Fourty Years of ECoCs, and the networks that now hold them together
By Beatriz Garcia – Author | Academic | Speaker | Research Director | Consultant | Cultural Olympiad, European Capitals of Culture, Festivals Impact & Legacy
In May 2026 I spent two weeks inside the European Capital of Culture world — first in Larnaka, then in Évora — and came away convinced that the most important thing the programme has built in forty years is not in any single host city. Athens took the first title in 1985 and seventy-five cities in 32 countries have held it since, but the asset that has quietly compounded over four decades is not the events themselves; it is the knowledge of how to do them — and the fact that this knowledge now (finally, 40 years on!) circulates.
I have a particular reason to notice. In 2013, in a study for the European Parliament, I assessed the long-term effects of the programme since 1985 and set out what would help future hosts. One recommendation was blunt: the ECoC needed a formal knowledge-transfer programme, because the hard-won expertise of each host city kept evaporating once the title year ended. The networks that existed then were informal — upcoming hosts quietly using past hosts as sounding boards. Useful, but fragile, and dependent on who happened to know whom.
A decade on, that gap has largely closed. This has not happened through a single EU mechanism, but through something more interesting: a dense, largely self-organised ecosystem of networks. That ecosystem is the real state of the art — and understanding how it works matters now, because the EU is currently working on what should replace the current ECoC legal framework after 2033.
Two networks, two functions
By 2026, two main networks anchor the ecosystem, and the difference between them is instructive.
The ECoC Family marked its 20th anniversary this May in Évora. It is, true to its name, a family of the title — the cities that have hosted, the cities currently and soon to be hosting, and the people who founded the network two decades ago. An anniversary naturally tilts the conversation towards reflection, and the panels carried that tone: “What would you do differently, knowing what you know now?” and “Does the beer always go flat after the event is over?”
But because the Family also gathers cities in the thick of the process, it works on live questions as much as past ones. I sat on the panel debating the ‘European dimension’ — one of the toughest, and arguably the essential, criterion to secure the title, and the one thing that sets an ECoC apart from any other kind of event. My core argument was that we read it the wrong way round: the European dimension is too often assessed as an external standard a city must prove it meets, when the truer starting point is that every European city already is Europe and helps define what it means — so the criterion should be an invitation to that conversation, not an examination with a single right answer [read my full reflection, here]. The rest of Évora’s gathering was memory work: the people who delivered the title, comparing scars — intimate, experiential, and unsparing in the way only veterans can be with one another.
Panel discussion on the ‘European Dimension’ within the ECoC Family 20th anniversary in Évora
Culture Next, and its biannual conference, where I had spent the previous week in Larnaka, does something different. Founded in 2017 and turning ten in 2027, it now gathers 48 cities across 25 countries — and crucially, it includes the many that bid and did not win, not only the title-holders. Roughly a third of its members have held the title; many of the rest bid without winning, or are still in the race. Its register is policy and infrastructure: Culture Next is expanding a (much needed!) ECoC Archive — turning a collection of bid books and official evaluations into a strategic tool — it is also running an SDG Innovation Lab to help cities evidence their cultural strategies against the global goals, and it is carrying the sector’s voice into Brussels.
So these two ECoC (de facto) knowledge-transfer networks divide the labour between them: The ECoC Family holds the title close: a peer community of those who have delivered it and those in the middle of doing so, where the hardest lessons of hosting pass directly from one team to the next. Culture Next casts the net wider — taking in the many cities that bid without winning — and turns the collective experience outward, into archive, evaluation and policy. They are complementary, not competitive. A city making its way through the ECoC journey now has both a community that has walked the same road and a policy engine working on its behalf — exactly the redundancy the programme lacked when I wrote my European Parliament report in 2013.
Knowledge that travels sideways
What has struck me most this year, though, is that the expertise no longer moves only within these networks. It now moves sideways between them.
At the Culture Next 16th conference in Larnaka the room included the editorial lead of UNESCO’s new global cultural-policy report, the United Cities and Local Governments focal point for culture, and a newly forming Mediterranean Cultural Cities Network. Culture Action Europe, Eurocities, and UCLG’s Committee on Culture — which has carried its Agenda 21 for Culture for over twenty years — are all now paying close attention to the ECoC programme and showing up at one another’s tables.
One the panels, discussing Mediterranean perspectives, at Culture Next 16th conference in Larnaka
This matters because it plugs the ECoC conversation into the biggest argument in international cultural policy. UNESCO’s first Global Report on Cultural Policies, launched at MONDIACULT in Barcelona last autumn, carries the pointed title Culture: The Missing SDG and calls for culture to become a standalone Sustainable Development Goal. When the editor of that report is moderating a panel at a Capital of Culture conference, and a city network’s SDG Lab is testing how to evidence precisely that case, the ECoC programme stops being a self-contained EU scheme and becomes a node in a global push.
Into Brussels, and the post-2033 question
All of which leads to Brussels, and to timing. ECoC networks and host cities now present directly to MEPs, and the moment is live. Last October the Commission published its First Interim Evaluation of the current ECoC action, with the explicit aim of identifying changes for the successor initiative after 2033. A public consultation is open. And the 2025 Capitals, Chemnitz and Nova Gorica–Gorizia, have gone further, producing a White Paper drawing on 64 past and future Capitals, with forty recommendations for reform — foregrounding, among other things, the European dimension.
Which is to say: the question I was asked to address on the European Dimension panel in Évora is the same question now sitting in front of the European Parliament. The networks are no longer downstream of policy: they are feeding it.
What still needs to improve
None of this is a victory lap. Three things still need fixing, and the post-2033 settlement is the moment to do it.
First, the infrastructure is real but unfunded. It runs on the goodwill and largely unpaid labour of networks and the people who staff them. The formal knowledge-transfer programme I recommended in 2013 still does not exist as a funded mechanism; what exists is a brilliant workaround. A successor framework should recognise and resource it, rather than assume it will keep appearing for free.
Second, care. The keynote in Larnaka was titled “European Capitals of Care,” and it named something the sector prefers to avoid: the people who carry this knowledge are often the same teams dismantled, exhausted or let go once a title year ends. A network culture that, in one speaker’s words, “always asks for more” risks burning out the very expertise it depends on. Knowledge transfer is also people transfer — and people have to be looked after to stay in the field.
Third, data discipline. An archive only becomes a strategic tool if it is accurate; the standardised evaluation framework I called for in 2013 is still not in place, and the record still blurs at the edges — candidate cities mis-logged as hosts, claims that outrun evidence. If the networks want to inform the post-2033 framework with authority, the evidence base has to be unimpeachable. It is worth saying plainly, too, that the Melina Mercouri Prize has not risen since 2010 and has lost roughly a quarter of its real value. Symbolic esteem without resourcing will not hold.
Forty years on from Athens, the European Capital of Culture has produced something its founders could not have designed: a living network of people who know how to turn a city inside out for a year, and who now teach each other how to do it.
Forty years on from Athens, the European Capital of Culture has produced something its founders could not have designed: a living network of people who know how to turn a city inside out for a year, and who now teach each other how to do it. The task for the next decade is to make that implicit infrastructure explicit — to fund it, staff it sustainably, and write it into whatever comes after 2033.
The knowledge finally stayed. Now it has to outlast the people who carry it.
