In 2025, Barcelona will host the third Mondiacult, the decisive World Conference on Cultural Policies and Sustainable Development, the great global meeting of Unesco that was born in 1982 and seeks to place culture at the center of the global agenda of development In the second edition of 2022, it brought together in Mexico 2,600 participants and 135 Ministers of Culture from all over the world and declared culture as a global public good. Miquel Iceta presented his candidacy as Minister of Culture in October and yesterday, already with Ernest Urtasun at the head of the ministry and with Iceta himself becoming Spain’s ambassador to Unesco, the general director of this institution, the French Audrey Azoulay, announced after a meeting with Pedro Sánchez and Urtasun in Moncloa that the chosen city is Barcelona. Saudi Arabia, which also chose to host the meeting, indicated that it was withdrawing its candidacy for the purpose of consensus and that it will present it again for the fourth edition of Mondiacult.
For Urtasun, who announced for his part that the meeting will be held in the second semester of 2025: “it will be a unique opportunity to put Spain in a leadership position in the matter of putting culture at the center of major global challenges”. “We will talk about cultural rights, heritage, museums, how to defend culture as a global public good and we will also debate the culture of peace at a time when conflicts are multiplying around the world”, remarked the minister.
Mondiacult, born in 1982, is the most important international meeting dedicated to culture and the one in Barcelona will be its third edition. The second was held in September 2022 and marked a new milestone for the consideration of culture as a global public good. In its three days, 150 states, after ten months of multilateral meetings, unanimously adopted a declaration that for the first time agreed that “culture is a global public good” and called for it to be included as a “specific objective by right own” among the next Sustainable Development Goals of the United Nations.
The text defined a series of cultural rights that had to be taken into account in public policies and that ranged from the social and economic rights of artists to artistic freedom, the right of indigenous communities to safeguard and transmit their knowledge ancestral and the protection and promotion of cultural and natural heritage. It also called for the regulation of the digital sector, notably the large platforms, for the benefit of cultural diversity on the internet, the intellectual property rights of artists and fair access for all. The celebration of the conference took place in Mexico forty years after he was born in that same city in 1982 with a meeting that also had the result of constituting a point of reference in the evolution of the ideology of culture and its relationship with the development
Unesco emphasized that Barcelona’s candidacy made perfect sense because it is a city that defends the organization’s values: “With nine spaces declared world heritage and a Unesco category 2 center for research in social sciences and humane, Barcelona has also been one of the Unesco Cities of Literature since 2015. And it has been designated the World Capital of Architecture in 2026. In addition, it has solid experience in hosting international events of the organization, such as the World Conference on Higher Education in 2022 and the upcoming Conference of the Decade of Ocean Sciences for Sustainable Development, in April, as well as in December the Global Forum against racism and discrimination”.
