Culture and heritage as a means to foster quality of life? The case of Wrocław European Capital of Culture 2016

ABSTRACT

Wrocław European Capital of Culture 2016, with its ‘Spaces for Beauty’ slogan, serves to show that cumulating financial resources and human effort to produce a large number of projects and initiatives in the field of heritage provides an opportunity to improve the quality of life for residents. This paper discusses two aspects of quality of life: access to and participation in culture as well as relations with urban space and built heritage. Both impact numerous areas of our lives, such as individual satisfaction, self-development, identity building, sense of belonging, sense of security, aesthetic pleasure, entertainment, learning, socialization of individuals and building social capital. This paper aims to bridge the gap between research on mega-events and the discussion on heritage, offering insights into the potential use of heritage as a development mechanism.

KEYWORDS:

• European Capital of Culture
• quality of life
• culture and wellbeing
• impact of cultural mega-events

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 With no special category for heritage projects in ECoC 2016, it is even difficult to assess the part of ECoC’s budget spent on heritage. Among the influences ECoC 2016 had on heritage one could list: an increase in the amounts spent on cultural infrastructure, renovation and revitalization, and a change in residents’ attitude towards heritage.

2 The main indicator that a given project addressed heritage was that it dealt with identity, memory, and history on the one hand, and with renovation or regeneration on the other.

3 The hypothesis is that the collocation most used with ‘heritage’ is ‘national’, which is complicated in the case of Wrocław. Moreover, the city, as claimed, is more forward-looking than dwelling on its past (FGI02; Chmielewski 2011, 6).

4 This number includes both residents and visitors. There is no exact data concerning the number of the former, but the research on cultural participation cited in the article refers to the residents of Wrocław and the region. To compare, Wrocław is a city of 642 869 inhabitants (as of 31.12.2019, Statistics Poland, https://bdl.stat.gov.pl/BDL/dane/podgrup/tablica)

5 In 1929, Wrocław hosted a Living and Work Space Exhibition (Wohnung und Werkraum Ausstellung, WuWA) presenting model housing estates created by the Deutscher Werkbund. Buildings created for the exhibition were meant to be just prototypes for mass housing estates, but most of them survived WWII and have since been inhabited.

Additional information

Funding

Sections of this paper are based on and supported by the research conducted within the JPI Cultural Heritage research project ‘HOMEE – Heritage Opportunities/Threats within Mega-Events in Europe’, with a grant issued by the Minister of Culture and National Heritage of the Republic of Poland.