Bid to be 39th Unesco ‘City of Design’
Two-day tour of our city for ambassadors
Whanganui’s application to be designated a Unesco City of Design is two-thirds of the way towards completion, with Unesco ambassadors given a two-day tour of the city last week.
Unesco is the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization.
Currently there are 38 Cities Of Design around the world, including Singapore, Buenos Aires, Berlin and Montreal.
For Whanganui to join them in the Creative Cities Network it needs to demonstrate a number of attributes, including an established design industry, a cultural landscape maintained by design and the built environment, design schools and research centres, and a practising group of designers with continuous activity at a local and national level.
The application is being headed by Whanganui and Partners Strategic Lead — Creative Industries and Arts, Emma Bugden.
She said the application process would take a year to complete, and had been an “extraordinary journey” in itself.
“Design is a very broad creative sphere. It spans so many different parts of our community, so we had to reach out to all those parts and bring them together, learn from them, and capture what they’re doing,” Bugden said.
“You also have to contact every other existing Design City and notify them of your intention, which is a really interesting part of it.”
The commissioners, from Unesco New Zealand, were invited to Whanganui to help them get to know the city first-hand, Bugden said.
“The other cities in the network are Dunedin, Auckland and Wellington. They’re big centres, they’re well known. We thought the commissioners might not have such a sense of familiarity with a place like Whanganui, so we brought them here for a two-day, whistlestop tour.
“When the application comes to them, they’ll have tangible experiences to draw on.
“Whanganui meets all the criteria, so it was really only a challenge for us to fit the wealth of design evident in our region into two days.”
Bugden, who is working on the project with Whanganui District Council heritage adviser Scott Flutey, said a number of other Cities of Design had got in touch, including Geelong in Victoria, Australia, and Singapore.
“The scale that Singapore operates on is unfathomable compared to Whanganui, but many of the challenges are still similar.
“How do we use design to make a liveable, creative, sustainable city that we all want to be part of?”
The application itself was free, and the major investment was “largely time”, Bugden said.
The full application will be submitted to Unesco New Zealand in May, who will then decide whether to endorse it and take it to Unesco International.