City & Culture Conference (Wrocław 2017)

This international conference is taking place in Wroclaw—the city which hosted the European Capital of Culture 2016. This event was a unique opportunity for creators, organizers and researchers of culture to scrutinize the processes affecting the local field of culture and cultural production. Although it was Wroclaw that won the title of the European Capital of Culture in 2016, the bidding processes highlighted the importance of cultural policies in urban development—a topic which has been widely discussed in all candidate cities. Recent years have also yielded many interesting academic analyses on culture prepared in Gdansk, Poznan and Warsaw by experts in sociology and cultural studies. The juxtaposition of the two concepts which lay at the core of the conference—city and culture—is based on a firm conviction that culture has the function of creating city-ness and a city has the function of creating culture. Although the specificity of urban culture can be debatable, the fact that city-ness becomes visible through the cultural life of the city is indisputable. The cultural life in and of a city is a form of socializing inhabitants and a way of creating values in public sphere. Culture is the basic asset and a set of values of a city which interconnect various aspects of its inhabitants’ life.