Alba Colombo is a Lecturer in humanities and culture management programs at the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya based in Barcelona. She has done a Bachelor History of Art at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, a Masters Degree on Sociology and recently finished her PhD focused on new methodological procedures to foster cultural effects generated by cultural events. Since 1998 she has been cultural manager of different initiatives at a international level. She has worked on large-format cultural events in the cinematographic sector, like the International Film Festival in Berlin and the European Film Academy. She currently is a jury member of the International Ramon Roca Boncompte Award for Culture Management Studies, as well advisor at the University and Research Catalan Agency. She has participated in European research projects, like the EURO Festival as well as published several papers in international journals as well as books. For more publication information you can visit: uoc.academia.edu/AlbaColombo/Papers
Culture Impact Perception: a model proposal for cultural impact measurement
Given the growth of social and cultural exchanges, provoked by migration, social movements and global economic instability, culture programs and cultural activities shall be strategic and important elements solving problems identified as collectives. Even the academic discussion of culture evaluation and effects measurements as been focused on several types of quantitative and qualitative indicators, is still complicated to measure intangible effects, outcomes or impacts generated by a culture program or culture events.
Due to the proliferation of events and festivals around the globe, this paper focuses on effects and impacts generated by culture events upon hosting communities such as cities, regions or areas.
There is some research attempting to measure and assess intangible impacts such as social or cultural impacts. Most of these papers propose an epistemological definition of cultural impacts related to other impacts like social, educational or political, and they also use different methodological procedures. (Delamere, Wankel & Hinch 2001; Fredeline, Jago & Deery 2003; Small, Edwards & Sheridan 2005)
Having examined the conceptualization of social and cultural impacts from several disciplines, as as well as underlying methodological aspects, this paper presents a new epistemological and methodological proposal, to be able to measure cultural impacts generated by implementation acts or culture events. The analysed data are mainly derived from a number of studies carried out by various researchers and institutions, as well as derived from the Cultural Impact Perception implementation exercise done on a European cultural event, the Karneval der Kulturen Berlin.
The paper concludes with some critical reflections as the new model represents a proposal and should be contrasted and tested on more cases, identifying the problems and advantages. Therefore the paper proposes some aspects which need to be taken into account when implementing this new methodological proposal.
