Culture and the City: Towards a Context-Aware Assessment Framework

How to assess the capacity of cultural initiatives to generate social value in urban contexts? Which lenses allow capturing dynamics that affect their transformative potential? Assuming that the social value of cultural actions goes far beyond their direct impacts and depends on their capacity to intercept broader trajectories of change, the contribution identifies observation lenses capable of rendering a complex picture of relations between actors, actions, and context-specific variables. Through a process-oriented approach, the authors put contexts back at the centre and look not so much at impacts per sè as at impact generation mechanisms. Moving beyond economic impact evaluation, they look at culture-driven social value generated in three impact domains: health and well-being, urban regeneration, and social cohesion. Without proposing a comprehensive evaluation scheme, the contribution identifies obstacles and enabling factors influencing the transformative capacity of cultural actions on an urban scale. In line with the conceptual and methodological setting of the research - carried out within the H2020 MESOC (MEasuring the SOcial impacts of Culture) Project - the authors reflect on these evaluative objects and question whether (and to what extent) they support a reflection on specific cultural actions but also on the capacity of urban contexts with different characteristics to welcome and promote transformation dynamics towards social impact generation.