Municipal authorities throughout Western Europe are attempting to drive regeneration of their urban centres through policies designed to attract inward investment and tourism. In an attempt to woo these outside economic agents, a variety of cultural consumption-oriented policies have been developed and marketed. These include investment in hard cultural infrastructure, such as museums or art galleries, and in less physical aspects such as events like the European Capital of Culture. A polemical debate surrounds this use of cultural policy with a clearly economic agenda. This paper looks at how the European Capital of Cuture (Cork 2005) brings these debates into the public domain.