This project is an explicit attempt to gauge the importance of Culture and Creativity to the economic and social sustainability of Galway city. Galway has been synonymous with culture and the arts for many decades. For years it has marketed itself as such to tourists, only recently has it begun to do so with investors. Building on previous work carried out at the Centre for Innovation and Structural Change (CISC) and running alongside the CreativEdge project, this piece of work sets out to build a concrete replicable index of Culture and Creativity for the city.
On the back of internationally reknowned festivals and practitioners, Culture and the Arts have filtered down to hard economic and urban facets in Galway. Though far from the original remit of Artistic endeavor, the positive spillovers from cultural pursuits in terms of quality of life and place competitiveness have been evidenced in the case of Galway. What this project sets out to do is attempt to ground these influences in a quantifiable form. In so doing we intend to build what we term a Cultural Index of Galway city.
The index itself will be based on data gathered at a city level from secondary and primary sources. Previous work carried out at CISC has already attempted to gauge and log the cultural infrastructure of the city and, while useful, this was only a snapshot of the physical / quantifiable aspect of culture in the city. This index intends to move beyond that by offering a dynamic, more qualitative overview of the impacts of culture and creativity across the city.
Alongside the physical infrastructure lies a host of other metrics: from graduate numbers, foreign direct investments (by industry type), tourist numbers, quality of life indices, festival rankings etc. that will provide not just a comprehensive overview for the city but will be the first of its kind in Ireland and the UK.
Funded by
NUI Galway Registrar’s Strategic Fund