Expériences, Ressources

Cultural Gems, a free open source web app

What is culture in your city?

Culture in a city is not only represented by museums, cinemas,theatres, art galleries, and other institutional places. Culture is heritage, with memorials, historic and religious sites, but it is also very much alive, with informal cultural spaces, meeting places where artistic creation happens, and places where music is played.

Cultural gems is a free open source web app, conceived by the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre, to map cultural and creative places in European cities. The main purpose is to capture diversity in culture and creativity among European cities. Cultural gems includes data on selected cultural venues from OpenStreetMap, and information provided by European cities, universities, and other public and private organisations. Citizens are encouraged to add more.

Participating cities

Cultural gems is designed to foster:
Data collection. Collect and make visible the cultural vibrancy of European cities, highlighting even the most hidden cultural and creative places
Harmonised categorisation. Cultural gems will extend the categories it makes available to capture unusual and unconventional cultural and creative places
Cities network. Cultural gems helps to strengthen bridges between European cities, fostering common challenges and knowledge exchange

How can you contribute to mapping culture and creativity?

Everybody can contribute by adding information on cultural and creative places in European cities. There are two ways to map new cultural gems in your city:

On the map
From the back-end

Background

Cultural gems is a spin-off project of the Cultural and Creative Cities Monitor, the web tool developed by the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre (JRC), to monitor and assess the performance of ‘Cultural and Creative Cities’ in Europe vis-à-vis their peers using mainly quantitative data describing:

  • Cultural Vibrancy measures the cultural pulse of a city in terms of cultural infrastructure and participation in culture;
  • Creative Economy captures how the cultural and creative sectors contribute to a city’s employment, job creation, and innovative capacity;
  • Enabling Environment identifies the tangible and intangible assets that help cities attract creative talent and stimulate cultural engagement.

Source: https://culturalgems.jrc.ec.europa.eu/