Arising from the [Cultural Audit of London], at my suggestion, the Burns-Owens Partnership (who produced the report) established a ‘club’ of World Cities to exchange benchmarked information and evidence about their cultural assets on the standardised basis established by the report. This was an impressive success. Today, the [World Cities Cultural Forum] counts on some 40 or more cities, and until the pandemic, met on a regular basis, each time in a different city.
The meetings themselves have become one of the most significant achievements of the Forum: the opportunity to simply meet and exchange ideas had become as important as the data itself, though these remain the backbone of the initiative.
I attended the Istanbul summit of 2013, an illustration of the power of inter-city collaboration. This post simply reproduces the agenda of that meeting, in and of itself a statement of what this movement had achieved.