Purpose - It is well known that culture is a catalyst for change, helping economies respond to societal problems and demands and that culture is where people turn to in moments of crisis. In this case study around designing and implementing evaluation methodologies/frameworks for Coventry UK City of Culture 2021, it is suggested that in English public policy and within publicly invested arts there is a maturation of thinking around recognising/measuring the public value of culture including its social value. The purpose of this paper is to chart the recent policy of justifying cultural expenditure with social value claims and highlight challenges for evaluating activity within Coventry UK CoC 2021 as a change in wider policy is taking place. Design/methodology/approach - This paper provides creative insights into the design and implementation of the evaluation methodologies/frameworks for CoventryUKCity of Culture 2021. The authors of this paper as the collective team undertaking the evaluation of Coventry's year as UK City of Culture 2021 bring first-hand experiences of challenges faced and the need for a cultural mega-event to evidence its value. Findings - The case study aims to address the concepts of measuring value within cultural events and argues that a paradigm shift is occurring in methods and concepts for evidencing the aforementioned value. Research limitations/implications - The case study within this paper focuses on the build-up period to the UK City of Culture 2021 year and the thinking and logic behind the creation of the evaluation/measurement framework and therefore does not include findings from the actual cultural year. Originality/value - It is acknowledged that there are papers examining measuring and evidencing the "value" of cultural mega-events, the authors bring real-life first-hand experience of the concepts being utilised by them on the ground in the delivery and evaluation design of Coventry, UK City of Culture 2021.

In 2014, European Urban and Regional Studies (EURS) awarded the first Jim Lewis Prize. The prize was established to mark the contributions of the former Editor, Jim Lewis, and to highlight the most innovative paper published in the previous year in the journal (see editorial announcement in European Urban and Regional Studies 21(1)). Following nominations from the journal’s Editorial Board, a number of papers were considered by the journal’s Editors. We are delighted to announce the prize award to Michael Janoschka, Georgia Alexandri, Sònia Vives-Miró and Hernán Orozco Ramos for their paper ‘Tracing the socio-spatial logics of transnational landlords’ real estate investment: Blackstone in Madrid’, European Urban and Regional Studies 27(2): 125–141. Nick Henry, Editor-in-Chief

It was over 25 years ago that European Urban and Regional Studies was launched at a time of epochal change in the composition of the political, economic and social map of Europe. Brexit has been described as an epochal moment – and at such a moment, European Urban and Regional Studies felt it should offer the space for short commentaries on Brexit and its impact on the relationships of place, space and scale across the cultural, economic, social and political maps of the ‘new Europes’. Seeking contributions drawing on the theories, processes and patterns of urban and regional development, the following provides 10 contributions on Europe, the UK and/or their relational geographies in a post-Brexit world. What the drawn-out and highly contested process of Brexit has done for the populace, residents and ex-pats of the UK is to reveal the inordinate ways in which our mental, everyday and legal maps of the regions, nations and places of the UK in Europe are powerful, territorially and rationally inconsistent, downright quirky at times but also intensely unequal. First, as the UK exits the Single Market, the nature of the political imagination needed to create alternatives to the construction of new borders and new divisions, even within a discourse of creating a ‘global Britain’, remains uncertain. European Urban and Regional Studies has always been a journal dedicated to the importance of pan-European scholarly integration and solidarity and we hope that it will continue to intervene in debates over what alternative imaginings to a more closed and introverted future might look like. Second, as the impacts of COVID-19 continue to change in profound ways how we think, work and travel across European space, we will need to find new forms of integration and new forms of engagament in intellectual life and policy development. European Urban and Regional Studies remains commited to forging such forms.

Over 20 years ago a series of papers identified a strikingly dominant economic cluster – the UK’s Motorsport Valley (MSV) – which led to MSV becoming an international exemplar of concepts such as agglomeration, clusters and knowledge-driven systems of regional development. Utilising an evolutionary perspective on cluster development, this paper asks ‘whatever happened to MSV?’. Drawing on the framework of strategic cluster coupling, four cluster development episodes are conceptualised that each depict the dynamic evolution of the cluster’s multi-scalar institutional environment, strategic coupling trajectories and economic development outcomes. Reflecting the emerging synthesis between evolutionary economic geography and geographical political economy, the paper describes an extended case study of cluster development, an evolutionary process of strategic cluster coupling and, ultimately, an example of cluster resilience. Through a focus on strategic cluster coupling, the paper provides further understanding of cluster evolution and path development mechanisms at key moments of cluster reconfiguration – and an empirical update and continuation of the economic story and cluster lifecycle of MSV.

In 2014, European Urban and Regional Studies (EURS) awarded the first Jim Lewis Prize. The prize was established to mark the contributions of the former Editor, Jim Lewis, and to highlight the most innovative paper published in the previous year in the journal (see editorial announcement in European Urban and Regional Studies 21(1). Following nominations from the journal’s Editorial Board, a number of papers were considered by the journal’s Editors. We are delighted to announce the prize award to Ioannis Chorianopoulos and Naya Tselepi for their paper ‘Austerity urbanism: Rescaling and collaborative governance policies in Athens’, European Urban and Regional Studies 26(1): 80–96. Nick Henry, Editor-in-Chief

This book explores the regional coordination and impact of state responses to irregular migration in Southeast Asia and the Pacific.

In 2013, the UK Government announced that seven of the nation’s largest banks had agreed to publish their lending data at the local level across Great Britain. The release of such area based lending data has been welcomed by advocacy groups and policy makers keen to better understand and remedy geographies of financial exclusion. This paper makes three contributions to debates about financial exclusion. First, it provides the first exploratory spatial analysis of the personal lending data made available; it scrutinises the parameters and robustness of the dataset and evaluates the extent to which the data increase transparency in UK personal lending markets. Second, it uses the data to provide a geographical overview of patterns of personal lending across Great Britain. Third, it uses this analysis to revisit the analytical and political limitations of ‘open data’ in addressing the relationship between access to finance and economic marginalisation. Although a binary policy imaginary of ‘inclusion-exclusion’ has historically driven advocacy for data disclosure, recent literatures on financial exclusion generate the need for more complex and variegated understandings of economic marginalisation. The paper questions the relationship between transparency and data disclosure, the policy push for financial inclusion, and patterns of indebtedness and economic marginalisation in a world where ‘fringe finance’ has become mainstream. Drawing on these literatures, this analysis suggests that data disclosure, and the transparency it affords, is a necessary but not sufficient tool in understanding the distributional implications of variegated access to credit.