World Cities Culture Report

The World Cities Culture Forum is a major global initiative on culture and the future of cities. It is a celebration of the importance of culture in the public and political life of world cities.

World cities increasingly have more in common with each other than with other smaller cities in their countries. Yet until now world cities have not had a forum in which senior policymakers can discuss culture.

The World Cities Culture Forum is an initiative of the Mayor of London. It was founded in 2012 by London, New York, Shanghai, Paris, Tokyo, Sydney, Johannesburg, and Istanbul. By bringing together their cultural expertise and knowledge, the participating cities have created an effective research and policy forum to address the role that culture plays in their cities, and to strengthen their policy responses to the similar challenges they face.

Since its inception, the World Cities Culture Forum has gone on from strength to strength and now boasts 22 members from across the globe and an ambitious programme of research and policy debate. The Forum events are an opportunity for city partners to meet face to face in order to engage in meaningful policy discussions about culture’s role in a world city context.

The World Cities Culture Report is the document at the core of the Forum research programme as a compendium of data and effective practice. By using more than 60 measures of cultural activity for each city it gives an unprecedented level of insight into their cultural strengths. This has been combined with individual portraits for each city, written in conjunction with them, examining the policy context in which culture is shaped in each place.

Download the report in French

Download the report in Japanese

Japanese-language fonts are required to read this report

Download a summary of the report in Turkish

The World Cities Culture Forum is organised and coordinated by BOP Consulting with the support and collaboration of the following partners.