UNESCO Creative Cities Beijing Summit to open

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UNESCO Creative Cities Beijing Summit to open

(China.org.cn) 13:06, October 19, 2013

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Beijing was named a "City of Design" by the UNESCO in June 2012, thanks to its great strengths in S&T innovation and design creativity. (Source: china.org.cn)

The First UNESCO Creative Cities Beijing Summit will open at Beijing Capital Museum on October 20, 2013, a science official of the capital city announced at a press conference on October 14, Beijing Daily reported.

This is the first time that Beijing and UNESCO are co-hosting an international event of this magnitude, Liu Hui, member of the Beijing Municipal Science and Technology Commission, said.

The four-day summit, themed "Charming creativity, beautiful city," creates a platform for multi-stakeholders from all corners of the world to discuss and share their experiences in achieving a city's sustainable development through innovative and creative approaches. It will gather about 500 participants in Beijing, including mayor-level representatives from the 34 appointed cities and candidate cities of the UNESCO Creative Cities Network, as well as cultural experts, famous artists, designers and stakeholders.

The summit will focus on three importance topics, namely, education, S&T and culture. It will highlight the following four major meetings: the International Conference on Learning Cities, Creativity Innovation Development Forum on Design and Cities, Mayors' Roundtable Meeting and the Beijing Forum on Arts and Cities.

Participants will adopt three important outcomes -- Beijing Agenda, Beijing Declaration and Beijing Consensus -- in their efforts to deepen the exchanges and cooperation among the creative cities in terms of education, S&T and culture.

A series of exhibitions, including the Creative Cities Exhibition, Beijing Design Creativity Exhibition and China Style-China Oil Painting Art Exhibition, will be on display during the summit to showcase the role played by creativity in a city's social and economic development, as well as in its people's lives.

Beijing was named a "City of Design" by the UNESCO in June 2012, thanks to its great strengths in S&T innovation and design creativity. The city's design industry raked in more than 120 billion yuan (US$19.4 billion) that very same year.

The event is co-organized by UNESCO, China's Ministry of Education, Beijing Municipal People's Government and the Chinese National Commission for UNESCO.

The Creative Cities Network was launched by the UNESCO in October 2004, with the intention to offer different cities a superb platform to shape joint development partnerships in the light of the international organization's global priorities of "culture and development" and "sustainable development." Right now, the network has seven thematic subdivisions, focusing on literature, film, music, crafts and folk art, design, media arts and gastronomy, respectively.

（Editor：LiXiang、Zhang Qian）