In the context of the European Semester and “The Role of Culture” event on 15-16 April 2015 in Lisbon, the JRC has been invited to discuss the ongoing work on the development of a monitoring tool, the Cultural and Creative Cities Index (working name). The Index is the result of a convergence of interests of several stakeholders and the European Commission to establish a common evidence-base for understanding and monitoring cultural and creative initiatives and assessing their social and economic impact in cities milieu. The city level analysis reflects the increasingly urbanized character of Europe and is further supported by the fact that most of the creative initiatives take place within urban areas.

Despite a plethora of indices devoted to cultural and creative sectors, there exists no single index that is accepted and used across the globe. The Cultural and Creative Cities Index aims to fill in the existing gap. The key features of the index are: full transparency and availability to the public; detailed interpretation of results and city profiles; benchmarking with peer cities based on economic level and population size; conceptual and statistical coherence; availability in two complementary versions - a “standardised” and a “flexible” one. The Cultural and Creative Cities Index will hopefully provide a workbench for research, e.g. of cultural potentials of different segments of the population. Opening and closing remarks to the event will be given by Sandis Voldiņš, State Secretary of the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Latvia, Presidency of the Council of the EU, Jorge Barreto Xavier, Secretary of State for Culture of Portugal and Enrique Barón Crespo, Former President of the European Parliament.