The EU has now announced the dates for the celebrations for the 25th anniversary of the European Capital of Culture initiative. A two day event will be held on 23rd and 24th March 2010, to be opened by President Barroso and Jack Lang, who was the founder of the idea along with the late Melina Mercouri, former Minister of Culture for Greece. For more information, check out the site. Further details and registration for the event are due in the new year.
Just in case you missed Carol Lewis’s recent article in The Times on measuring Liverpool’s economic regeneration – featuring an interview with Impacts 08 Director Beatriz Garcia, you can catch it here.
Good things come in threes, they say, so we’re happy to announce publication of three new reports on our website. In Liverpool 08 – Centre of the Online Universe, Andy Miah and Ana Adi examine how people engaged with Liverpool’s Capital of Culture year through the web – and specifically social media. Liverpool’s Arts Sector – Sustainability and Experience explores the impressions of artists and arts organisations about the impact of Liverpool 08. And finally Liverpool’s Creative Industries looks at the effects on the city’s changing creative industries sector.
More followers are joining us on Twitter all the time, and it’s the best way to keep up to date with what’s happening here at the Impacts 08 office. We’re gearing up for lots of announcements regarding new publications and our final report, so come on over and make sure you don’t miss a thing!
Today Impacts 08 Programme Manager Ruth Melville is down at The Evaluation Conference 2009, the annual shindig of the UK Evaluation Society. She’ll be presenting on ‘Capturing the impacts from Liverpool 08 Capital of Culture Year’, explaining how our research has involved working alongside Liverpool Culture Company to set up evaluative mechanisms and developing models for evaluating the multiple impacts of culture-led regeneration programmes that can be applied to events across the UK and internationally. Ruth’s abstract says: ‘This multifaceted approach leads to learning in terms of evidence-based practice, research to inform policy and the knowledge exchange function of universities’. We’ll be adding her presentation to our main site soon.
A campaign has started rumbling (on the web at least) for the Italian city of L’Aquila, devastated by an earthquake in April 2009, to host the European Capital of Culture title in 2013. If you read Italian, you can check out this new WordPress blog, or follow Carbonara’s blog.
