How Culture Next is turning 40 years of European Capital of Culture bids into something cities can use

Forty years of knowledge, just out of reach

Picture a cultural officer at a city council somewhere in Europe. She has been asked to write her city’s next cultural strategy, maybe a plan to bring life back to an old waterfront. The first question she has is a simple one: has anyone done this before, and who should I speak to?

The answer almost certainly exists. Since the 1980s, cities across Europe have bid to be named European Capital of Culture. Each bid produced a bid book, each winner produced evaluation reports, and many cities have kept working on their ideas long after the decision, whether they won or not. However, currently all of this is spread across dozens of cities and decades of documents, and so the knowledge she (the cultural officer) needs is sitting there, just out of reach.

That is the problem Culture Next set out to solve for its members.

Meet Encore

Encore brings that knowledge into one place. At its heart is a public archive of bid books, selection and evaluation reports and member submissions, going back 40 years. On top of that, every city has its own workspace, where it can upload its own strategies and working documents, and then choose which ones to share with the wider archive.

This is where it becomes genuinely useful. Encore reads across all of these documents and shows a city where its priorities overlap with others in the network, and who it should be talking to. So our cultural officer can search waterfront placemaking and be pointed to the city that tried it, what happened, and the person who led it.

That last part matters most. Earlier work with the network focused on collecting data and indicators, which cultural teams understandably found difficult to provide. The more valuable thing turned out to be people. Encore’s members portal connects people to the projects they have worked on, so it works as a directory of expertise as well as an archive.

It also captures something official archives miss. Brno, for example, never held the title, but Encore can still trace its current cultural projects back to the bid book it wrote years ago. A bid that did not win still has a lot to teach.

Bringing the network together

The next step is joining Encore up with the main Culture Next website. Rather than rebuilding the site, Whitelabel is reimagining its front face so it can do two jobs at once. For the public, it is the home of European Capital of Culture. For members, it is a clear route into the portal, where they can explore the archive, sign in to their workspace and find open calls and programmes from across the network in one place.

This also means everything can live in one place. Applications for programmes like Culture Next’s mobility scheme, which currently sit on a separate site, can be built straight into Encore, from the application form through to the contract at the end. Behind the scenes, Encore is also being brought onto Whitelabel’s main platform, so that it shares the same tools as the rest of our work and can keep growing with the network.

What can other networks learn from this?

A network does not need to start by collecting new data. Most networks are already sitting on years of reports, strategies and experience, and the work starts with making that easy to find and easy to act on.

The real value of a network is its people, and the lessons they have learned along the way. AI is not there to replace those conversations, just to make sure the right ones happen. The lesson is about connection, and making sure 40 years of experience does not go to waste.