Committing to a Mediterranean region of culture and ecology
We, local authorities, artists, urban planners, citizens, and members of the Territoires Cultivés network, affirm that the Mediterranean of the 21st century cannot be defined without memory, dialogue, or culture.
On the Mediterranean shores, rich in diversity, living traditions, and vernacular knowledge, we choose a networked Mediterranean, rooted in the territories as sources of collective reinvention.
Manifesto of Mediterranean Cities of Culture and Ecology
We are convinced that:
- Culture and its actors offer a sensitive perspective that allows for a collective perception and representation of the world as it truly “beats”
- The actors involved in shaping territories have a genuine desire to embrace cultural approaches to renew their planning practices
- Culture is a driver of transition and positive change. It is a lever for combating inequalities and acts in subtle, continuous, and persistent ways to promote education, ecology, and peace
- Artists—through creation and design—and territorial actors together are the protagonists of a desirable future. Their alliances refresh our collective imagination and help ensure that contemporary challenges become accessible and meaningful to all
- Heritage, common goods, vernacular knowledge, and contemporary creative forms must be recognized and integrated into all ways of acting
That is why we want to:
- Give full attention to artistic and cultural intelligence for its ability to broaden the frameworks of thought in evolving territories
- Call upon these alternative, cultural, and grassroots forms of expertise to imagine, together with citizens, new ways of inhabiting our spaces
- Systematically integrate a cultural approach into spatial planning policies and, conversely, encourage the localization of cultural policies
- Collaboratively craft the narrative of territorial planning with the help of cultural actors
- Support each regional transformation project with a cross-cutting cultural approach from the outset
- Make the integration of cultural rights self-evident within social, educational, ecological, and tourism policies
- Assert Mediterranean culture in the face of future challenges related to Artificial Intelligence
- Foster Mediterranean cooperation and cultural interactions in connection with territorial transformations
We call for:
- Empowering citizens to be active participants in managing territorial transitions
- Providing young people, through culture and on tangible issues, with critical tools to face the challenges ahead
- Widespread use of cultural processes to connect territories with their local potential and transformation projects
- Creating “living-lab” style experimental programs to narrate, through cultural acts and with residents, the planning and development of territories
- Organizing one or more major public events across territories to showcase experimental arts-design-territory projects, supported by “The Voice of the Mediterraneans”
- Experimenting with, documenting, and sharing “culture-territory-transition” synergies in a consortium, and building a network among Mediterranean communities
- Expanding the Territoires Cultivés network to all shores of the Mediterranean
Across the Mediterranean, we affirm our desire to build cultivated territories that are fertile, fair, sustainable, and poetically inhabited.
Join the network of the international cooperation project Territoires Cultivés