EU's best practice capitals for 2019 (are a model for the US/North American best practice promotion)

When I was writing a series of articles for a project in Baltimore by the Washington Chapter of the European Union National Institutes of Culture (archived here) I was struck by what the focus of the European Commission on the creation and codification of best practice knowledge through the creation of adoption networks, in part focused on strengthening economically weaker sections of the Union.

A major element is the mounting of annual "European Capital of ____" programs to highlight best practice in particular communities, as a way to demonstrate a better way forward to other cities and countries.

Capitals of Culture.  The first major program was the Capital of Culture program, which highlights two cities each year, one tends to be a larger city from a OECD country and one tends to be a smaller city from a non-OECD country, although at times nonmember countries in the EU orbit may be selected, such as Istanbul, Turkey in 2010.

The 2019 Capitals are Matera, Italy and Plovdiv, Bulgaria.

Green Capital.  The EU extended this concept to the environment, by creating the Green Capital program.  The first city so designated, was Stockholm in 2008.  Other cities have included Hamburg and Essen in Germany, Copenhagen, Denmark, and Bristol, UK.

The 2019 European Green Capital is Oslo, Norway.

They have quite a line up of events related to it, including the Urban Future Global Conference, Nordic Electric Vehicle Summit, Oslo Innovation Week, Nordic Biogas Conference, World Green Infrastructure Congress, and the IFLA World Congress for landscape architecture.

Youth Capital.  The Youth Capital program is sponsored by the European Youth Forum and is "designed to empower young people, boost youth participation and strengthen European identity." The first city designated was Rotterdam, in 2009. The 2019 capital is Novi Sad, Serbia.

Separate national initiatives by European states

Germany's International Building Exhibition.  The Internationale Bauausstellung is a unique German event that usually takes place over a decade including planning, project realization, and the expo showing off specific projects, modelling large scale urban and environmental revitalization.

The most recent event was in Hamburg, in 2013, and while many future scheduled events are underway, the next public expositions are scheduled for 2020.  For the first time, these events will be held outside of Germany, in Basel, Switzerland and Parkstad, Netherlands.

-- "The contemporary International Building Exhibition (IBA) : innovative regeneration strategies in Germany," Alice Shay, MIT thesis
-- "The German Internationale Bauausstellung (IBA) and Urban Regeneration: Lessons from the IBA Emscher Park," book chapter by Philip Pinch and Neil Adams, London South Bank University

German Garden Festival.  One of the things I missed in my article series was another German expo, the Internationale Gartenbauausstellung (IGA), Germany's International Horticultural Exhibition. Like IBA it is not an annual event. Technically, it's supposed to be mounted every ten years, although that hasn't been the case exactly over the last 20 years. The most recent event was in Berlin in 2017, and the next scheduled IGA is in the Ruhr Valley, in 2027.  The exhibitions feature gardens, landscape architecture projects, horticulture and plant breeding, gardening equipment, and park and garden furniture.  The 2013 event in Hamburg was coordinated with IBA, but that type of congruence was atypical.


Britain "City of Culture" program. Separately, adopting the European Capital of Culture model, the UK has created the City of Culture program to put a shine on various cities and their culture programs with the aim of promoting tourism and arts-based revitalization ("How to become the next UK City of Culture," Hatch Regeneris).

This program runs every four years, and with Coventry the designee in 2021.

Global programs: World Design Capital program.  Separately, the World Design Organization designates a World Design Capital every two years.  Last year it was Mexico City and next year it will be Lille, France.  Helsinki was World Design Capital in 2012.

The US and/or North America should adopt the EU "Capital" model as a way to demonstrate best practice in culture, the environment, youth affairs, and community revitalization.  In my sum up piece about what I learned, I fulsomely listed lessons for the EU, Baltimore, and the US, with the recommendation that the US should do something similar.

Although now, in a spirit of hemispherical cooperation, something sorely missing from the Trump Administration at present, it would better to extend the invitation to participate to Canada and Mexico as well.

From the piece:

European revitalization and cultural development lessons that the United States/Federal Government should consider for adoption

The biggest lesson for me from this writing project has to do with recognizing the vast scale and opportunity to learn from the knowledge and best practice innovation systems operated by the European Union/European Commission, and whose programs are not necessarily limited to nations that are members of the EU so long as they are in Europe and/or part of the EU’s strategic interests.

The US, especially our higher education institutions and many federal government agencies, generates plenty of knowledge, reports, and information, but our systems and networks for integrating this knowledge into transformational practice are much less well developed, so the success rate and time line for innovation diffusion is much more labored.  The EU and various pan-European initiatives actively develop communities of practice while in the US comparable efforts tend to be more parochial, one-off events.

While the Federal Government has various cultural and economic development promotion programs delivered via various agencies ranging from the National Endowment of the Arts “Creative Placemaking” program to the “Promise Neighborhoods” initiative by multiple agencies spearheaded by the US Department of Housing and Urban Development, as well as various smart growth initiatives, especially those involving the Environmental Protection Agency, and transportation programs under the US Department of Transportation*, no program in the United States operates at the city level with the same level of “audacity” of Germany’s International Building Exhibition (IBA), where a multi-year program culminates in a variety of physical transformation projects that change the built and natural environment in a wide variety of ways that are truly remarkable–the Emscher Landscape Park project in the Ruhr region of Germany is
(* This was written during the Obama Administration. The Trump Administration has dropped most of these initiatives)

Imagine promotion of US revitalization financing and planning programs partly by having demonstration projects comparable to the massive scale of IBA, rather than the small scale efforts that are more typical and take decades to begin to see critical mass improvements.

That would be far better than undertaking large scale demolition programs, as Detroit is planning to do, which will end up with the demolition of at least 10% of that city’s already dwindling building stock (“Blight Cleanup Will Cost a Bankrupt Detroit $850 Million,” New York Times) just to end up with empty land.

By contrast, about €2 billion of public and private investment will be spent on IBA Hamburg, on physical improvements to the the communities within the project area over the period of 2006-2020, when the entire program is expected to be completed–even though the exhibition year of the program was limited to 2013, when a majority of the projects were completed and on display.

(Yes, we have the legacy of failure in the 1950s-1980s era urban renewal program, but a program like IBA is focused on innovation, transformation, and doing and is much more participative and engaged than traditional top-down revitalization programs that typify various city efforts today or in the past.)

The European Capital of Culture program is also a great model, where, with the support of national and state-regional governments, city revitalization efforts and the development and realization of a wide range of new cultural and physical infrastructure are fostered and accelerated.

Cities like Liverpool have had tremendous success in leveraging these events to rebrand and reposition and expand their tourism promotion efforts on a multifold basis.

 The US could do a similar program, just as the UK is doing with its new City of Culture program, with separate tranches for large cities and smaller towns and rural areas. In some respects, the “heritage areas” programs at the state and national level do some of this, but in the US these programs do not receive the kind of attention and funding accorded to the European Capital of Culture program.

Other Pan-European programs could be adapted to the US as well with the aim of achieving similar impacts, not just for economic development and best practice adoption, but on community building, sustainabilitly, and social inclusion dimensions also. These programs include the European Green Capital and European Youth Capital programs by the EU and the EuroScience Open Forum “Science in the City” festival, although the latter festival appears to have been a one-off event.

These are great models for transforming how the federal, state, and local governments should refocus on innovation diffusion and the development of best practice initiatives and programs that result in fundamental change and improvement in how we address difficult and seemingly intractable urban problems, especially in the face of declining budgets at all levels of government.

The Garden Festival as another model.  Not as part of the EU article series, I wrote a separate piece on garden festivals, which with a more park and open space orientation, are also a method to demonstrate best practice revitalization initiatives ("European Garden Festivals as a model urban planning initiative for Detroit and other US cities").

(Britain did garden festivals in the early 1980s, although they didn't have much long term effect, and so it wasn't relevant to the piece I wrote on Liverpool.)

When I was on the Design Review Committee weighing in on proposals by the finalist design teams for the 11th Street Bridge Park project, I wrote a piece for this blog suggesting that DC could be a pilot site, doing such a program along the Anacostia River ("DC has a big "Garden Festival" opportunity in the Anacostia River").

There are various garden festivals extant across North America such as Buffalo's GardenWalk as well as the developing concept of "garden tourism," but there isn't a nationally-scaled travelling event on the scale of Germany's IGA.