The data challenge of Capital of Culture - EU's Flagship Program for Cities

The "European Capital of Culture" action has grown in scope and size to become today one of the most prestigious and high-profile cultural events in Europe. Over the years the initiative also contributes to the sustainable development of cities and their surrounding areas, bringing them – if well prepared – long-term impact in cultural, social and economic terms. As a consequence, ECoC are now recognized as laboratories for strategic investments in culture at local and regional level.

However, there is still a shortage of a coherent evidence-base to better grasp the benefits of being an ECoC, especially its medium-to-long term cultural, social and economic legacy in host cities. Common ground to compare its impact from one city to another is also missing. The new evaluation obligation introduced in the new Decision is a way to remedy this situation.

This is the challenge we address and focus on.

The new CoC builds on 4 fundamental pillars:

Pillar 1: Cultural offer and the European dimension (SO1)

What is measured: The scale, diversity, and artistic quality of the program. It specifically examines the level of transnational cooperation (cross-border collaboration) and how European culture and shared values are highlighted.

Pillar 2: Access and participation (SO2)

What is measured: Audience development. The framework critically assesses the engagement of local residents (particularly marginalized groups or audiences less likely to engage with culture under normal circumstances) during both the preparation and implementation phases.

Pillar 3: Capacity building of the cultural sector (SO3)

What is measured: The long-term impact on the local creative sector. This includes skill development for cultural professionals, stronger networks, and cross-sector collaboration between culture and other fields (such as technology, healthcare, or education).

Pillar 4: International profiling and urban development (SO4)

What is measured: The reputation and visibility of the city at a European and international level. This is reflected in the growth of cultural tourism, urban regeneration, and the pride and identity of the residents themselves. Can you suggest some formats for pilots, which test different aspects of a data spaces for arts and culture?

Europe's cultural and creative sectors (CCS) generate an extraordinary volume of engagement data — ticketing records, audience surveys, digital participation logs, heritage visitation counts, wellbeing outcome measures — yet this data almost never becomes evidence. The obstacle is not scarcity; it is incommensurability. A "cultural participation" metric in one city, a "wellbeing impact" indicator in another, and a "heritage visit" count in a third may each be recorded with methodological rigour, yet remain semantically incompatible, because they rest on different definitions, categories, and cultural assumptions about what audience engagement actually is.

This is not a technical failure that better databases can fix. It is a semantic infrastructure gap, and it sits underneath — and undermines — every existing attempt at cultural benchmarking and cooperation across the European Research Area and beyond.

KULTURDATA has worked with 23 consortium partners in a 2027 Horizon project to specifcally address this issue by answering these questions:

• How are cultural data currently structured, presented and used in decision-making across different contexts, and where do technical, economic and epistemic asymmetries create gaps in visibility, comparability, trust or influence?

• What constitutes trusted cultural intelligence for different decision-makers, and what common concepts, indicators and approaches to provenance, uncertainty and data literacy are required to make interoperable cultural data meaningful without erasing contextual difference?

• How should a future cultural MIS/DSS translate interoperable data into actionable intelligence for city, national and international decision-making, and what requirements should this create for data spaces, pilots and future policy?

• To what extent does deploying the co-governed federated Data Space for Arts & Culture (DSAC) together with a meaning-preserving "Lexicon" in reducing semantic and infrastructural asymmetries—improving comparability and translation of cultural engagement/value evidence—while remaining feasible and ethically robust (e.g., governance legitimacy, data sovereignty, transparency of meaning-conversion, uncertainty handling, and avoidance of harmful bias/misinterpretation)?

• Can the governance and semantic models (DSAC + Lexicon) function as genuine peer-to-peer international cultural relations infrastructure—where partner regions have reciprocal rulebook-amendment rights—rather than an adoption-only, Europe-to-world export?

• What governance mechanisms, participation incentives, and trust-building processes are required to sustain reciprocal governance, continued semantic convergence, and ongoing ecosystem stewardship of DSAC + the Lexicon beyond the project lifecycle?