When your city tries to become the European Capital of Culture, you don’t just write a bid. You write a story that you hope will carry you into a different future. A shared vision. A strategy. A promise. You gather communities, institutions, artists, policymakers. You ask bold questions. You imagine what the city might become if art and culture were given enough time, space, trust, and resources.

We did all of that. And then we didn’t win.

But the real challenge began after the result was announced. Not the heartbreak - that passed - but the quiet, more persistent question: What now? What do you do with a plan written for a stage that no longer exists?

The bid as a temporary frame

Our bid sparked a surge of creative energy. It helped build momentum, visibility, collaboration. For many months, we felt part of something shared and hopeful. People came together - not in formal roles, but as collaborators, each bringing a different way of seeing. We saw the city not only as it was, but as it might become.

But a bid is a fragile kind of structure. It exists for the sake of evaluation, competition, timing. When the spotlight moves on, the structure dissolves. What’s left isn’t the same plan - it’s a pile of questions, a list of half-begun conversations, and the memory of what was possible.

The challenge now is: how do we keep working with the same urgency and care, without the frame that once held us together?

Wellbeing as more than a theme

The heart of our bid was wellbeing. We didn’t treat it as a trend or a formality—it was our attempt to imagine a city where people could simply live better. Where everyday life felt lighter, more connected. Where culture didn’t just live in institutions but moved quietly through everyday life. We looked around and asked what was already working, what needed more care, and how we could create the conditions for people - not just audiences or users - to feel truly supported by the city they live in.

This vision hasn’t changed. But its context has. Without the structure of the ECoC programme, wellbeing risks becoming vague again - something nice, but hard to hold.

Our challenge is to keep wellbeing as a verb: not something we declare, but something we practice. Not a headline, but a thread that connects small actions. A table where artists still gather over coffee. Honest conversations that take time to unfold. Spaces that keep adjusting and reopening - imperfect, maybe, but alive.

Building on this, we began to explore the relationship between culture and health - how artistic and cultural practices can support emotional, social, and physical wellbeing. It became one of our primary areas of interest: not just a theme, but a field for experimentation and learning.

Soft infrastructure and the art of gathering

After the bid, we didn’t launch a new programme. We didn’t rebuild the city. We started meeting. Once a month, artists gather to talk, share frustrations, exchange ideas. No agenda. No pressure. But essential.

These small gatherings form a kind of soft infrastructure - unofficial, informal, but deeply sustaining. In their rhythm, trust has grown. Collaboration happens gently, without needing permission. Ideas take shape slowly, on their own terms. Through all this, we've stayed connected and curious. That, too, was part of what the bid imagined: creating conditions for long-term cultural life to take root - not through grand gestures, but through continuity and care.

This, more than any outcome, may be the deepest legacy of the bid.

Public space as a site of care

The project Szklane Pułapki - Glass Traps - was developed after the bidding process ended, as a visible sign of the legacy it left behind. It tackles an urgent but often unnoticed issue: birds dying from collisions with transparent bus stop shelters. Over time, however, it has grown into more than a technical fix. We’ve come to see it as the start of a broader conversation about animals in urban environments, and how public space can be reimagined to care for all forms of life.

We designed and installed one bird-friendly bus stop, with the intention to create more. We worked with environmental groups, artists, and neighbours to imagine what it means to share a city - with birds, with trees, with each other. This is not just urban planning. It is co-creation - a cultural act drawing on many kinds of knowledge.

The goal is not simply to avoid harm, but to create a more inviting, hospitable, and imaginative city for all.

We didn’t win the title, but we started something

Rethinking a city’s cultural plan after the ECoC bid isn’t about rewriting strategies. It means listening to what has quietly taken root - gatherings, gestures of trust, and a shift in how we think about wellbeing and care.

What remains isn’t a masterplan, but a handful of habits. Things we return to. Ways of noticing, adjusting, staying present.

And perhaps that’s enough to begin again - at least for us. For the informal gatherings, the quiet interventions, the ideas that continue to grow. What I’ve described - the meetings, the bus stop, the threads of care - are just fragments of a larger, still-unfolding picture.

There’s a quiet persistence running through the city: new attempts, unexpected alliances, ideas that keep resurfacing. The energy sparked by the bid is still alive, adapting and taking new shapes.

Photo: © Patryk Sawicki.

Aleksandra Kozik

Aleksandra Kozik is a cultural animator, designer, and project manager working at the intersection of socially engaged art, education, and community participation. Her practice focuses on co-creating inclusive spaces with and for local communities, often through interdisciplinary and collaborative approaches. She holds degrees from the Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków and Katowice. Aleksandra was part of the team involved in the Bielsko-Biała (Poland) bidding process for the European Capital of Culture 2029.