Impacts’18 | ECoC Legacies, 10 years on

Impacts’18 is a longitudinal research programme dedicated to capturing the long-term effects of hosting the European Capital of Culture title on the city of Liverpool.
Using the data baseline and methodological framework established by the Impacts 08 research programme — a five-year study on the economic, environmental, social and cultural impacts of Liverpool 2008 that concluded in 2010 — the project will produce a unique retrospective on the effects of hosting an ECoC which, spanning over 20 years, will be one of the most ambitious and wide-ranging of its kind.
The project builds on my work on the multiple impacts and long-term legacies of cultural interventions on ECoC host cities and other major event host cities since 1998. I have directed extensive research on the only two UK-based EcoCs to date (Liverpool and Glasgow), as well as two of the leading international ECoC comparative programmes, one funded by the European Commission and the other by the European Parliament. All of these projects provide an unmatched baseline for Impacts 18.
Impacts 18 has benefited from kick-starter support from the AHRC Cultural Engagement Fund as well as funding from Culture Liverpool and the ICC Endowment Fund.
The focus of the programme is to extend data collection relating to the five main thematic impact clusters assessed by Impacts 08:
  • City image and reputation
  • Cultural participation and access
  • Cultural and creative vibrancy
  • Economic and tourism development
  • Cultural governance and leadership
For 2018, additional emphasis will be placed on the assessment of long term impacts on citizens wellbeing, city identity and local self-perceptions. Data across all of these themes will be analysed with a view to determining how durable the effects of the ECoC on these areas have been in the time that has elapsed since 2008.
Further information on the research programme
— including its methodology and research themes — is available here.
www.iccliverpool.ac.uk/liverpool2018