Osan City Designated as Candidate City for 2nd Cultural City by Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism

[Suwon Ilbo=Reporter Seo Dong-young] Osan City was designated as a candidate city for the 2nd Cultural City program announced by the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism on the 30th.

The Cultural City initiative is a national policy project promoted by the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism. Starting in 2018 and running through 2023, the project will select five local governments annually, ultimately supporting a total of 30 local governments with 10 billion won in project funding, consulting services, and cultural urban regeneration projects over a five-year period.

Bucheon City in Gyeonggi Province was designated as the 1st Cultural City candidate in 2018, along with a total of 10 other local governments including Daegu Metropolitan City.

Osan City was the only municipality in Gyeonggi Province to prepare for the designation announcement as a 2nd Cultural City candidate in March 2019. The city invited Yoon Bong-taek, head of the Cultural City Promotion Task Force in Seogwipo, Jeju, which was designated as a 1st candidate city last year, and Lee Seung-wook, representative of Busan's Yeongdo Ward Cultural City Promotion Cooperative Plan B, to receive expert consulting. The city also benchmarked nearby Bucheon, Cheonan, and Cheongju cities.

In particular, to create a cultural city where citizens serve as the primary agents through direct planning, participation, and activity, the city has shared the experience and know-how from its educational city project while organizing citizen governance and continuously promoting communication and participation.

The city also held a vision declaration ceremony titled "Cultural City Osan That Revitalizes Through Connection." The city also developed strategies to embrace citizen groups that might otherwise be excluded due to academic and economic issues through collaboration between youth supporter programs and the youth employment center.

The city explained that "although promoting a citizen-led cultural city was a vague goal, it was possible to make a bold move for the cultural city candidate designation by actively utilizing the citizen governance composition and activities that became a source of potential as an educational city, which Mayor Gwak Sang-wook has pursued for over a decade."

Additionally, National Assemblyman An Min-seok, a four-term congressman and chairman of the Standing Committee on Culture, Sports and Tourism, played a significant role in the selection of the candidate cultural city through his broad information and network, as well as expert recruitment and consulting support.

Lee Dong-ryeol, chairman of the Cultural City Promotion Committee, who led the final presentation on the 13th, said, "I realized that promoting a cultural city can only be created entirely through the strength of citizens." He continued, "If the city pursues intangible resources—humanware—in response to its regional characteristics of being relatively sparse in physical cultural resources compared to other local governments, it would align with the purpose of the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism, offering hope that it can become a culture of creativity created directly, rather than a cultural city dependent on tangible resources." He expressed his feelings about the candidate city designation.

A city official stated, "The city will promote cultural city specialization projects and preliminary projects over the course of 2020" and added, "Through the tripartite agreement established in August with Gyeonggi Province and the Gyeonggi Cultural Foundation, we will make efforts to be designated as the main cultural city in 2020 through inter-agency cooperation and mutual support."