Mulicipalities at the core of a new european project intended to promote scientific culture at local level, ESCITY.
Escity is the acronym of Europe, Science and the City, a project that has received financing from the European Commission’s Science and Society Programme, aiming to lay down the basis for an international community interested in promoting scientific culture in Europe and with the ability to act as a cultural lobby.
ESCITY focuses on creating the core for a community that brings together regional and local governments and social researchers across Europe to exchange information and best practices with the emphasis on strategies that place the promotion of scientific culture within the cities’ and regions’ cultural policies. The project aims to settle the basis for a wider and lasting network, able to act as a lobby.
ESCITY has four Areas:
1. To provide a broad forum for scientific culture issues across Europe.
2. Benchmarking the promotion of scientific culture at regional and local level.
3. To organise a European Conference to be held in Barcelona in 2007, which the city has declared “Science Year”. Prior, contacts will be made with other European networks of cities in order to gather experiences, concerns and suggestions relevant to ESCITY and identify potential participants and network members.
4. To engage in a lobby strategy by publishing an action guide to be distributed to European governments, its contents being the forum conclusions, a list of best practices, the benchmarking main findings and a set of tools and recommendations for local and regional governments.
The project will be led by The Barcelona City Council Institute for Culture and the Scientific Communication Observatory of the Pompeu Fabra University (Spain) with the participation of Observa – science in society, Wissenschaftszentrum Wien (Austria), Ciência Viva – Agência Nacional para a Cultura Científica e Tecnológica (Portugal) e Municipality of Tromsõ, (Norway).
