Creative Europe
Desk UK
for Culture

CITYBOOKS – UNIQUE CITY IMPRESSIONS citybooks is a project in which artists and public find each other in an urban and multimedia environment. Several experienced partners from Austria, Belgium, France, FYR of Macedonia, Poland and United Kingdom work together towards an intercultural collaboration on European level with a huge audience potential and a low threshold. The city is the principal factor. CREATE Authors, photographers and video makers – young talents and established names – get to know a city during a two-week residence and translate this experience into their personal artistic language. Per city, five authors each write a citybook: a story, an essay or a piece of poetry in which the city is the main focus. One photographer delivers 24 photos. From each of the cities visited, a video portrait is made and included in the series City One Minutes. DOCUMENT The heart of citybooks is its website, www.city-books.eu. Here all the elements of the project come together: the citybooks of the authors as web text, as e-book and as podcast in English, French and Dutch, the photographs, the City One Minutes and all the information on the collaboration with the European cities. DIALOGUE Artists across Europe enter into dialogue with a city and its culture, mainly through activities organised by the local partners. These encounters leave their imprint in the citybook of the author, the visuals of the photographer and the short films of the video maker. citybooks appear in English, French and Dutch, and when applicable, in a fourth ‘local language’. Via citybooks everyone gets the opportunity to discover urban culture at its best and to learn another language in the meantime. CONNECT citybooks means building a sustainable network of ‘Unitied Cities of Europe’. In the project supported by the European Commission we include six cities, but our ambition is that eventually every European country is represented in citybooks.