Keynote address at the CreArt European City Conference, Romania

This month found me braving minus 16 degrees in the Transylvania district of Romania, for a conference on the theme of creativity and crisis in European cities. I was invited to open the conference with an address on cultural policy, scarcity and the European city, and did so despite suffering from a mild flu (i.e. not entirely compos mentis). The conference is one of the early meetings of The CreArt project – full title: CreArt Network of Cities for Artistic Creation. This is one of the funded strands of the European Commission’s Culture Programme (2007-2013). Coordinated by the Fundación Municipal de Cultura (Valladolid, Spain), CreArt is now a network of 14 partner cities and institutions, and particularly concerned with emerging city centres, smaller or second cities, cities and regions and the ways cultural strategy can make for a creative city even in times of relative scarcity. The partner cities are Aveiro (Portugal), Kaunas and Vilnius (Lithuania), Delft (Netherlands), Pardubice (Czech Republic), Genoa and Lecce (Italy), Linz (Austria) Arad (Romania), Kristiansand (Norway) and Valladolid (Spain), the central organisation of the Project.

For me, the CreArt project is valuable for several reasons: First, creative city cultural strategy, while producing some impressive aspects of many European cities, has been compromised by the emphasis on creative industries. The autonomy of culture – a quintessential European concept – has become conceptually vague, particularly in European countries where cultural provision has always been a state-dominated, bureaucratic-institutional affair, and now where the state apparatus has become overwhelmingly concerned with economic survival. Second, the crisis in European politics has opened a field of possibility for cultural activity, particularly activity that addresses questions of migrations, diasporas and ethnicities, European identity and participatory local urban renewal. The conference for me opened a whole new way of thinking about Europe – and reminded me how every country has their own, quite distinct, relationship with Brussels. On the whole, the experience of the conference and its sense of cultural unity-in-diversity was inspiring – here is something of an ‘alternative’ European project of integration, where culture (not politics or economics) is the driver.

For CreArt’s website see: http://www.creart-eu.org/
They will be publishing my paper during the next few months.

The top photo is the conference hall of the City Hall of Miercurea Ciuc, in the Harghita County (Transylvania), photo of the outside below (that's our small group of speakers, doing a post-conference sightseeing tour).

Jonathan Vickery : 18 Feb 2013 10:57 |  Comments (0) |  Report a problem