From the autumn of 2017 to the spring of 2018, I took part in Debrecen’s ECoC2023 bid and drafting the city’s cultural strategy until 2030 as a supervisor and cultural professional.  I developed the tender’s artistic programme together with Dr Márton Méhes (for the first round). In addition to developing and writing copy for the tendered event series and concept, I was also tasked with managing the process of cultural strategy creation and formulating the strategic goals. Both the tender and the cultural strategy enjoyed uniform political, professional and public support.

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The artistic programme developed for Debrecen’s bid to become a European Capital of Culture 2023 is an immanent consequence of the city’s history, and also embodies a megatrend that is a global problem. Future.hand.book, in other words, Debrecen is the city of hands and books, i.e. it can be considered a hub of knowledge where a culture of on-hands skills and knowledge to be acquired from books has always formed a uniform whole. This is how it used to be in the 16th century thanks to guilds the Reformed Church College, and it is no different today, when the know-how of international companies operating in the industrial parks meets intellectual potential of the University of Debrecen.

Practical on-hands know-how and theory laid down in books share a presence in the life of the city, but this manual culture is slowly waning and disappearing due to the headway gained by the digital and virtual world. In formulating Debrecen’s identity for the 21st century, one needs to ask how the achievements of knowledge through hands (folk art, gastronomy, tilling the land) can have a presence and play a role in the life of a settlement showing dynamic economic growth on the path to becoming a major city, i.e. one shifting scale. Boosting traditions with a new dynamic and scrutinizing cultural attitudes resulting in static, occlusive conditions is not only a challenge for Debrecen, but also one for every major European city. The problem thus raised is local, but also a European and global issue.

How will the relationship between manual/analogue and digital shape up? What are the synergies, hybrid solutions, new qualities that could come about from the interaction of the two cultures? How can values and traditions be kept well and made a living part of the present in the 21st century? That is the dialogue being initiated for Europe, even as we write a manual for everyone (books being a metaphor for knowledge transfer) and also serve as a user/action guide as a consequence of our model position. The problem raised is multidisciplinary—it is not just the relationship of folk art and new craft or design that we intend to address, but also the relationship of man and nature, knowledge about the soil and plants, the culture of gastronomy and the culture of books. For us, hands and books also serve as a metaphor for thinking citizens willing to take action.

In other words, for those proactive inhabitants of Debrecen who are willing to shape their own culture, environs and neighbourhoods, who assume responsibility for and act in the interest of their happiness. It is no accident that the cultural strategy and the ECoC programme both direct the spotlight on the decentralisation and democratisation of culture. The European ideal of active citizens is still just something to wish for in post-socialist countries, and everyone (authorities, institutions, NGOs) has a lot to do in order to achieve it.

 

The cultural strategy of the City of Debrecen with County Jurisdiction for 2018–2030 was drafted parallel to the bid for European Capital of Culture (ECoC) 2023, and similar to the latter, it was based on widespread social and political consultation series, in addition to enjoying the support of all political parties present in the city’s Assembly. 

There is not enough space to list all of the principles in the cultural strategy (see the attached documents), so I will only mention some of the key ones here:

• Culture is the tool of community building, social cohesion and the creation of equal opportunities.

• An organically developing culture has to be created, which needs to be sustainable in the long run. 

• Motivating cultural innovation is of strategic significance in the development of Debrecen. 

• The city of Debrecen is aware of its responsibility for cultural development and the preservation of the cultural values of the surrounding settlements, villages and towns. 

• The city is striving for cultural diversity and European dialogue.

 

In the past decade, Debrecen had a significant effect on the cultural life of not only Hajdú-Bihar County, but on that of the entire region; in the future, this presence is going to be even stronger and it will be clearly palpable in cross-border bilateral and multilateral cooperation, especially in the neighbouring cities and settlements of Romania, Ukraine and Slovakia. The number of the cultural institutions and public collections, as well as the intense cultural activities in Debrecen with national prestige also support the intention to make Debrecen the second capital of culture of Hungary. In 2016, the city announced an economic development programme worth more than HUF 200 billion (€ 640 million), which focuses on the modernization of the available infrastructure and the horizontal developments contributing to as wide access to the culture for the inhabitants as possible. This programme will end in 2023, and is in synergy with the cultural strategy, while it helps to realize the innovative ideas prompting the city to also implement a scale shift in culture. The local government is able to operate its institutions in a stable and sustainable way, and it is equally able to finance its undertakings set in the cultural strategy. 

The city’s biggest problem is that it does not communicate and manage its cultural values and brands professionally, failing to connect culture and city marketing, even as cultural innovation and the creative industries have a very low presence in the city. In light of all that it is not at all surprising that the city is all but invisible on the cultural map of Europe. The rethinking and the modernisation of the cultural identity of Debrecen, boosting the dynamism of its traditions, increasing the creative industry presence, and the conscious building of the city’s image via culture are key questions in the strategy. 

Naturally, these cultural strategic aims also support social innovation. Developing institutional service provider models is a fundamental goal to facilitate cultural decentralization, and to provide equal opportunities for accessing culture throughout the city; to this end, new cultural centres will be built to offer a wide range of services at the housing projects and in the less developed areas of the city. Not only will culture be decentralised, but also democratised.

With the support of EU grants already awarded, cultural professionals and the inhabitants of the city will take part in awareness-raising training courses and projects to learn how to make culture into a tool of community building. We hope that from passive culture consumers, the inhabitants of Debrecen will become proactive culture makers. In upcoming years, the city is going to subsidize the grassroots and civilian cultural initiatives (this year, it will spend HUF 400 million in grant funds on this objective).