ABOUT BOOK

‘What is Europe? It’s not just a series of banknotes’, an interviewee remarked ~when asked about European heritage. Our study of European Capitals of ~Culture (ECoC), one of the main European heritage programmes, proceeds ~in the same spirit, informed by the complex and disputed discussions of what ~Europe is (see, for example, Sassatelli 2002 ) and how, within such shifting ~grounds, European heritage might be interpreted (see, for instance, Delanty ~2017 ; Niklasson 2017). Described by some as large- scale bottom- up cultural ~programming (Immler and Sakkers 2014 ), the ECoC programme has seen several ~cities across Europe compete for the title of European Capital of Culture ~for more than three decades now. Our research has focussed on three cities, ~Valletta as ECoC 2018 , Plovdiv as ECoC 2019 and Galway as ECoC 2020. We ~are conducting a discourse analysis of the submitted bids as the key documents ~related to each city’s participation in the programme; we are then investigating ~four common themes that emerge from this analysis: Europe, heritage, diversity ~and future.