Cultural and Creatives City Monitor: A tool to promote mutual exchange and learning between cities to boost culture-led development

The Cultural and Creative Cities Monitor is a new tool to monitor and assess the performance of 'Cultural and Creative Cities' in Europe vis-à-vis their peers using both quantitative and qualitative data.

The quantitative information is captured in 29 indicators relevant to nine dimensions reflecting three major facetsof the cultural, social and economic vitality of cities:

  • Cultural Vibrancy measures the cultural 'pulse' of a city in terms of cultural infrastructure and participation in culture;
  • Creative Economy captures how the cultural and creative sectors contribute to a city's employment, job creation and innovative capacity;
  • Enabling Environment identifies the tangible and intangible assets that help cities attract creative talent and stimulate cultural engagement.

The Cultural and Creative Cities Monitor is designed to help national, regional and municipal policy makers identify local strengths and opportunities and benchmark their cities against similar urban centres using both quantitative and qualitative data. The Cultural and Creative Cities Monitor is thus an instrument to promote mutual exchange and learning between cities. For researchers, the pool of comparable data is expected to generate new questions and insights into the role of culture and creativity in cities’ social and economic wellbeing.

This platform allows users to browse the 168 selected cities and the quantitative and qualitative information about their performance in the Countries and Cities pages. Its Create your own Monitor page also makes it possible to create a new city entry, by adding new data, and to compare it to selected cities in the Monitor; to adapt weights according to the importance attached to different topics by cities and produce customised rankings; and to simulate the impact of policy actions (e.g. increased city visitors) on the final scores, thus allowing users to build scenarios. The Plots page allows users to explore how the selected variables and dimensions relate to each other.

How to read and use the map: (a) the colour of the dot in the map indicates the dimension where each city performs best; (b) go over a city with your mouse to know about its performance; (c) click on a country if you want to know about the performance of the selected cities in that country; (d) to go back to the home screen, click the ‘X’ button on the upper right corner of the page.

Author: 

Joint research centre

Date: 

Sunday, 9 July, 2017 - 12:15
Joint research centre, crowdfunding4culture, IDEA Consult, European Commission, cities, culture, creatives, tool, policy, cultural policy