What have we done so far and what are the potential ways forward?

Festivals and cities need to connect with each other in order to give their communities a temper, a spirit, a face, a soul. Festival makers and cities have the role and responsibility to enable encounters between the arts and people and between the people. 

The European Festivals Association started to engage in conversations with cities and regions from all around Europe holding a strong festival and European commitment back in 2018 more structurally. 

Since then, various steps have been taken to offer a space and a platform for festivals, cities and regions to exchange, explore ways of collaboration and improve their synergies with A Soul for Europe as its main partner. In 2018, EFA joined the “Cities4Europe, Europe for Citizens” campaign of Eurocities and invited in this framework the festivals community and city mayors to become active partners. While undergoing the COVID-19 crisis and rediscovering the cities without their festivals, EFA together with A Soul for Europe (ASfE) decided to launch the Festival Cities Initiative. A series of five webinars were organised and gathered various festivals and cities networks that discussed about joint responsibilities and possibilities for the future of our shared public spaces, community celebrations and cultural life with/after corona. These conversations confirmed the need for cities to create a sense of connection among their citizens and engagement with the place where they live. Festivals are a great match to help fulfil this purpose, they can help build social capital, gluing communities together. Festivals are laboratories of new thinking, getting a different knowledge of their audiences and the inhabitants of the city that goes beyond figures and numbers. For this collaboration to work, arts and festivals need to be at the center of the city development, education and economic planning as has been reiterated throughout many discussions from the Festival Cities Initiative and after in the EFFE Seal meetings. However, the challenge seems to be how to move from inspiration and declarations to action. 

After these conversations and webinars, EFA felt enough mandate to launch the EFFE Seal for Festival Cities and Regions together with seven cities Belgrade, Bergen, Edinburgh, Ghent, Krakow, Leeuwarden and Ljubljana - and their stakeholders, in 2022. 

The EFFE Seal for Festival Cities and Regions started as a recognition and commitment scheme. It has now developed some lines of work that go into the direction of building a community where knowledge is exchanged and even produced, in order to dive deeper into the questions surrounding the relation between festivals and their local authorities. 

Through questionnaires, brainstorming and diverse participatory workshops in particular during the Festival Cities and Regions Meet Up steered by Nicolas Bertrand and Nele Hertling (ASfE) in the framework of the Arts Festivals Summits, EFA offers a framework for cities to discuss topics that are high on cities’ agendas, including sustainability, the social impact of festivals for the wellbeing of their societies, diversity or inclusion, among others. These moments also serve to develop and define a working agenda through a bottom-up approach together with the EFFE Seal Cities and Regions. The EFFE Seal today counts 29 cities and regions from 19 countries that signed up for this commitment and to be part of the EFA community (approximately 60 more cities and regions have taken part in EFA’s conversations and activities since 2018). 

The approach adopted in the development of this initiative is not about giving directions or benchmarks, but it is about creating a laboratory where individuals from the most diverse contexts enrich themselves and discover and shape their local ‘experiments’ in the most internationally informed and inspired way. EFA feels the responsibility to boost curiosity among the different cities and regions about one another: to exchange not only best practices but also reflect on patterns, relations, structures, and policies. The aim is not to imitate one another but enhance comparability, understanding each other and oneselves. 

Different conversations throughout this process have revealed the need to connect not just for cooperation, but for urgent dialogue across all parts of society, to go against current trends that drive us towards more individualisation and polarisation in today’s world. Through the EFFE Seal, cities and regions engage in this dialogue and explore how they can do something across borders to develop new ideas, possibilities, practices, that festivals and cities together can use in their existence to tackle the most important concerns of our times. An example of this is the first joint action from these cities and regions: the EFFE Seal Catalogue on Environmental Sustainability identified by them as one of the most pressing topics and worth exploring in collaboration with their festivals. Inclusion and diversity, artistic freedom of expression or social wellbeing or the impact of their festivals in their territories – just to name a few – are other pressing issues that these cities and regions voiced when they were asked for the challenges and opportunities that they find of interest to discuss and develop at a pan-national level.  

It does not come as a surprise that these priorities follow the lines of the resolution on the EU Work Plan for Culture (2023-2026) adopted by the Council on 29 November 2022. In fact, it confirms the starting point of the Festival Cities Initiative which was precisely the festivals angle and the European contribution with the city as the third vertex of the triangle. In this context, a series of statements have remained relevant throughout the years, being one of them the one made by Geert Cochez (Deputy CEO from Visit Brussels) back in 2019 and reiterated in several keynotes and meetings from the EFFE Seal by Eric Corijn (professor in Urban Studies at Free University Brussels, director Policy & Research Global Parliament of Mayors). Their claim is that a city is not a country as power-oriented nation states are not capable of addressing global issues, whereas cities tend to search for “glocal” solutions. Moreover, in the Festival Cities Conversations Online in 2020 it was added that “while nations may seem to be the main focus of the European Union and Council of Europe, change and prosperity will be driven from the cities” as mentioned in a paper by Simon Mundy gathering some conclusions from the conversations. It is important to understand, as citizens of a locality, that Europe is a political concept rooted in local life, without the success of the cities, Europe does not work. These arguments emphasise the importance of cities and regions not only for the arts and festivals but also for Europe. 

The uniqueness of this initiative lies in the interest of cities and regions in their festivals, their impact on the territory and their contribution for Europe and its democratic values. Its transectoral approach giving a space for mayors to be in contact with their festivals differentiates this initiative from others focused only on one of the two: the establishment of a direct and equal dialogue between arts and politics makes its essence rather singular. 

Ana Benavides Otero

Picture credit ©Festival de Peralada - ICONNA