InduCult2.0: We have a message for European policy makers!
22 March, Brussels, Belgium
Seventy stakeholders, European experts platforms and policy makers (including MEPs and liaisson offices) gathered at the European Parliament to discover how the topic of Industrial Culture can be integrated in future regional development and decision making processes.
Focus:
Industry has intensively shaped the European identity. With the European Steel and Coal Community (Schuman Declaration), it has even marked the birth of the united Europe that we live in today.
So far, political attention goes out mostly to the technological aspects of this transition – digitalization and key enabling technologies and economic growth. We, the partners of the INTERREG Central Europe project ‘InduCult2.0’, are convinced that the merits of ‘the factory of the future’ depend as much on its cultural uptake in the industrial regions. Indeed, understanding and developing their distinct culture will enable industrial regions not only to respond to the changes, but even to anticipate them. Thus, InduCult2.0 stresses that Industrial Culture, being constantly shaped by the communities who have lived and are still living it, can come in as a key transformative power in this industrial transition: A progressively understood Industrial Culture creates an authentic and dynamic common ground for identity and image by integrating the regions´ industrial past, present and future.
Three keynote speakers shared their thoughts on the added value of Industrial Culture from governance, economic and tourism perspectives. A panel of Central-European experts commented on these visions during an open debate.
In the evening a memorandum of understanding was signed to celebrate the official cooperation between the InduCult2.0 partnership and the ERIH Network.
