Culture

In Rennes, a fine arts museum just opened in the heart of a deprived neighbourhood. In Rotterdam, the municipality works with festival organisers on a multi-year plan to reduce CO₂ emissions and tackle shared challenges such as energy, transport, waste and single-use plastics. Investment in culture is important for its own sake, but culture is also key to any progress in sustainable and resilient cities. Culture is an engine for urban economic development, for social inclusion, and contributes directly to enhancing the quality of life of citizens. It is increasingly at the heart of local development agendas, and its connection to other areas is becoming ever more evident. This is also a clear trend at the EU level, which is reflected in increasingly more transversal European policies and programmes where culture is connected to other policies. Eurocities promotes culture as a means of social change, making the most of culture to improve relationships between people, promoting links between creative industries and culture, and exchanging best practices for improving the quality of life through cultural experiences and development. Eurocities members’ most recent work includes:

• Eurocities Statement: A more sustainable culture starts in cities.
• Eurocities Lille Call to Action on Sustainable Culture
• Measuring the impact of culture
• 100+ initiatives, 60 cities, one commitment: low-carbon and inclusive culture in action.
• Future cultural spaces in cities – 10 trends.