A heritage city. A creative city.

Ballarat is a city of diverse peoples on traditional land. Our city is a location made up of diverse creative skills with a chequered and layered history. This special heritage has left us with a complex web of crafts that have been used to tell the tale of an indigenous nation, a goldrush city and today a city of varied groups of migrants gathered, travelling through, or embedded over the last 200 years.

Additionally, our city is preparing for influx and growth into the future. We seek to capture the craft and skills of new peoples arriving in our town.

Our commitment to a vision of a Creative City of Craft and Folk Art falls under four key pillars:

Pillar 1 -
Creative a new economic heartbeat: Craft and folk art have helped our city survive throughout time. We have a responsibility to harness these skills and create environments where we can support practitioners to become sustainable.

Pillar 2 -
Celebrating, protecting and reinterpreting the rare and forgotten crafts: Heritage is critical for our city. Rare crafts, fine skills and artisanal experience are important to conserve, preserve and research.

Pillar 3 -
A welcome platform for our newer community members: As a Creative City of Craft and Folk Art we seek to integrate and harness knowledge, growing new trades and sectors, sustaining and broadening skills.

Pillar 4 -
Reinvigorating the skills of our indigenous communities: with a traceable heritage of more than 65,000 years, the skills and crafts of our indigenous peoples of the Wadawarrung, the Dja Dja Warrung and others from the Kulin nation, have been severely interrupted. We are dedicated to supporting our First Nations peoples in tracing these back, reawakening old craft forms and putting them at the heart of our craft-based city.

About the UNESCO Creative Cities Network

The UNESCO Creative Cities Network covers seven creative fields: Crafts and Folk Art, Design, Film, Gastronomy, Literature, Media Arts, and Music.

Objectives

The UNESCO Creative Cities Network aims to:

• strengthen international cooperation between cities that have recognized creativity as a strategic factor of their sustainable development;

• stimulate and enhance initiatives led by member cities to make creativity an essential component of urban development, notably through partnerships involving the public and private sectors and civil society.

• strengthen the creation, production, distribution and dissemination of cultural activities, goods and services;

• develop hubs of creativity and innovation and broaden opportunities for creators and professionals in the cultural sector;

• improve access to and participation in cultural life as well as the enjoyment of cultural goods and services, notably for marginalized or vulnerable groups and individuals;

• fully integrate culture and creativity into local development strategies and plans.