WORLD SOCIAL FORUM 2010 - GRANDE PORTO ALEGRE

[esmeralda lewiit]

I know I said I was going to talk about cultural diversity, but first I want to bring up an important info I just received...From January 25th thru the 29th, Porto Alegre, Rio Grande do Sul is going to be hosting the World Social Forum 2010 (http://www.forumsocialmundial.org.br/).This is the sixth time Brazil hosts this event, receiving social initiatives from all over the world aiming at promoting and fomenting social, democratic, participative actions.This years the cultural panels at the WSF will be focused on the discussion about creative cities, perphery culture, independent culture or free culture.In Brazil, cultural policy has taken a swerve since 2003 in the discussion of culture as a key element for development. Culture is understood as a threefold phenomenon: culture as a key element for democracy and citizenship, culture as an economic activity and culture as a simbolic expression. Therefore, culture is regarded as a key issue for social sustainable development, rather than simply "beaux-arts"... culture is recognized as a simbolic expression that has a fundamental role in building a democratic, non-violent, collaborative community.. instead of promoting culture in central locations, in buildings and arenas designed espeacially for that purpose, Brazil focus on the decentralization and universal access giving space to the fruition of periphery cultural movements and collaborative social networks and independent or free cultural initiatives.Of course these creative cities and periphery cultural phenomena are just starting in Brazil and are far from being equally distributed in the brazilian territory. they are in fact concentrated in some cities and they do develop a great work in building social networks with collaborative methods.This Forum will receive many of these intiatives, some of them from Porto Alegre and the surrounding areas, and other from all over the country and the world, in order to discuss culture and cultural policy aiming at the development of a collaborative agenda for the social development.This is a website of Pontos de Cultura - cultural spots (http://www.cultura.gov.br/cultura_viva/?cat=4), which are some of this periphery initiatives, I was talking about..that's it for now!www.elewiit.com.br