City/culture discourses: Evidence from the competition to select the European Capital of Culture 2008

In the current era of globalization, manufacturing decline and place marketing, many cities have turned to culture as a favoured means of gaining competitive advantage. The European Capital of Culture (ECOC) programme has been a significant catalyst for culture-led regeneration. In 2008 the ECOC title will be held by a UK city, and in 2000 the UK government launched a major competition to decide the nomination. This article reports on a study of three of the cities that participated in the competition: Liverpool, Cardiff and Bristol. The main aim of the study was to explore how far the Capital of Culture process in the UK had led to fresh thinking on what culture can do for a city. The paper has three main sections. First, it gives a brief account of the background of the ECOC programme and briefly reviews evidence on the impacts of the programme to date. Second, it outlines the process that was used to decide the UK nomination. It then looks in more detail at the experience of the three case study cities, examining in particular the discourses of culture and the city that seem to be at work in their ECOC bids.