Cultural and creative cities (European Commission)

The Cultural and Creative Cities Monitor uses both quantitative and qualitative data to show how well 168 selected cities in 30 European countries perform on a range of measures describing the ‘Cultural Vibrancy’, the ‘Creative Economy’ and the ‘Enabling Environment’ of a cities.

Released for the first time in 2017, the Monitor offers a pool of comparable data that can be used by journalists to gain insights into the role of culture and creativity in cities’ social and economic well-being and to benchmark their cities against similar urban centres using both quantitative and qualitative data.

Among the dimensions considered, the status of cultural venues and facilities, cultural participation, the weight of creative and knowledge workers as well as openness, tolerance and trust.

The platform offers great room for personalization, allowing to create a new city entry, by adding new data, and to compare it to selected cities in the Monitor; to adapt weights according to the importance attached to different topics by cities and produce customised rankings; and to simulate the impact of policy actions (e.g. increased city visitors) on the final scores, thus allowing users to build scenarios.

Data can be downloaded in Excel format.