A mega-event in a small city: community participation, heritage and scale in the case of Pafos 2017 European Capital of Culture

ABSTRACT

Pafos’s ‘Open Air Factory’ strategy for the 2017 ECoC was a simple yet imaginative concept born out of a strong desire to re-draw the city’s small-town character, diversify its economy, and steer social and cultural development along new paths. In order to counter the city’s limited economic resources and cultural infrastructure, the event’s vision was based on the two assets that Pafos has in abundance: a rich cultural heritage and a community eager for change. This paper tracks the uneven path of community involvement during the ECoC bidding, planning, implementation and post-implementation stages, and looks at urban heritage as the shared field of convergence for the multiple modes and degrees of participation in the realization of a mega-event. The city’s small size allows for original insights into the opportunities and limitations of the intersections between community, heritage and scale in the case of mega-event-based urban regeneration.

KEYWORDS:

• Community involvement
• cultural heritage
• European Capital of Culture
• participation
• small and medium-sized European cities and towns (SMSTs)

Acknowledgements

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 Cyprus Research Promotion Foundation (RESTART 2016-2020, Project: P2P/JPICH_HCE/0917/008). The authors would also like to thank Georgia Doetzer, Chief Executive at Rialto Theatre, Limassol, and Artistic Program Director of the Pafos 2017 Organization, for her input on the Pafos 2017 volunteers. The valuable comments of the editor, Davide Ponzini, and the anonymous reviewers, on an earlier draft of this paper, are greatly appreciated. Any errors or oversights are the authors’ responsibility.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 With an urban population of almost 33,000 (in the most recent census of 2011), in the scale of the European context Pafos falls within the small-medium sized town (SMST) category, with populations of between 5,000 and 100,000 inhabitants (Servillo, Atkinson, and Hamdouch 2017). Given, however, that the entire population of the Republic of Cyprus does not exceed 900,000, and that Pafos is the country’s fourth largest urban settlement, it is considered a city for the scale of Cyprus.

2 After the violent events of 1974, thousands of Greek-Cypriots were forcibly relocated from their homes in the north to the south, whereas Turkish-Cypriots had to take the reverse route. Cyprus has since been divided into the Republic of Cyprus (which controls the southern two-thirds of the island) and the self-declared Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus (which controls the northern one-third). This displacement has emptied out large urban areas and entire villages all over Cyprus, while new neighborhoods and ad-hoc settlements sprang up around existing communities.

3 Authors’ estimate based on the description of projects (Grizzo et al. 2011).

4 Pafos 2017 set aside approximately €500,000 for cultural activities after 2017 and the Ministry for Education and Culture offered an additional €270,000 to continue the Pafos 2017 legacy (European Commission et al. 2018, 86). However, without an established administrative body, these funds are inaccessible.