London Borough of Culture competition

I have written about the European Union Capital of Culture program, which has been extended to other arenas, such as the European Green Capital program, and the Youth Capital program.

(In "Reflections on EU and Baltimore," I suggest that the US should do similar programs.)

A few years back, the UK modeled a "UK City of Culture" program after the EU program.  The program runs every two years, and this year, the Capital is Hull ("Appetite for arts booms in Hull under City of Culture banner," The Stage).

Justine Simons, deputy mayor for culture, artist Bob and Roberta Smith and London mayor Sadiq Khan


Now London is launching a similar program, a competition open to the city's 32 boroughs. The competition will select boroughs for 2019 and 2020, with each getting £1.1 million, with a further £600,000 to be distributed to six boroughs for separate projects (£100,000 each).

(In London, Montreal and other cities, there are sub-city governments, called boroughs, with different political and local governance structures from the overarching center city structure.)

-- "London Borough of Culture competition launched," The Stage.
-- Apply to be the London Borough of Culture, City of London
-- Sadiq Khan's mayoral race manifesto section on arts and culture

While most US cities are "too small" for this to be able to work at the city scale, it's something that could be organized at the metropolitan scale and of course, at the state scale.

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Note as discussed, plenty of places utilize arts to push urban revitalization, and increasingly, cities have arts and culture master plans.

See:

-- "Arts, culture districts, and revitalization," 2009
-- "BTMFBA: the best way to ward off artist or retail displacement is to buy the building," 2016
-- "When BTMFBA isn't enough: keeping civic assets public through cy pres review, " 2016
-- "Should community culture master plans include elements on higher education arts programs?," 2016
-- "Leveraging music as cultural heritage for economic development: part two, popular music," 2017
-- "Leveraging music as cultural heritage for economic development: part one, opera," 2017