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Abstract
This article examines the articulation of the benefits associated with staging the European Capital of Culture (ECoC) in Liverpool, England in 2008. It is argued that relevant policy documents, and policy discourses more generally, propose a strong influential role for the operations of the ECoC upon the creative industries. Such a strong relationship, however, is difficult to evidence either at a discursive level or from the attitudes expressed by those working within the creative industries locally. The idea that the ECoC can promote broadly ‘creative’ activity is thus posited as being merely one aspect of the ECoC’s major goal of attempted city rebranding, rather than anything more substantive; nevertheless the articulation of ‘success’ of the ECoC in this regard seems entrenched.
Notes
1. This research was carried out as part of an AHRC/ESRC Impact Fellowship in Cultural Policy and Regeneration. See: http://www.ahrc.ac.uk/FundedResearch/Pages/ImpactFellowshipinCulturalPolicyandRegeneration.aspx.
2. The Liverpool Culture Company was the body tasked with organizing Liverpool’s ECoC. Whilst technically a separate entity, the company was mostly located, staffed, and funded within the infrastructure of Liverpool City Council.
4. No opportunity emerged to interview entrepreneurs in the subsectors of ‘TV/Radio’ or ‘Designer Fashion’, but these are likely to be poorly represented in the local environment in any case: recent Inter‐Departmental Business Register data suggests the number of enterprises in Liverpool in the ‘Radio and Television Activities’ area, for example, can be measured in single figures.
5. As interviews were structured around the DCMS taxonomy of the ‘creative industries’, it is their labels that are used here.
6. Over 100 miniature replicas of Taro Chiezo’s ‘Superlambanana’ sculpture, resident in the city since 1998, were produced and spread throughout the city on the now ubiquitous ‘CowParade’ model during the 2008 ECoC year.
7. ‘La Princesse’, commissioned by Artichoke, was a giant mechanical spider which appeared at various points throughout Liverpool City Centre in September 2008, a ‘highlight’ of the ECoC programme. The giant puppets created by ‘La Machine’ have been commissioned internationally by a variety of cities seeking the spectacular.
8. See Note 6.
9. Liverpool is the area consistently ranked highest for ‘multiple deprivation’ out of the 354 districts in England in central government Indices of Multiple Deprivation (see http://www.imd.communities.gov.uk/).
10. Indeed, many of the interviewees for this research project expressed a perceived value in the potential afforded by their continued location in Liverpool to avoid such a dominant cultural centre and its associated competitiveness.