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Call for papers ? Tafter Journal
The design and implementation of the European Capital of Culture: a
critical survey
In the last decade great attention has been given to the study of
mega-events and their impact at the urban and regional scale.
Different economic, social, political and urban planning approaches
have been developed on this topic by the points of view of scholars,
institutional actors, economic interests, civil society and grassroots
organizations.
Mega-events have been recognized by local governments as opportunities
to reconstruct and reinforce cities at the local level, while
positioning themselves on the global stage. The European Capital of
Culture (ECoC) is a longstanding program for allocating resources and
visibility for a cultural mega-event that aims at highlighting the
richness and diversity of European cultures and the features they
share, as well as to promote greater mutual knowledge and
understanding among Europe's citizens. This objective implies one of
the main challenge cities have to face when drawing their ECoC
proposal: finding a balance between global ambitions and local needs,
while safeguarding place diversity and at the same time boost the
opportunities of the programme.
A set of researches and publications already discussed these issues,
with limited insight in the urban policy design dimension. Without
losing the richness of the existing debate, the call for paper
critically focuses the analysis and interpretation of the urban realm
in the projects proposed by cities as well as the reports of the
selection panels. The distance between the city depicted in the
proposals and in their actual implementation can fuel interesting
discussion of the program as well as provide decision makers with
critical and usable knowledge. Both theoretical and
case-study-oriented papers could investigate one or more of the
following questions:
? Where is the ?city? in the proposal and how much is it relevant?
? How the city and its space are conceived and what are the
expectations in transforming its physical, cultural, social and
economic elements through the mega-event?
? What are the visions and images the candidate city proposed? A
historically valuable town center or a culturally lively and dispersed
global metropolis? Do them coincide with the spatial frame for
implementing actual cultural and urban policies? How peculiar and
diverse are these places?
? How these issues could be evaluated in a city that has already
realized an ECoC year?
The call for papers aims at collecting a significant and consistent
number of short contributions - about 3000 words or 15000 types -
discussing the distance between urban and cultural policy design and
its implementation.
Tafter Journal - www.tafterjournal.it - is an online journal dealing
with cultural policy, heritage, architecture and town planning and the
use of new technologies in the cultural policy field. Its mission is
to foster informed debate and publish contributions written by and for
academics and research experts as well as a broader set of
practitioners, organizations and people working in the cultural policy
field.
Please send the contributions in a light PDF file to
[log in to unmask] no later than May 15, 2011.
Davide Ponzini, PhD
Assistant Professor (Ricercatore) in Urban Planning
Dipartimento di Architettura e Pianificazione, Politecnico di Milano
Via Bonardi 3, 20133 Milano, Italy
Tel +39 02 23992603 / 5427, Fax +39 02 23992610
Email: [log in to unmask]
Sampo Ruoppila, PhD
Research Director, Urban Studies
Department of Social Research, University of Turku
FI-20014 Turku, Finland
Tel +358 40 5926629
Email: [log in to unmask]
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