Out of 270 submitted Good Practices, the Heerlen Murals has been awarded a Good Practice City label
Following a call for proposals under the URBACT programm by the European Commission, we supported the City of Heerlen in submitting – on behalf of the Heerlen street art community – the Heerlen Murals as a Good Practice. In total some 270 Good Practices have been submitted by 219 cities from 29 different countries, while only 97 have been recognized (so only one out of 3).
So now the Heerlen Murals have been awarded the URBACT Good Practice City label and the proposal is now part of the first pool of 97 URBACT good practices selected throughout Europe!
Main strong points of the Heerlen application are:
· the bottom-up movement
· the co-creation and co-ownership to build social cohesion and improve liveability
· the economic perspective
The Heerlen Murals adds to the beautification of urban areas and puts the city nationally and internationally on the map as a unique ‘Mural Capital’ sparkling new light into the city’s tourism industry, having emerging effects on the tourism industry.
It is also a Good Practice that has a high replication potential as it is easy to adept and apply to the context of many cities troughout Europe, with relatively limited means.
Under the facilitation of Cultura Nova and supported grandly by the City of Heerlen, Heerlen Murals was first formalized in 2013, by the Street Art Foundation. Since then some 67 mural art works spread out over the city have been created through community involvement.
From mid-June, the URBACT Secretariat will launch a Communication Campaign around the Good Practices, the main highlight of which will be the URBACT City Festival that will take place in Tallinn (Estonia) on 3-5 October 2017. The festival will be the opportunity to formally award Heerlen with the URBACT Good Practice City label and to showcase its practice amongst your European peers.
The European label for Heerlen follows the national recognition by winning the Dutch Street Art Award last weekend in the category Local Government in Amsterdam.
Image: by IBA – Bidbook Urban Heerlen with Mural by Collin van der Sluijs (NL), Super-A (NL) TITLE Koolpiet – forward in time