Fabienne Trotte & Esther Destrés | Relais Culture Europe (FRA)

Art and social transformation

The social and environmental emergency we face reactivates the need for democratic spaces able to generate commons. Artistic practices, when developed in direct relation with the environments in which they seek to activate change, seem to be able to participate in the emergence of these commons.

In that frame, and starting from the city of Valencia in Spain, which has a long history of citizen movements, we came to question art as politics, raising the following question: how do art and artists support citizen protests nowadays? This question has opened us more widely to work on the themes of archive, memory and traces as commons.

Pau Rausell Köster | Director of Econcult. Research Unit in Cultural Economics, University of Valencia (ESP)

Cultural experiences in the framework of “cultural cities”. Measuring the socioeconomic impact of culture in urban performance

The conceptual model synthesises the basic elements of the heritage city, the smart city and the creative city. The city is interpreted from a threefold perspective; as a repository of resources, as a connective interface, and as the setting for citizens’ life and social and professional experiences. In this context, each of these perspectives incorporates culture in a different way, activating different models of value creation and different processes of production and reproduction of this value.
In each of the urban models described above, production processes that combine symbolic, physical, financial, social, human and cultural capital in different ways and urban strategies are implemented to provide cultural experiences that ignite transformative effects through several spillovers. That means that culture, in its different dimensions, regains the role of raw material and becomes the point of origin to activate development processes and improve urban performance

Pascal Brunet | Relais Culture Europe (FRA)

City as a network?

Do we really still need the “city”? Hasn’t it become a kind of a “rubber word” for trying to define the way our societies are inscribed in space? A word that better expresses what our “geographical being” is becoming, our relationship to the world in all its scales? More globalisation, globality, and the World, also means more “city” everywhere in the discourse of public space. This is why, at least in the Global North, we confuse the city, a “living area”, a “relational space” with a “need to territorialise”. The city can be this “local” which is constructed by the crossing and mixing of our histories, our relationships, our organisations, and so many nodes, circulations, exchanges and regulations which have woven the human links which constitute the city. A serious prospect in the digital age?

Zeynep Arda | Izmir University of Economics (TUR)

Lessons learned from T-M and how to apply them to the cultural management practices of Izmir, Turkey

Since September 2021, I’ve been working for the Izmir Metropolitan Municipality’s Culture and Art Department and Izmir Mediterranean Academy, on the committee for UCLG (United Cities and Local Governments) projects. Izmir was one of UCLG’s pilot cities between 2016-2019 and at the moment it is one of the 11 Leading Cities, as a part of the program „Agenda 21 for Culture”: (https://www.agenda21culture.net/our-cities/leading-cities). I would like to present the lessons learned in the process and some of the interesting projects that are/will be applied in this context.

Youssra Zakaria | CLUSTER Cairo (EGY)

Trans-making research on art and public space in Valencia

This research addresses public space regulation within the city, examining this question in three different neighbourhoods in Valencia (El Carmen, Russafa and Benimeclat). In contrast to the common belief that public space regulation may vary from city to city, but remains basically the same across the interior space of the city, this research highlights how it differs from tourist to non-tourist zones within the same city, raising questions on culture, local economy and urban governance.

Çiğdem Kaya | Istanbul Technical University (TUR)

Design in public space

The method of the research relies on forming a landscape from the collection of ethnographic participation about objects in public space from different cities in the world over an extended time. The collection of personal temoignages of objects portrays the variety of the frameworks created with and around objects in everyday life such as attachment, meaning, belonging, use etc. The written collection was analyzed with content analysis and frameworks were identified illustrating the agency of objects.

Omar Nagati & Youssra Zakari | CLUSTER Cairo (EGY)

Presentation on ALFABRIKA (CLUSTER’s fablab) concept and programs 

Presentation on ALFABRIKA (CLUSTER’s fablab) concept and programs over the past few years, as a framework of exchange between artists and design students with academic training, on the one hand, and artisans and craftspeople having practical knowledge, on the other. By sharing the process and outcome of a series of thematic workshops, the presentation demonstrates how ALFABRIKA serves as a space of encounter between formal and informal modes of knowledge, and co-learning through co-production.

Rafał Sadownik | Workshops of Culture (POL)

Constitutive elements and essential rules of London’s Adventure Playgrounds

Children’s culture is based on playing. “Yes, but what if…”, the educator in every adult might quickly object. If they twist their ankle, what then? Perhaps we ought to plan an activity for them after all… Sociocultural animation, in this case, is about not interfering. Children stay active when the conditions are right, especially in a natural environment. Every parent has probably experienced the phenomenon of a child vanishing from view and reappearing hungry but happy.

The speaker calls attention to the problem that parents no longer provide opportunities for kids to find activities on their own. They stopped being sensitive to spontaneous developmental processes, which merely need company and a place where kids may move around freely. It cannot be a coincidence, given that grownups are jealous of space. They want to fence it off and keep it to themselves. That’s why they prefer it when kids don’t move about too much or need a lot of space. Why do grownups exhibit such competitiveness? Paradoxically, adults choose to keep kids still first and then engage them in activities. Instead, they should focus on creating environments that allow kids to play independently with other kids. Since it is such a broad topic, the speaker will not concentrate on the physical effects of the lack of open spaces, where kids prefer to spend more time than sitting watching screens.

A generation of adults with bent backs and contracted muscles is on the rise, and they are unlikely to ever regain the level of physical fitness that nature intended for humans. This makes it even more worthwhile to take up the speaker’s suggestion that every cultural centre should, if at all possible, include both a building and an outdoor playground. Such a playground is a strategy, not an infrastructure.

20.09.2022
Kultura Enter