Transnationalisation of development strategies in East Central European cities: A survey of the shortlisted Polish European Capital of Culture candidate cities

Abstract

The level of integration of a city into transnational networks has become widely interpreted as the decisive factor of urban development in a globalising world. Hence, the building of transnational links has become a vital aspect of city development strategies. This applies in a particular way also to the “latecomer” cities in East Central Europe aspiring to overcome marginality. Here, the analysis of final European Capital of Culture applications allows for definition of the state-of-the-art of such transnationalisation strategies in this part of Europe. As the cases of the five cities shortlisted in the contest to become the Polish European Capital of Culture 2016 show (i.e. Gdańsk, Katowice, Lublin, Warsaw, and the eventual laureate city of Wrocław), transnational networking on the level of innovative regions, metropolitan areas or cross-border regions is rather poorly developed. The cases also show that the lack of transnational urban societies, which is interpreted as a disadvantage in the quest to build and market attractive and creative cities, can be compensated for by the rediscovery of a multiethnic past.

Keywords

European Capital of Culture Gdańsk Katowice Lublin transnationalisation urban–regional networks urban development strategies Warsaw Wrocław

Introduction

The cities in East Central Europe labelled post-communist, post-socialist, or transformation/transition cities frequently continue to be seen as a distinctive subject for urban research. Back in the 1990s, the cities east of the former Iron Curtain were usually portrayed as being in a transformation process that had not yet been completed. The dominant setting was that of new democratic and market structures that were still in the making or still had shortcomings (see e.g. Markowski, 1997 on Polish or Bora, 1997 on Hungarian cities). These included insufficient local planning and development tools, rivalries between the central state and the local level, weak citizenship in a situation where private lives needed to be rearranged in multiple ways, lack of viable know-how at the level of urban decision-makers, etc. With respect to contradictory trends and confusing data, often no clear development directions emerged, apart from revealing that these cities were on a bumpy road in simultaneously adapting to the conditions of a democratic market economy and those of a globalising world. Not least in the light of criticism of a “transitology” approach (Pickles, 2010: 136), after the turn of the millennium most scholars started to acknowledge that the challenges deriving from the globalisation process had become by far the more dominant for the development of East Central European cities (Hamilton et al., 2005; Stryjakiewicz, 2000). Yet if acknowledging that increased socioeconomic as well as spatial polarisation is a main effect of globalisation to be observed all over the world, then such trends affect East Central European territories particularly deeply. The reason for this may be described through the term “latecomers” (Bohle, 2002: 284): the cities and regions were in a peripheral location from the perspective of established Western European socioeconomic structures, their municipalities were less prepared to tackle the challenges as they had to start by creating civil government structures in the first place, and they were overwhelmed by processes such as deindustrialisation or suburbanisation unfolding much more quickly and less predictably than in the West. Hence, also beyond any transition concept, and acknowledging the influence of EU adaptation and harmonisation processes, East Central European cities may still be seen to follow a particular development path (Tsenkova, 2006).

However, while there is now significant literature on how globalisation or European integration parameters influence the development path of these cities, there is little analysis so far of the development strategies pursued by municipalities to react to these challenges. When taking, for example, the case of spatial planning policies, clear evidence has been found that an adaptation of national planning systems in East Central European states to “European” standards may not necessarily have led to a change of attitude in authorities towards actually using European-oriented planning as an active and integrated development tool (Adams, 2008; Tölle, 2012). Consequently, and not only in relation to spatial planning, differences arise between the wording in strategic development documents and the actual development policies, which makes an analysis of the latter in East Central European cities challenging. This paper will present such an analysis through the example of transnational aspects in urban development policies, and it will do so on the basis of the final application documents of the five cities shortlisted in the selection process to designate the Polish European Capital of Culture (ECOC) for 2016 − Gdańsk, Katowice, Lublin, Warsaw, and the final laureate city of Wrocław. An understanding of the logic behind and the significance of such an analysis necessitates first a look at the increased importance of the European Capital of Culture event as well as its selection process for city development, notably against the background of the problem of urban strategy analyses in East Central European cities. This will be followed by a delineation of the transnational dimension in urban development and how it is reflected in current major concepts on developing cities and their regions in the fields of urban marketing, innovation policies, metropolitanisation, and (macro-) regional cross-border cooperation. The subsequent analysis of the ECOC application documents will then look at how transnationalisation strategies connected to the concepts pursued. The findings will be used to highlight the specificities that the application of transnational strategies may lead to in the East Central European context.

European Capital of Culture applications as strategic documents for urban development

Large-scale projects and urban festivals have long been acknowledged as effective tools for helping cities to generate, to kick-off, or to consolidate in a considerably short time-span a profound and lasting impact on urban and socioeconomic structures as well as on urban images and identities (Gold and Gold, 2005; Johansson and Kociatkiewicz, 2011; Smyth, 1994). In this context, the ECOC is today perceived as a major urban development catalyst not only with respect to tourism, culture activities and infrastructure (more often than not the event had provoked an “arts and civil building spree” – Evans, 2001: 252), but also far more broadly with respect to the strengthening of creative industries, the regeneration of deprived urban areas, the improvement of cooperation between local authorities and between public and private institutions, and the definition of an urban image that is to be communicated on an international scale. So what had started in the 1980s as an intergovernmental initiative to add a cultural dimension to the European integration process by staging seasonal festivals in cultural hubs such as Athens, Florence or Berlin, has over the years and decades developed into “a kind of European urban policy by different means” (Habit, 2011: 154), i.e. into a community action well embedded in EU policies (see also Gierat-Bieroń, 2009; Herrero et al., 2006; Mittag and Oerters, 2009). In turn this has rendered the task of applying to be an ECOC a much more demanding one for candidate cities. In 2004 a report on the ECOC mandated by the European Commission stated the importance of the event’s economic potential for urban development (Lähdesmäki, 2012b), and in consequence the planned exploitation of this potential has become a crucial factor in the selection process (as reflected in the official EU guide) (Guide, 2009) and application forms for ECOC candidate cities. While the quality and exceptionality of the proposed ECOC programme is a prime selection criterion, the production of lasting effects for the cultural but also the social and urban development of the city are of importance as well. In addition, the sheer attractiveness of the event has turned the ECOC selection, which is organised by the government of the country to which the event has been attributed for a given year, into a subject of strong competition between the usual large numbers of candidate cities. In this tightening competition, the task for a determined municipality well surpasses the activity of just preparing an application document taking the suggestions of the EU-defined guidelines and addressing them with some imaginative ideas about how to present European culture. Instead a successful candidate city must convince the selection committee through a comprehensive strategy linking culture with urban policies in fields such as marketing and communication, urban regeneration, social cohesion, regional cooperation, or competitiveness. Moreover, to increase the credibility and persuasiveness of the application it would need to be sustained by embedding it into the context of already established cooperation structures and implemented strategies and investments – which in turn must to some extent exist independently from the success or failure of the candidacy. Regardless of whether the ECOC application is interpreted by the municipality as an opportunity to boost existing city development strategies, or rather as a chance to define and implement new strategies, the final application document must outline the desired future development path and image for the city.

This character of the ECOC application document makes it especially interesting in the case of East Central European cities. For a long time since the early 1990s, urban strategy documents here had a tendency of being rather loosely connected to the policies actually pursued by municipalities, be it for a lack of suitable tools, of financial means, or of political consensus (see e.g. Łoboda, 2000 on Wrocław; Tölle, 2008 on Gdańsk). Strategy documents were often prepared according to some general “Western” model rather than in terms of local needs and discourses, and consequently had a tendency to be redrafted in rather short time intervals. In contrast, a final ECOC application document would have to show which steps have already been taken to implement certain projects, and which projects are going to be continued even if the application proved unsuccessful. In addition, the required high degree of integration of the proposed ECOC concept, its programme and organisation structures, into the social context of a candidate city necessitates the mobilisation and participation of the local public, the local culture, science and business milieu, and the cultural elite. In brief, a final ECOC application may be considered a document whose main findings and objectives are based on strategies actually pursued by local decision-makers and embedded to a significant extent in the local context. And while one may always elaborate in the context of evaluating city strategies about the thin line between an optimistic scenario and wishful thinking, in the case of ECOC applications the prepared propositions are to some degree examined and refereed through the selection process. The difference this makes concerning the value of the documents in an East Central European context becomes apparent when looking at the example of the selection process for the Polish ECOC 2016.

Table 1.

List of the Polish cities involved in the ECOC selection process and their national ranking by population.

Rank	City	Population in thousands	Rank	City	Population in thousands
1.	Warsaw	1,708.5	10.	Katowice	309.3
3.	Łódź	725.1	11.	Białystok	294.3
4.	Wrocław	631.2	12.	Gdynia	248.9
5.	Poznań	553.6	15.	Sosnowiec	215.3
6.	Gdańsk	460.5	16.	Toruń	204.9
7.	Szczecin	409.6	18.	Gliwice	186.9
8.	Bydgoszcz	363.0	19.	Zabrze	180.3
9.	Lublin	348.6	21.	Bytom	176.1

Source: Main Statistic Office, population in 2011.

Notes: Candidature city – shortlisted; Candidature city – not shortlisted; City that is part of the metropolitan area of Gdańsk (i.e. Gdynia) or of Katowice.

In accordance with the ECOC selection rules, in 2009 the Polish Minister of Culture and National Heritage established a selection commission that comprised six members from Poland and seven from other European countries including EU representatives, and asked for the submission of application documents by interested municipalities. This call was heeded by the municipalities of 11 cities, all of them the capital city and economic centre of their respective voivodeship (i.e. of one of the 16 regional self-governing units that Poland established in 1999). In addition, as the municipalities of Gdańsk and Katowice launched applications for their respective metropolitan areas including other large cities, in total no fewer than 16 of the 20 largest Polish cities that could participate in the selection process actually did so (the second biggest city of Cracow, ECOC in 2000, was naturally excluded) (tab. 1). As a result, the assemblage of candidate cities utterly differed from the much more diversified ones that had emerged in other large European countries selecting their ECOC. For instance, in the designation of Donostia-San Sebastián 2016 (the Spanish ECOC selected parallel to the Polish one), the list of 15 candidate cities included some major cities but also two towns with fewer than 60,000 inhabitants, as well as the joint bid of three medium-sized cities campaigning as one “cultural triangle”.

In the case of Poland, however, the clear picture is that all major Polish cities interpreted the possibility of becoming ECOC as an opportunity to boost their development through a major festival. As regional support is a prerequisite for any serious application, voivodeship marshal offices (the marshal being the elected head of regional self-government) were consequently unlikely to support the initiatives of cities other than their capital cities. It is quite evident that the role of culture in these cities differed significantly. When considering, for instance, one of the recent classifications of Polish cities according to their cultural capital (Chlebicki et al., 2010), in effect the country’s capital city of Warsaw and the Polish cultural metropolises of Gdańsk, Wrocław, Katowice, Łódź and Poznań were competing with small cultural centres such as Toruń and Szczecin, as well as with cities classified as being on the cultural periphery such as Lublin, Białystok, and Bydgoszcz. Yet while the initial situation does not necessarily reveal much about the role culture is to play in the future development of a city, it is also quite evident that the priority municipalities are conferring to culture in their actual development policies is unlikely to be equally high in all of these cities. So one may suspect that in this first phase some cities may have launched applications with certain inconsistencies and perhaps not always based on clearly defined and locally integrated urban strategies. Yet one may also presume that such applications were unlikely to stand up to the scrutiny of the selection committee, whose task at this stage had been to draw up a short list of cities with a “realistic prospect of winning” the competition (Guide, 2009: 35). Five cities were shortlisted in 2010: Gdańsk, Katowice, Lublin, Warsaw, and Wrocław. Each municipality was given nine months in which to prepare its final application document, i.e. to further develop its candidacy and reply to recommendations and comments from the selection committee. What is important in the context of this analysis is that these five cities prepared the very development strategy documents that, as outlined above, may be seen as having a special value for analysing strategic development planning and its transnational dimension in East Central European cities.

The transnationalisation of urban development policies

The ECOC event has always been connected to a concept of transnationalisation: Europe may be seen as a transnational spatial category (Lähdesmäki, 2012a), and the ECOC itself had right from its start in the 1980s a transnational character because the underlying idea was to highlight the richness and diversity of European cities and cultures, while at the same time displaying common European values to be found at the local level (Griffiths, 2006). Consequently, numerous scholars have looked at ECOCs approaches to defining and actually producing “European culture” (e.g. Ingram, 2010; Sassatelli, 2002). With regard to East Central European cities – which are latecomers also in the sense that their countries became EU members only in the 2004 and 2007 enlargements –this process has to be seen in the context of “Europeanness [being] seen as something that manifests better living standards” (Lähdesmäki, 2012a: 12; see also Habit, 2011). Such interpretations, however, call for shifting the attention of scholars from an interpretation of ECOC strategies pursued by municipalities as being primarily concerned with becoming “European” culturally, towards an interpretation that stresses their efforts to tackle the challenges deriving from a globalising world. This necessitates here, however, first a look at just what this transnational dimension, which has become such a key aspect in city development and consequently also in ECOC strategies, is about. The paper goes on to look at the major concepts on developing cities and their regions in order to demonstrate their connectivity to this dimension. This is to form the basis of the subsequent analysis of the five ECOC final application documents.

The concept of transnationalisation has multiple facets and is interpreted in different ways in various scientific fields. While until the 1990s the term was used almost exclusively in the field of legal studies, political affairs, and economic relations (Zimmermann, 2008: 31), it then became used, especially in the context of ongoing globalisation processes, in numerous other disciplines. These included, in particular, spatially sensitive social science research and cultural studies, seeing transnationalisation as “a process of shaping comparatively lasting and close relations of social practices, symbol systems and artefacts across pluri-local and national state boundaries” (Pries, 2002: 264). While definitions may vary, two common interdisciplinary features of transnational studies may be detected (see Zimmermann, 2008): they always concern phenomena of a cross-border character (i.e. across state borders), and they are always connected to a process transcending an “international” dimension. The latter aspect is referring to the increase of cross-border relations not controlled by the nation state – that is, relations based on networks such as between individuals and groups, private companies and NGOs, and local and regional authorities. From an urban research perspective, the relevance of this understanding of transnationality lies in the fact that cities and their regions are seen to constitute the nodes of these networks – that is, the places where the transnational flows intersect. This leads to cities being at the core of a globalisation process “conceptualized as a multilayered process of expanding and intensifying transnational networking” (Krätke et al., 2012: 2). It has often been stated that the level of integration into transnational relations is to a large extent the decisive factor of urban development and has led to an erosion of traditional city hierarchies (see Hall, 2004b; Sassen, 2001). This in turn has made the building of networks a key aspect of urban development strategies, with urban decision-makers embracing globalisation “as a pathway to economic (and cultural) modernity” (McNeill, 1999: 144).

In consequence, concepts currently dominating the discourse on development strategies for cities and their regions are closely connected to transnational thinking. The first concept here is that of innovative network or cluster policies. The idea behind them is to react to the fact that knowledge is becoming increasingly specific, tacit and complex (Oerlemans et al., 2007) by building network structures as effective devices allowing local firms to gain access to global innovation processes. Even though there are diverse definitions of clusters and networks in the scientific world whose underlying theories are subject to a permanent academic dispute (Hassink, 2001), it is usually seen as an essential role of public authorities to pursue a top-down innovation policy (Koschatzky, 2001). Such a policy manifests itself in the establishment of networks between public sector units, private companies, science and research institutions and the broader business environment. In times in which “the entrepreneur is conceived of as a network operator or manager“ (Nijkamp, 2003: 403), such a network or cluster policy is seen to be necessary for the transfer of knowledge into new production methods and products in defined competence fields that are to contribute to the specialisation of an urban region. The extension of such an innovative region across a national state border in some cases, and the linking of it to greater European and global knowledge networks in all cases, exemplifies for the transnationalisation of urban policies in which promoting transnational networks has become a response to the internationalisation of research as well as markets.

The idea of networking for the specialisation of a (city) region is closely related to the shift from a city to a metropolitan dimension (Krätke, 2007). This may be summarised by the need to increase the visibility and socioeconomic potential of a city in the form of creating metropolitan areas, to integrate these metropolitan areas into transnational urban networks, and to make them potent actors in a cooperation region that in turn may well have a transnational dimension. This is based on the approach of globalisation meaning “the return to the idea of a city-state”, which is reflected in the process of metropolitanisation (Parysek, 2006: 34). As the tasks of municipalities extend beyond close city boundaries, cities try to organise metropolitan cooperative structures, thus focusing public investment, combining strengths and balancing weaknesses in order to increase competitiveness (Lackowska and Zimmermann, 2010). This in turn is the base for integrating the city into transnational urban networks, whose relations are increasingly replacing those within traditional international city associations or between twinned cities (Kern, 2001). In addition, there are transnational strategic alliances, ranging from city networks such as the French–German–Luxembourgian QuattroPole to macro cooperation areas such as the Austrian–Czech–Slovakian–Hungarian Central European Region.

Transnationalisation of development strategies, however, not only concerns these three regional dimensions, but also concerns the field of urban marketing and image-campaigning. It is an indispensable feature of globalising competition that individual cities and their regions have to present their uniqueness at a time when they are at risk of becoming indistinguishable, so each city needs to define its “own special niche in the market by developing what is known as a unique selling proposition” (Ratcliffe and Stubbs, 1996: 502). The crux is, however, that produced images need to be closely connected to the place identity of a city, which in turn is the outcome of a collective process based on interpretation and narrative rather than on design features themselves (Hague, 2005). Such narratives may be influenced by urban development strategies, notably in the context of city marketing, yet this requires the combination of an inward- with an outward-orientated function: marketing measures intend to influence the identification of a city (in the sense of recognisability), which is the prerequisite for the identification with a city (in the sense of emotional connectivity) (Ebert, 2004). Against the background of increasingly polarised urban societies, marketing becomes therefore a means of fostering social cohesion by stimulating place identity among the local population. So the objective to convince the outside world that the social climate in a given city is marked by openness and tolerance includes the task of convincing the inhabitants of the city themselves that this is the case.

Yet there is another reason for producing urban images of openness and tolerance, which is connected to what may be labelled the “creative city” approach, claiming that it is creative and knowledge-intensive economic activities that are “crucial for future urban economic development” (Musterd and Murie, 2010: 17). Accordingly, an urban milieu characterised by a transnational, open and tolerant society and by culturally diverse places would be essential to attract the creative people – “talents” – whose activities are forming the hotbed of innovative thinking resulting in new products and production methods. While there exists today strong criticism of any development approach that is just “scattering the notions of tolerance, openness and diversity over a city” (Hall, 2004a: 257) in order to quickly put it on some successful development path, there are nevertheless still two important factors to consider. First, after having been warily put into perspective, the idea of strengthening the creative sector is still seen as a means of helping cities to adapt to “new circumstances and new opportunities” even by critics (Musterd and Murie, 2010: 29). Secondly, the “creative city” approach is dominating the work of numerous scholars aiming at analysing creative and cultural industries in their respective city region, and has a significant influence on urban decision-makers and thus city development strategies. This may be observed in quite different forms in cities all over East Central Europe (Stryjakiewicz et al., 2010), yet in the case of Polish cities the picture given by the broad range of literature on numerous urban regions is quite homogenous: the usual outcome is that a creative sector exists in a given urban region, that it is in geographical terms concentrated in the core city, and that the potential to strengthen this sector by public policy measures has so far been rather poorly exploited (see e.g. Staś, 2008 on Katowice; Miszczuk and Ponikowski, 2008 on Lublin; Dudek-Mańkowska et al., 2011 on Warsaw; Namyślak, 2009 on Wrocław). Smith (2001: 19), in his analysis of transnational urbanism distinguishes between transnational flows “from above” (of highly skilled work forces) and “from below” (migrant communities), and one may conclude that the transnational dimension of urban development strategies relates to both of them – to the attraction of “talents”, but also to the increasing use of migrant communities interpreted as “ethnic capital” for the demonstration of multicultural character and tolerance (see Arnaud and Pinson, 2004).

Table 2.

Shortlisted ECOC candidate cities: Population in the city, agglomeration and region.

City	Population in millions	Metropolitan area / Agglomeration	Population in millions	Voivodeship (region)	Population in millions
Gdańsk	0.46	Gdańsk Metropolitan Area	1.28	Pomerania	2.28
Katowice	0.31	Silesian Metropolis	1.97	Silesia	4.63
Lublin	0.35	Lublin Metropolitan Area	0.71	Lublin	2.17
Warsaw	1.71	Warsaw Agglomeration	2.63	Mazovia	5.29
Wrocław	0.63	Wrocław Agglomeration	1.12	Lower Silesia	2.91

Source: Main Statistic Office, population in 2011.

Analysis of transnational policies in the European Capital of Culture application documents

The above has discussed the reasons behind and main current features of the transnationalisation of urban development strategies. The analysis of how this transnationalisation is integrated into the five final ECOC application documents, and what this tells us about strategic development planning in East Central European latecomer cities, will proceed using the concepts of image-building, the innovative region, the metropolitan region, and the cross-border (macro) cooperation area.

The image of the transnational urban community

The chance to use the ECOC title to communicate a (perhaps newly) defined image for a city on an international scale has always been one of the prime motivations for municipalities to apply for this title. Naturally, each of the Polish ECOC candidate cities defined its “unique selling proposition” for the competition, resulting in Gdańsk being presented as a city of freedom and solidarity (under the title of “Freedom of Culture – Culture of Freedom”), Lublin as an East–West “City in Dialogue”, Katowice as a postindustrial “City of Gardens”, Warsaw as a place full of “New Energy for Europe”, and Wrocław as a city characterised by metamorphoses of different cultures and by “Spaces for Beauty”. While these are undoubtedly appealing images for marketing the respective cities, the problem for Polish cities claiming to be transnational in the sense of being multiethnic, tolerant and open is the fact that they simply have an overwhelmingly Polish and Roman Catholic population. In compensation, it is the reference to the sometimes stunning, intertwined multiethnic and multi-religious past of all cities that in the ECOC applications becomes the key element of the narrative. This includes a tradition of tolerance that once had been part of the place identity but that needs to be brought to the fore again, for example by creating “a vision to unite the inhabitants and to create a community feeling” (GA: 9)¹ as well as by raising “the level of social cohesion and of engagement” (WaA: 3). The “Lublin Model of Multicultural Dialogue” (LA: 23) with its roots in past centuries is to form the basis for multicultural best-practice projects, and similar approaches may be found concerning the tradition of “the century-long co-existence of Jews, Poles, Germans and Czechs” (KA: 19) in Katowice and Upper Silesia. The evocation of a multiethnic past that vanished for good nearly seven decades ago after the horrors of the Second World War and its aftermath may appear at first glance to be a rather deliberate substitute chosen for the lack of such elements in the present. Yet there is nevertheless an important opening-up process attached to this, as is typical for East Central Europe. All five Polish candidate cities had to start to rediscover their local history after 40 years of official Communist history interpretation, which for example disregarded local Jewish history. There was also no room for German history even in those cities that became Polish only in 1945 as a result of the Yalta and Potsdam Treaties. Consequently also the history and traditions of the ancestral lands of the new city inhabitants – the Poles from former East Polish territories annexed by the Soviet Union – remained a taboo. The development of awareness of this long-ignored part of the cities’ identities among their citizens is therefore indeed a sign of opening-up to a transnational perspective of historical interpretation. Consequently, the Wrocław Application “puts an emphasis on the multicultural city heritage and stresses the link of the modern culture of Wrocław with the culture of the former Eastern borderlands of Poland, as well as the capability to accept the German past of our city” (WrA: 17), and similar passages may be found in the Gdańsk Application. Yet while the Gdańsk Application talks more about an ongoing process of “trying to define its identity” (GA: 29), the Wrocław bid tends to interpret this process as having been successfully completed and even of being a role model for creating a “multiple identity” in modern Europe (WrA: 9). As a matter of fact, this issue still seems to be rather problematic in all Polish cities (see Thum, 2005 or Lewicka, 2008 on Wrocław; Nyka, 2003 or Tölle, 2008 on Gdańsk; Murzyn-Kupisz and Gwosdz, 2011 on Katowice).

In addition, Wrocław presents itself as a city with an impressive transnational character today, in which – to give the whole quote – “apart from Poles are again Germans, Czechs, Jews, Hungarians, Frenchmen, Englishmen, Dutchmen, Belgians, Scandinavians, Americans, Ukrainians, Greeks, Roma, Lemkos, Karaites, Armenians, Arabs, Chinese, Japanese, Koreans, Vietnamese” (WrA: 21). This presence is seen as the basis for Wrocław being a “cultural laboratory” (WrA: 22) and forms a key aspect of the ECOC application – however, in doing so obviously omitting any quantification of the importance of these groups. Warsaw in turn is presented as the “most cosmopolitan city in Poland” with “growing minorities of Chinese, Vietnamese, Russians, Byelorussians, Ukrainians and Turks” (WaA: 19), yet at the same time it is explicitly stated that Warsaw may not be called multicultural from a West European perspective. Although there is a lack of city-specific data in both cases, 2011 voivodeship population figures hint strongly at a rather unimpressive degree of multiculturalism. There were only 4400 foreign citizens and 11,000 Polish citizens with a non-Polish national-ethnic identity in the whole voivodeship of Lower Silesia including Wrocław (Statistical Office in Wrocław, 2012: 115), and 17,200 foreign citizens and 19,000 Polish citizens with a non-Polish national-ethnic identity in the voivodeship of Mazovia including Warsaw (Statistical Office in Warszawa, 2012: 101). In each case, the numbers would account for little more than 2% of the city’s overall population even if this part of the population was to be solely concentrated in the respective city itself.

The transnational innovative region

The objective to create local and regional networks in the cultural and creative industries sector, integrating research and science institutions, and to connect them to transnational networks, is included in all five application documents. This may be seen as an acknowledgement of the particularly strong need for a proactive public role to establish innovation systems in East Central European countries (Varblane et al., 2012). Reference is made to the existing creative and cultural industry milieux which are to be made “ever more dynamic” (WrA: 29), to produce “spaces for testing innovative solutions” (WaA: 45), or whose cooperation is simply to be “supported” (KA: 25). In Gdańsk the existing “strong ICT/ETI cluster” in the region (a network of companies and research institutions initiated by the Pomeranian voivodeship) is to be further developed by linking it to cultural and creative industries (GA: 32), while in Lublin the “generation of knowledge, creativity and innovativeness” is to be based on the building of partnerships between local research institutions and social initiatives as well as other institutions (LA: 42). In the cases of Lublin and Warsaw the aspect of strengthening and networking the city’s creative sector is a central part of the application concept. In the case of Lublin “Culture of Knowledge” is one of the four main themes, and in the case of Warsaw the “City of Talents, City of Citizens” is one of the three main narratives of the ECOC programme. In these cases it is obviously hoped to overcome the existing impasse in building innovation networks by implementing major ventures presented as key projects in the ECOC applications. Yet the Wrocław Application is comparatively low-key about this issue when rather casually mentioning the expected synergy effects of the ECOC event on the apparently already existing “creativity of Wrocław” (WrA: 28) and on its cultural and creative industries.

The transnationally linked city region

The different approaches towards the integration of the urban region in the ECOC applications quite explicitly reflect the problems of building metropolitan structures (tab. 2) in an atmosphere that is, first, often dominated by rivalry between municipalities (Lackowska and Zimmermann, 2010) and, second, lacking support from central government. For instance in the case of the so-called Tri-City – Gdańsk together with the city of Gdynia and the popular seaside resort of Sopot – the local climate is characterised by competition between the two big cities. However, the ECOC application process of “Gdańsk and Metropolis” indeed included representatives from each other Tri-City as well as from 11 neighbouring municipalities. Thus it became understood “as a tool to integrate the region” (GA: 16), and as “the first step” to start various processes to “turn the archipelago of cities and communes into a modern metropolis” (GA: 15). Unfortunately, any metropolitan unity that might have been achieved in the course of the candidacy received a major blow just a couple of months after the bid’s failure, when in September 2011 the city of Gdynia and a number of other municipalities abstained from participating in the newly founded metropolitan cooperation platform. In contrast, the metropolitan dimension of the ECOC candidacy of Katowice could be based on cooperation structures that had been well established since 2007 between the then 14 communes of the Silesian Metropolis – possibly apart from the Poznań Metropolis, the only advanced example of this kind in Poland. Consequently, all objectives attached to the concept are connected to the whole conurbation, as is the defined long-term effect of becoming a “competitive metropolis” to be able to compete successfully “with the powerful hubs of the global economy” (KA: 36).

Yet in none of the other three applications did the metropolitan dimension have any significance: In the case of Warsaw (where the municipality is notorious for not entering into any cooperation structures with the suburban municipalities, see Lackowska and Zimmermann, 2010), there may have been vague references to the Warsaw Agglomeration. However the focus on the capital city itself was barely hidden by the authors of the application who stated only that “on second thoughts we felt the need to designate further areas of engagement” (WaA: 9), and naming in this context the suburban area as just one among others. In turn, the Lublin Metropolitan Area exists only as a joint promotion initiative started in 2008 by local and sub-regional governments around the city, while the activities of the Wrocław Agglomeration Development Agency founded in 2005 are limited to supporting economic activities in the agglomeration. Accordingly neither the Lublin nor the Wrocław ECOC applications includes any integration of the respective city region.

The transnational cross-border (macro) region

The aspect of presenting the city as part of a larger cross-border region is somewhat present in all five application documents, but in quite ambiguous forms. In Katowice this aspect was treated rather randomly and concerned only the idea to create, together with Cracow and the Czech city of Ostrava, a “triangle of cities that together will play the role of an important cultural, scientific and manufacturing centre in this part of Europe” (KA: 10). This is based on an existing concept of creating a tri-polar transnational region; however, so far, the establishment of collaboration structures between the cities has been rather poorly implemented (Podhalański, 2008). In the application of Warsaw, with its claim to constitute “a bridge between the European Union and the East” (WaA: 31), transnational strategic relationships were limited to poorly specified contacts with cities in the former Eastern Bloc. This is in sharp contrast to the city of Lublin where a similar main theme of bridge-building to the East was manifested by a strong emphasis on becoming a centre in a region to be developed along the “Eastern Axis of Cultural Cooperation” (LA: 28) forged with the capital cities of two neighbouring voivodeships. The primary objective was to use “the development potential of culture for one of the poorest regions in the EU” and to “overcome marginalisation and underinvestment in Eastern Poland at least in the field of culture” by “smart investments in social capital, education, creativity and infrastructure” (LA: 29). To this region a clear cross-border dimension was to be attached. First, the West Ukrainian city of Lviv, whose mayor had even appointed a special ECOC commissioner, was to be integrated on multiple levels. Second, and with clear relation to the Bug Euroregion that encompasses the border region of Poland, Belarus and Ukraine, the Bug river and its valley were to be presented as a “landscape without borders” (LA: 57). In turn, in the case of Gdańsk, predictably the city wanted to use the ECOC event to promote “the Baltic idea” in its cultural and social dimension in order to raise “the presence of the region in the European Union”, and to take action to “build a joint identity” for the Baltic Sea Region (GA: 33). Yet, surprisingly, similar perspectives are completely missing in the case of Wrocław, whose municipality (as well as the Lower Silesian Voivodeship’s Marshal Office) is partner of the Polish–German “Oder Partnership” macro cooperation area: neither this transnational structure itself nor any of its partner cities (Berlin, Dresden, Szczecin, and Poznań) have any role to play in the ECOC strategy. The regional dimension of the bid is limited to Lower Silesia, for which the ECOC is to become a “mobilising and activating factor” in the fields of tourism and culture (WrA: 17). A small transnational dimension is added by extending the perception of Lower Silesia to that of a historic cultural landscape, and therefore scheduling specified ECOC events in the Czech city of Hradec Králové as well as in the German border city of Görlitz. In the case of the latter it is in turn striking that its Polish twin city of Zgorzelec is not included, as both border cities are promoting themselves as the European City of Görlitz–Zgorzelec, and both had campaigned jointly to become ECOC 2010.

Conclusions

When accepting that transnationalisation is a key demand in urban development strategies today, then just what can be gathered from the case of the five shortlisted Polish ECOC candidate cities? For once it is evident that becoming “innovative” and “creative” is certainly interpreted by East Central European latecomer city authorities as a way to overcome a peripheral socioeconomic situation, and in consequence the ECOC event has become seen by all case study cities as a potential catalyst for building such structures. At the same time, the common omission of any mention of local achievement of specifications in the ECOC applications hints at the fact that municipal policy measures in that direction have so far failed to make any decisive difference in the major Polish cities. In turn, the picture on how the issue of building metropolitan areas is treated is somewhat less clear. With the Silesian Metropolis being the only case of pre-existing comprehensive intercommunal structures, the other cities are in fact examples of failure to satisfactorily achieve this objective (Gdańsk) or, in some cases, of having even abandoned it (Lublin, Warsaw, Wrocław). Consequently, the “building” of metropolitan areas in East Central European cities seems in the vast majority of cases to be limited to a marketing policy, thus omitting issues such as jointly improving the competitiveness and socioeconomic potential of the city region in a transnational scene. In turn, the picture with the acceptance of transnational (macro-) regional strategic thinking seems to be even less consistent. Some municipalities see further integration into existing networks (Gdańsk in the Baltic Sea Region), or even building such structures from scratch (Lublin), as key policies, while others rather omit the non-existence of such structures or ambitions (Katowice, Warsaw) or even refuse to define any objectives on the basis of existing networks (Wrocław in the Oder Partnership). So the potential for overcoming marginality by integration into transnational cooperation areas is apparently assessed in extremely different ways by East Central European municipalities. Such ambiguities, however, do certainly not apply to the aspect of integrating a transnational dimension into city marketing strategies, as all municipalities have accepted the apparent need to present their respective urban communities as being transnational in the sense of being multicultural, and thus tolerant. Yet here the East Central European understanding is different from the Western one. As, for example in the case of Poland, no large numbers of foreigners or religious–ethnic majorities inhabit these cities today, multiculturism is to be based on the evocation of pre-war multiethnic tradition, and on the genuine societal process of opening-up to that past. So one may conclude that in East Central European cities transnationality is seen as a historic dimension, on which present urban images and identities are to be built.

The five final application documents would certainly form a rewarding basis for a discussion of how municipalities of (East Central) European cities want to make their respective ECOC “European” in an EU urban cultural understanding, and how this may lead to certain mismatches between aspirations and reality as well as to the paradox of streamlining cultural concepts that are meant to present variety (Griffiths, 2006; Habit, 2011; Lähdesmäki, 2012b). Yet this study is focused on what these application documents reveal about urban development strategies pursued in East Central European cities. Fostering cultural and creative industries, attracting “talents”, creating innovative city regions, supporting metropolitan cooperation, and related to all of these aims connecting the city to transnational networks, is based on theories and concepts influencing the current state-of-the-art of city development in general, and there are of course better and worse examples of how their application has been successful in and suitable to specific local conditions in cities all over Europe. Nevertheless, some specific East Central European features have become detectable: the different definition of a transnational urban character, the generally poor results of building metropolitan areas as well as innovative regions, and the highly inconsistent picture concerning the integration into cross-border cooperation areas. Apparent problems may to some degree be caused by the comparatively weaker economic base in this peripheral part of Europe. Yet when acknowledging that the establishment of networks is at the core of urban transnationalisation strategies, it appears that this is the very Achilles’ heel in the development of East Central European cities. Literature on Western examples seen as role models for successful partnership building often highlights the learning process of the public side that had been involved in building multi-layer cooperation structures, and it appears that this is exactly what has barely happened in the latecomer cities. It remains to be seen whether networking will eventually become a feature of city development in East Central Europe, whether it will be compensated for by other forms, or whether its absence will constitute an enduring structural barrier to successful city development in this part of Europe.

Footnotes

Final ECOC Application Documents

Gdańsk Application [GA]: Instytucja Kultury Gdańsk 2016, 2011. Kultura Wolności. Formularz kandydatury Gdańska do tytułu Europejskiej Stolicy Kultury 2016. Selekcja końcowa [Culture of Freedom. Application form of Gdańsk for the title of European Capital of Culture 2016. Final selection]. Gdańsk.

Katowice Application [KA]: Instytucja Kultury Katowice 2016 Biuro ESK, 2011. Katowice Miasto Ogrodów. Aplikacja w konkursie o tytuł Europejskiej Stolicy Kultury 2016 − selekcja końcowa [Katowice City of Gardens. Application in the contest for the title of European Capital of Culture 2016 − final selection]. Katowice.

Lublin Application [LA]: Miasto Lublin, 2011. Lublin Europejska Stolica Kultury 2016. Aplikacja finałowa [Lublin European Capital of Culture 2016. Final application]. Lublin.

Warsaw Application [WaA]: Miasto Stołeczne Warszawa, 2011. Warszawa – miasto kandydujące do tytułu Europejskiej Stolicy Kultury 2016. Wniosek aplikacyjny [Warsaw – candidate city for the title of European Capital of Culture 2016. Application]. Warszawa.

Wrocław Application [WrA]: Instytucja Kultury Wrocław 2016, 2011. Przestrzenie dla piękna – na nowo rozważone. Aplikacja Wrocławia o tytuł Europejskiej Stolicy Kultury 2016 [Spaces for Beauty – reconsidered. Wrocław’s Application for the title of European Capital of Culture 2016]. Wrocław.

References

Adams

(2008) Convergence and policy transfer: An examination of the extent to which approaches to spatial planning have converged within the context of an Enlarged EU. International Planning Studies 13(1): 31–49.

Arnaud

Pinson

(2004) Shaping the identity and mobilising the “ethnic capital” in three European cities. In: Eckardt

Hassenpflug

(eds) Urbanism and Globalization. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, pp.131–150.

Bohle

(2002) Europas neue Peripherie. Polens Transformation und Transnationale Integration [Europe’s New Periphery. The Transformation and Transnational Integration of Poland]. Münster: Westfälisches Dampfboot.

Bora

(1997) The impact of transition: Hungary. In: Kirdar

(ed.) Cities Fit for People. New York: United Nations Publications, pp.487–492.

Chlebicki

Grodny

Solecki

(2010) Zróżnicowanie instytucjonalnego kapitału kulturowego polskich metropolii [Institutional cultural capital diversification of Polish metropolises]. In: Rewers

Skórzyńska

(eds) Sztuka – Kapitał kulturowy polskich miast. Poznań: Wydawnictwo Naukowe UAM, pp.155–170.

Dudek-Mańkowska

Fuhrmann

Grochowski

Zegar

(2011) Potential and conditions for the development of the creative sector in Warsaw. Miscellanea Geographica 15(1): 171–186.

Ebert

(2004) Identitätsorientiertes Stadtmarketing. Ein Beitrag zur Koordination und Steuerung des Stadtmarketings [Identity-oriented City Marketing. A Contribution to Coordination and Steering of City Marketing]. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang.

Evans

(2001) Cultural Planning: An Urban Renaissance? London & New York: Routledge.

Gierat-Bieroń

(2009) Europejskie Miasto Kultury. Europejska Stolica Kultury. 1985−2008 [European City of Culture. European Capital of Culture. 1985−2008]. Kraków: Instytut Dziedzictwa.

10.

Gold

(2005) Cities of Culture. Staging International Festivals and the Urban Agenda, 1851−2000. Aldershot & Burlington, VT: Ashgate.

11.

Griffiths

(2006) City/culture discourses: Evidence from the competition to select the European Capital of Culture 2008. European Planning Studies 14(4): 415–430.

12.

Guide (Guide for Cities Applying for the Title of European Capital of Culture) (2009) Guide for Cities Applying for the Title of European Capital of Culture. Brussels: European Commission.

13.

Habit

(2011) Die Inszenierung Europas? Kulturhauptstädte zwischen EU-Europäisierung, Cultural Governance und lokalen Eigenlogiken [The Orchestration of Europe? Capitals of Culture between EU Europeanization, Cultural Governance and Local Intrinsic Logics]. Münster: Waxmann.

14.

Hague

(2005) Planning and place identity. In: Hague

Jenkins

(eds) Place Identity, Participation and Planning. London & New York: Routledge

15.

Hall

(2004a) Creativity, culture, knowledge and the city. Built Environment 30(3): 256–258.

16.

Hall

(2004b) European cities in a global world. In: Eckardt

Hassenpflug

(eds) Urbanism and Globalization. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, pp.31–46.

17.

Hamilton

FEI

Pichler-Milanović

Dimitrovska Andrews

(2005) Introduction. In: Hamilton

FEI

Dimitrovska Andrews

Pichler-Milanović

(eds) Transformation of Cities in Central and Eastern Europe: Towards Globalization. New York: United Nations University Press, pp.3–21.

18.

Hassink

(2001) The learning region: A fuzzy concept or a sound theoretical basis for modern regional innovation policies? Zeitschrift für Wirtschaftsgeographie 45(3/4): 219–230.

19.

Herrero

Sanz

Devesa

Bedate

del Barrio

(2006) The economic impact of cultural events: A case-study of Salamanca 2002, European Capital of Culture. European Urban and Regional Studies 13(1): 41–57.

20.

Ingram

(2010) Promoting Europe through ‘Unity in Diversity’: Avignon as European Capital of Culture in 2000. Journal of the Society for the Anthropology of Europe 10(1): 14–25.

21.

Johansson

Kociatkiewicz

(2011) City festivals: Creativity and control in staged urban experiences. European Urban and Regional Studies 18(4): 392–405.

22.

Kern

(2001) Transnationale Städtenetzwerke in Europa [Transnational city networks in Europe]. In: Schröter

(ed.) Empirical policy and administration research. Local, national and international perspectives. Opladen: Leske + Budrich, pp.95–116.

23.

Koschatzky

(2001) Networks in innovation research and innovation policy – an introduction. In: Koschatzky

Kulicke

Zenker

(eds) Innovation Networks: Concepts and Challenges in the European Perspective. Heidelberg & New York: Physica, pp.3–23.

24.

Krätke

(2007) Metropolisation of the European economic territory as a consequence of increasing specialisation of urban agglomerations in the knowledge economy. European Planning Studies 15(1): 1–27.

25.

Krätke

Wildner

Lanz

(2012) The transnationality of cities: Concepts, dimensions and research fields. An introduction. In: Krätke

Wildner

Lanz

(eds) Transnationalism and Urbanism. New York & Abingdon: Routledge, pp.1–30.

26.

Lackowska

Zimmermann

(2010) New forms of territorial governance in metropolitan regions? A Polish-German comparison. European Urban and Regional Studies 18(2): 156–169.

27.

Lähdesmäki

(2012a) Discourses of Europeanness in the reception of the European Capital of Culture events: The case of Pécs 2010. European Urban and Regional Studies 00: 1–15.

28.

Lähdesmäki

(2012b) European capital of culture designation as an initiator of urban transformation in the post-socialist countries. European Planning Studies 00: 1–17.

29.

Lewicka

(2008) Place attachment, place identity, and place memory: Restoring the forgotten city past. Journal of Environmental Psychology 28(3): 209–231.

30.

Łoboda

(2000) Development strategies of towns: The case of Wrocław. In: Chojnicki

Parysek

(eds) Polish Geography: Problems, Researches, Applications. Poznań: Bogucki, pp.69–76.

31.

McNeill

(1999) Globalization and the European City. Cities 16(3): 143–147.

32.

Markowski

(1997) Major tendencies and structural problems of major Polish cities in the new economic context. DISP 130: 40–46.

33.

Miszczuk

Ponikowski

(2008) Nauka jako czynnik kreatywności aglomeracji. Przykład Lublina [Science as a factor for creativity of an agglomeration. The case of Lublin]. In: Klasik

(ed.) Kreatywna aglomeracja – potencjały, mechanizmy, aktywności. Podejścia metodologiczne. Katowice: Wydawnictwo Akademii Ekonomicznej, pp.137–154.

34.

Mittag

Oerters

(2009) Kreativwirtschaft und Kulturhauptstadt: Katalysatoren urbaner Entwicklung in altindustriellen Ballungsregionen? [Creative economy and capital of culture: Catalysts of urban development in de-industrialising urban regions?]. In: Quenzel

(ed.) Entwicklungsfaktor Kultur. Studien zum kulturellen und ökonomischen Potential der europäischen Stadt. Bielefeld: transcript, pp.61–92.

35.

Murzyn-Kupisz

Gwosdz

(2011) The changing identity of the Central European city: The case of Katowice. Journal of Historical Geography 37(1): 113–126.

36.

Musterd

Murie

(2010) The idea of the creative or knowledge-based city. In: Musterd

Murie

(eds) Making Competitive Cities. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, pp.17–32.

37.

Namyślak

(2009) Przemysły kreatywne w aglomeracji wrocławskiej [Creative industries in the agglomeration of Wrocław]. In: Klasik

(ed.) Kreatywne miasto – kreatywna aglomeracja. Katowice: Wydawnictwo Akademii Ekonomicznej, pp.123–131.

38.

Nijkamp

(2003) Entrepreneurship in a modern network economy. Regional Studies 37(4): 395–405.

39.

Nyka

(2003) Recycling Gdańsk’s urban spaces: The processes supporting the identity of the city. In: Eckardt

Hassenpflug

(eds) Consumption and the Post-Industrial City. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, pp.261–271.

40.

Oerlemans

Meeus

Kenis

(2007) Regional innovation networks. In: Rutten

Boekema

(eds) The Learning Region: Foundations, State of the Art, Future. Cheltenham & Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar, pp.160–183.

41.

Parysek

(2006) Processes affecting the development and transformation of towns in Central European states: The case of Poland. Quaestiones Geographicae 25: 29–36.

42.

Pickles

(2010) The spirit of post-socialism: Common spaces and the production of diversity. European Urban and Regional Studies 17(2): 127–140.

43.

Podhalański

(2008) Building polycentricity of the metropolitan region of Kraków and Katowice. Czasopismo Techniczne A 5: 75–89.

44.

Pries

(2002) Transnationalisierung der sozialen Welt? [Transnationalisation of the social world?]. Berliner Journal für Soziologie 2(1): 263–272.

45.

Ratcliffe

Stubbs

(1996) Urban Planning and Real Estate Development. London: UCL Press.

46.

Sassatelli

(2002) Imagined Europe: The shaping of a European cultural identity through EU cultural policy. European Journal of Social Theory 5(4): 435–451.

47.

Sassen

(2001) The impact of the new technologies and globalization on cities. In: Hauptmann

(ed.) Cities in transition. Rotterdam: 010 Publishers, pp.326–349.

48.

Smith

(2001) Transnational Urbanism: Locating Globalization. Oxford: Blackwell.

49.

Smyth

(1994) Marketing the City: The Role of Flagship Developments in Urban Regeneration. London & New York: Spon.

50.

Staś

(2008) Przemysły kultury – przykład Katowic [Culture industries – the case of Katowice]. In: Klasik

(ed.) Kreatywna aglomeracja – potencjały, mechanizmy, aktywności. Podejścia metodologiczne. Katowice: Wydawnictwo Akademii Ekonomicznej, pp.101–110.

51.

Statistical Office in Warszawa (ed.) (2012) Statistical Yearbook Mazowieckie Voivodship 2012. Warsaw: UStat.

52.

Stryjakiewicz

(2000) Implications of globalisation for regions and localities in an economy in transition: The case of Poland. In: Parysek

Stryjakiewicz

(eds) Polish Economy in Transition: Spatial Perspectives. Poznań: Bogucki, pp.7–28.

53.

Stryjakiewicz

Burdack

Egedy

(2010) Institutional change and new development paths: Budapest, Leipzig, Poznań, Riga and Sofia. In: Musterd

Murie

(eds) Making Competitive Cities. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, pp.92–112.

54.

Thum

(2005) Wrocław and the myth of the multicultural border city. European Review 13(2): 227–235.

55.

Tölle

(2008) City profile Gdańsk. Cities 25(2): 107–119.

56.

Tölle

(2012) National planning systems between convergence and incongruity: Implications for cross-border cooperation from the German-Polish perspective. European Planning Studies 21(4): 615–630.

57.

Tsenkova

(2006) Beyond transitions: Understanding urban change in post-socialist cities. In: Tsenkova

Nedović-Budić

(eds) The Urban Mosaic of Post-Socialist Europe: Space, Institutions and Policy. Heidelberg & New York: Physica-Verlag, pp.21–49.

58.

Varblane

Ukrainski

Lillestik

(2012) Path dependency factors affecting the innovation systems of latecomer countries: Comparison of Central and Eastern Europe, Asia, and Latin America. In: Carayannis

Varblane

Roolaht

(eds) Innovation Systems in Small Catching-Up Economies: New Perspectives on Practice and Policy. New York: Springer, pp.39–57.

59.

Zimmermann

(2008) International – transnational: Forschungsfelder und Forschungsperspektiven [International – transnational. Research areas and research perspectives]. In: Unfried

Mittag

van der Linden

(eds) Transnationale Netzwerke im 20. Jahrhundert. Historische Erkundungen zu Ideen und Praktiken, Individuen und Organisationen. Vienna: Akademische Verlagsanstalt, pp.27–46.