth of cultural activities in the city.

The study focuses on the cultural and creative aspects of Istanbul, with reference to its history, multiculturalism and recent developments in the international cultural arena. Istanbul represents an interesting case to examine the development of a city to achieve world‐class status, despite its historical significance as a center of trade and culture in the ancient world, its current globalization and development are fairly recent.

Developments in recent years from a cultural, as well as an economic perspective provide some indication that Istanbul is transforming into a world city. However, the ability of the city to influence international cultural circles is limited by the reduced demand for cultural products by residents. Nevertheless, Istanbul's multiculturalism, history and its geographical position are significant advantages.

Little attention has been paid to the relationships between various elements in the development of a world city. From this perspective, the paper discusses the role of culture in positioning Istanbul as a world city, and examines its relationships with commercial activities and influence on tourism, focusing on the synergetic relationship between these elements.

Cities are the place where people spend the great majority of their daily time. Many cities face a variety of social issues such as: high unemployment, increasing crime rate, migration flows, shifts in types of social interactions and lifestyle. These examples represent only a few of the issues encountered. Increasing the number of cultural offerings of a city may help improve the population's general sense of well-being as well as to increase its attractiveness for investments. However, the topic is delicate, and culture is an asset that must be treated carefully. Hence, enhancing culture as a positive asset to be cultivated may seem to be the perfect solution to overcome these issues. Often, a city's government will assume that enhancing and supporting cultural and creative industries will provide a solution to urban socio-economic crises and the stress of the urban fabric without effectively considering their own particular historical-geographical and socio-political conditions. Sometimes cultural heritage is exploited without giving due consideration to the creative sources of value generation in the city. Thus, this may lead to side effects such as the general risk of attracting socially and economically unsustainable mass tourism; the risk related to the possibility of being trapped by city's own cultural heritage and history acting as obstacles against any possible innovations; the risk of gentrification with a consequential loss of important traditions and social relationships characterising the urban areas.