BAGUIO CITY – An official of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) was impressed with the overall impact of the designation of Baguio City as one of the world’s cities in the Creative Cities Network on crafts and folk arts.
UNESCO Philippines National Commission Secretary-General Lila Ramos Shahani said that being a member of the Creative Cities Network is a recognition of Baguio City’s decades of being in the limelight in arts and culture and that will surely go with a huge responsibility to sustain the designation through the years.
While the designation of Baguio City as the first city in the country and the fifth Southeast Asian city to be part of the Creative Cities Network does not come with a monetary reward, the UNESCO official underscored the recognition will surely spur the needed investments and infrastructure development to be infused by both government and the private sector to bring the city’s arts and culture to a higher level of brilliance.
“Baguio City has been a center for arts and culture over the past three decades and its designation as a member of the Creative Cities Network on crafts and folk arts last year is a living testament that the creativity of the people, especially those in the field of arts, remain vibrant to date,” Shahani stressed.
She cited the case of Vigan City over two decades ago when it was just a second-class municipality in Ilocos Sur with a whooping 45 percent unemployment rate and an annual budget of only P27 million in 1995.
When Vigan City was bestowed the title as a world heritage city in 1999, Shahani claimed investments started to be infused that sustained and sustains the establish identity resulting to the desired development that helped significantly reduced the city’s unemployment rate to only 8 percent and contribute in increasing its annual budget to twelve times its annual budget in 1995.
According to her, the sustaining the designation as a part of the Creative Cities Network involves a solid partnership among the local government, concerned government agencies, the private sector and the stakeholders of the arts and culture to make Baguio City to have a formidable creative economy.
Shahani claimed she is proud of the achievement of Baguio city as a creative city on crafts and folk arts because as it acquire the designation in just over six months, unlike other cities in the world which acquired their recognitions after several years of attempting to do so.
Shahani also used as an example the case of Angono, Rizal where the arts and culture desk in the local government is different from the tourism desk to avoid possible conflicts in certain programs and projects, apart from the existence of a local arts and culture council that oversees the sustained implementation of short, medium and long term programs to hold on to the recognition as part of the Creative Cities Network for the benefit of the present and future generation.
By Dexter A. See