From now on, political participation must be a daily practice and a cultural policy.
The professionals of culture, the expecting and active public, programmers, managers, administrations, specialised press etc... must have stable bodies to design the guidelines of their cultural policies and make the necessary assessments and estimations.
Participation must be, from now on, a permanent and inviolable value, a compulsory characteristic in any democratic society.
The Strategic Plan for Culture (PECZ) that is being drawn up, includes nine thematic working groups, and is composed of 350 professionals from every cultural field as well as cultural and social activists. The PECZ makes use of a predetermined questionnaire with thirty ideas for debating derived from five arguments and nine strategic lines headed by a dynamizer person.
The groups have been these:
- 1. Group on Local and European Identities, and Multiculturality
- 2. Creativity Group
- 3. Mobility and Cultural Cooperation Group
- 4. Accessibility, New Publics, and New Attraction Poles
- 5. Innovation and Technology Group
- 6. Group of Environmental Sustainability in time for programmes and projects
- 7. Education for Culture.
- 8. Group of Cultural Industries
- 9. Group of Leisure, Culture and Territory
The works made by the groups are judged by more than 100 associations of neighbours, trade unions, economic entities, young people, women, entrepreneurs, workers, consumers, solidarity groups, integration, environmentalists, children, old people, culture groups, leisure groups, gastronomy, migrants and professionals.
After that, the items are debated by the administrators of public cultural funds, and the professional cultural groups receive again the document after debating and the contributions, for its final drawing-up.
The basics of the programme for the candidacy of Zaragoza for European Capital of Culture 2016 derived from this double-track process.
Zaragoza is also creating stable organs of participation for the culture sector and for defining the cultural policies, and the so-called Culture Observatory has just been opened.
