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Glasgow's reign as 1990 European City of Culture is regarded as a successful example of culture-led regeneration. Claims of success focus on Glasgow's ability to use a cultural event as a catalyst for image change, which led to a dramatic growth in leisure and business tourism and contributed to strengthening the city's creative economy. Glasgow 1990 was also originally praised for its broad cultural remit and spatial distribution of activity to reach out to marginal communities. However, this is rarely mentioned as a legacy or mark of success. This is partly a result of the limited visibility that Glasgow community programme had beyond those directly involved, an example of the trend towards excluding grassroots stories from the mainstream media. Fifteen years on, references to Glasgow 1990 have resurfaced due to the nomination of Liverpool as 2008 European Capital of Culture and the interest in establishing replicable models for cultural regeneration. The emphasis is on economic regeneration but linked to the expectation that, with it, will come social and cultural regeneration. On this basis, it is relevant to revisit what was achieved by Glasgow’s approach to community engagement in 1990 and assess whether the experience has led to any sustainable legacy within the city’s creative economy. This paper presents the results of a three-year project looking into the long-term cultural legacies of event-led regeneration. The research involved the content analysis of 20 years of press references to Glasgow 1990 and related cultural policy documents, 55 personal interviews and seven focus groups with event stakeholders – including a wide range of grassroots art groups. The findings support the claim that localities must work towards diverse and inclusive social environments to secure high levels of local creativity and thus maximise distinctiveness, competitiveness and long-term sustainability. Selected findings
Successful components of 1990 community programming
Selected policy lessons:
This paper explores discussions around city marketing and event branding strategies as catalysts in the transformation of a city’s image by studying the experience of Glasgow in the last two decades. The paper analyses the evolution of Glasgow’s image projection from a classic city marketing approach (the renowned ‘Glasgow’s Miles Better’ campaign in 1983) into a holistic branding strategy (the 2004 ‘Scotland with Style’ campaign), passing through the promotion of Glasgow as European City of Culture in 1990. These campaigns and related activities, including the evolution of city logotypes and slogans, are studied through document narrative analysis and personal interviews with key informants representing the city’s political, cultural and business worlds. The purpose of the paper is to identify the key elements of Glasgow’s original marketing strategy (as discussed by Paddison, 1993) and study the effect of their progressive transformation into a branding strategy (see Evans, 2003). This implies a reflection about the changing role of culture as a key selling point for Glasgow (see Kearns and Philo, 1993) and an evaluation of the influence of hosting a special event – the European City of Culture title – in this progression. The paper notes that the combination of innovative approaches to city marketing with the hosting of cultural events has played a key role in Glasgow’s positioning as a cultural centre first and, since the late 1990s, as a centre for the creative industries. However, it is important to establish that such an approach has led to celebrating certain aspects of the city’s culture while others have been progressively marginalised. Existing studies into city marketing and event branding tend to overlook the potentially negative impact of using culture as the main promotional tool of a given city. With its analysis of Glasgow’s experience, this paper will demonstrate the relevance of assessing cultural impacts as a complement to the more established economic and physical impact assessments in order to better understand the effect of hosting special events and developing event-led marketing strategies on the cultural life of a place (see also Richards and Wilson, 2004). References This paper evaluates the success of the European Union City/Capital of Culture programme as a model for culture-led regeneration through assessing the long-term cultural impacts of Glasgow’s experience in 1990. The paper relies on soft indicators such as media and personal discourses to measure the cultural impacts of regeneration as distinct from economic, physical and even social impacts. The effect of regeneration on local images and identities are seen as a key cultural impacts that, in Glasgow’s case, emerge as the stronger and best sustained legacy of its reign as City of Culture fifteen years on. However, the assessment of cultural impacts is scarce and, instead, is often dismissed as purely anecdotal compared with the hard-evidence provided by established economic and physical impact evaluations. To address this situation, this paper outlines the research design and main findings of a three-year qualitative longitudinal study into the progression of narratives around Glasgow’s image and identity, covering the years 1986 to 2003. The paper concludes that these narratives are the most important source of current pride and belief in the city’s potential as a creative centre and are thus the more sustainable legacy of Glasgow’s approach to culture-led regeneration.
Cultural policy research exists in many contexts, asks many different kinds of questions and adopts a wide repertoire of research methodologies from a raft of academic discourses. This essay investigates the research questions and approaches being undertaken by those working in this field. To achieve this the essay draws upon readings of contemporary publications in the field and on the authors’ experiences of building a research capacity in the area of cultural policy in a British – and, more particularly, a post-devolution Scottish – university. The essay traces the emergence of an academic discipline in the field and seeks to advance this by reviewing a tripartite research agenda investigating: the history and historiography of cultural policy; the principles and strategies of cultural policy; and, the relationships between cultural policy and cultural theory/cultural studies.
Fourteen years after hosting the European Capital of Culture title, Glasgow remains a key point of reference for culture-led urban regeneration schemes. In the run up to the nomination of Liverpool as the second UK city to host this title in 2008, the UK media and most candidate bid proposals referred to Glasgow as the most successful example of such event and the model that candidate cities wanted to replicate. At this point, some questions arise: how relevant is Glasgow’s 1990 experience to the present and future of Liverpool? Which are the key lessons? And which aspects cannot be replicated and might require new models and new approaches to regeneration? This paper uncovers key findings from a three-year project investigating the long-term cultural legacies of Glasgow 1990 and sheds new light on both the positive and negative myths surrounding the definition, implementation and sustainability of such experience.
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