Description (EN): Many European cities and regions can boast of deep-rooted cultural traditions in the field of ceramics and small crafts. Preserving cultural values and cultural heritage has since long been a priority area for the European Union. However, besides preservation, cultural heritage is a major asset in economic terms for European regions: it also generates jobs, household income and stimulates local economic development.
Towns of ceramic and small crafts traditions, endowed with a rich artistic heritage, are nevertheless facing severe problems: globalisation exacerbating competition and ageing population of craftsmen, both leading to a continuous decline of the sector.
CeRamICa is the result of a long cooperation of the municipality of Hódmezővásárhely, lead partner in Hungary, with eleven other European cities with whom they share a common cultural heritage and face the same difficulties and eagerness to preserve and promote the ceramic and small crafts sector in Europe.
Partners will join forces and exchange best practices to jointly develop local and regional development strategy recommendations and instruments to support and boost the ceramics and small crafts sector in the partner regions. These sets of recommendations will be drawn with the aim of preserving and promoting this significant European cultural heritage and thus making the sector a competitive driving force of the local economies.
All 12 partners are municipalities (or representative bodies) from 8 countries, offering a good balance between Eastern and Western countries to enrich the exchanges and transfers of experiences between them.
The starting point will be a thorough analysis of the sector in partners’ regions, including interviews of all relevant stakeholders. The study will be a means to identify best practices that led to tangible results. Its results will directly feed the core activities of the project: the intensified transfers of experiences and best practices.
The transfers of best practices will provide a unique opportunity to learn from each others' experiences, acquire new methodologies, processes or techniques that helped develop new products, open up new markets for enterprises and crafts(wo)men, identify effective marketing and training tools or create new jobs and enterprises.
The project clearly addresses the objectives of the programme and the Lisbon agenda. The lessons learnt will be reflected into jointly developed local and regional development policy recommendations, validated by politicians formally represented in the project. They will also include action plans for implementation into other EC programmes. Their effectiveness will be highly improved and durability of the project results ensured.
Last but not least, major European and regional events will be organised as to widely disseminate best practices identified to successfully preserve and promote the ceramics and small crafts sector in partners’ regions and beyond.
Read more Achievements (EN): Many European cities and regions can boast of deep-rooted cultural traditions in the field of art ceramics and small crafts. Preserving cultural values and cultural heritage has since long been a priority area for the European Union. CeRamICa partners have recognised that the specificity of this cultural and economic sector requires appropriate public support to be translated into local and regional public policies and development plans. Such policies or plans are either ineffective or have been non-existent so far.
Partners have thus decided to join forces and share their experiences, good practices to jointly develop recommendations for local and regional development policies. The added value of the CeRamICa project is the strength of a Europe wide cooperation and the opportunity it offers to develop effective public policies and tools based on each other's experiences.
In order to achieve this, the project has carried out the followings:
After a kick-off event in Hódmezővásárhely, the work started with analysing the situation of the ceramics and small crafts sectors in the regions of partners. A joint methodology was applied with the aim to identify good practices available. The analyses included collecting data and interviewing stakeholders (artisans, decision makers, Structural funds project managers) in order to get a full picture on the sector’s situation.
Based on the data and other researches, a comparative interregional situation analysis was compiled, investigating the issue at European level. It gave a situation overview of the situation and the most important problems, assets and opportunities of ceramics and small crafts in today’s Europe. As local/regional cooperation was the guiding principle, everything was done in close collaboration with local craftsmen, artisans, educational institutions, chambers of commerce, decision making & funding bodies; resulting in interaction and cooperation among them
Partners have been organising events throughout the project where all involved actors could meet and exchange their views, share problems, bring together ideas for future development and build relationships with each other.
Using the experiences of these meetings, partners compiled a local/regional catalogue of good practices and have drawn a first version of recommendations for the local, regional and national policies and decision makers, providing ideas for the improvement of the sectors. These were synthesized on project level listing 46 good practices.Partners could exchange their experiences at 1st Interregional Conference in Vallauris. 2010 was spent with partners actually exchanging and transferring their experiences in order to adapt the best fitting solutions into their own practices and decision making. This has been done through intensified transfer of experiences visits: site visits, study tours, workshops involving staff of CeRamICa partners
and relevant local/regional stakeholders, i.e. ceramists, craftsmen, decision makers. 12 such exchanges packages have been carried out in CeRamICa.
The visits have proven very useful and were followed by a revision and finalization of the recommendations for the local, regional and national policies and decision makers, in order to incorporate experiences that had been seen and transferred. Experiences have been discussed and disseminated at 2nd Interregional Conference in Alcobaca.
Partners carried out an endorsement process of their policy recommendations, meaning an official approval by responsible decision making bodies (municipal councils, board of directors) to ensure that the planned actions will really be turned into action later on. Recommendations were collected also on project level, introduced to the wide public at the Final Event in Hódmezővásárhely and distributed to numerous regional/national/European relevant bodies.
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