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The main objective of the study is to analyse the perception of accessibility to cultural for different age groups (children, teenagers, adults and seniors) in the city of Novi Sad (Serbia). Additional goals were to reveal which cultural contents in the city are the most important to which particular age group and to measure the level of compatibility with their needs.

The study sample consisted of 170 respondents of different age groups used for comparison purposes. Data were collected through an online questionnaire and analysed by IBM SPSS Statistics (descriptive statistical analysis and ANOVA test).

The results of this research showed that a gap is evident between the current cultural offer and the needs and preferences of visitors of different age groups. One of the significant obstacles that emerged is the inadequate promotion of cultural contents in the city to different age groups of visitors (children, teenagers, adults and seniors). The study also identified the age groups of visitors to whom the cultural offer was least adapted, as well as mapping the cultural institutions which are least accessible to audiences of different ages.

The paper addresses the knowledge gap related to accessibility to cultural for different generations. It focuses on topics that have not been previously researched – comparison of the needs of different generations concerning the actual offer in cultural institutions, addressing the importance of certain elements of a cultural offer to different age groups and the level of accessibility of such features to different age groups.

The 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.

Survey research was conducted among 303 residents of Novi Sad, which has been selected to be the ECoC for the year 2022.

The 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.

The 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.