For two days the City of Maastricht, with co-hosts Maastricht Univeristy, the Jan van Eyck Academy, and the Hogeschool Zuyd, explored ideas, concepts, case studies and insights to investigate the conditions necessary for creating a successful bid to become Europe's Capital of Culture, or ECOC, in the year 2018, in a conference called Lieu De Passages.
Held in a section of the newly renovated industrial site that still houses the ENCI cement works, now known as AINSI standing for - Art Industry Society and Innovation - the conference convened researchers, policy makers, cultural workers, artists and entrepreneurs to listen, learn and comment.
The conference was free and open to the public. Noticeable were the many participants from outside the city and its cultural institutions; equally noticeable was the absence of representatives from certain of Maastricht's well known and respected business and cultural organizations.
Embarking on this bid is a huge undertaking that will require a significant investment of time, money and human resources. Gathering stakeholders from the early stages of planning and ensuring a platform for the sometimes conflicting, sometimes complimentary agendas is a critical first step. It is at these critical early stages of development that many bridges can be built, gaps navigated, and opponents won into proponents.
It would be wise for the primary stakeholders to set a defining strategy, broken into phases and stages that are consistently and clearly communicated. Schaefer Communications experience with such large-scale public undertakings, such as the launch of Philadelphia's CoreStates Bicycle Championship Race and the Minneapolis Riverfront: Vision and Implementation Project, was to define from the start: What does the City want to create for whom, and why.
Panelist, Neil Person, head of Liverpool Welcome, stressed that his city used this competition as much as a means to goal, rather than the goal itself. Liverpool wanted to reposition the city and the ECOC competition provided a clear and compelling raison d'être, complete with actual deadlines. Maastricht would do well to heed this experience, perhaps using the ECOC bid as a logical and reasonable tie in to the many strategic economic, community and cultural development initiatives that local citizens already recognize. Among these are: the growth and internationalization of Maastricht University; the development in the past years of the Mosae Forum area of the new government centre; the completion of the shopping area Entre Deux; the redevelopment of the Old Bridge and western riverfront; the focus on Euregio cooperation in the health sciences with Liege and Aachen, to name a few.
Liverpool created a smart, workable framework that helped them throughout the lengthy process of engaging citizens and other stakeholders through to the actual staging and implementation of their 2008 Europe Cultural Capital City Year. With a central theme of repositioning Liverpool, the cultural year stayed on target with sub-themes that included: Create: whether through visual or performance art, the act of creating provided a vehicle for dialogue and exchange; Participate: perhaps as central as creation of art and culture are the ways flesh and blood humans engage through cultural experiences; State: Liverpool tackled some thorny issues, particularly around the city's multi-culturalism, through their process and programming; Debate: such an event is an excellent forum to bridge differences and scale walls that separate. Liverpool ECOC 2008 has been deemed a great success.
While each city is unique and brings an individual DNA to the European Cultural experience, the opportunity to host such an event can be a driver to focus on the issues that unite us more than the interests that separate us. Maastricht ultimately, like all ECOC candidates, can and should embrace this opportunity to engage in the wide-ranging and meaningful dialogue between all stakeholders to help define its complex and distinctive role as a European cultural city. Long-term, the process itself, this reflective journey, will make Maastricht a better place to work, live, learn and play.
©2009 Susan Schaefer