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In the last days of May, Eutropian’s Levente Polyák was in Tartu for the TransEuropeHalles conference, in order to strengthen our cooperation with TEH and to strengthen our cooperation with TEH and advance the movement of community-driven real estate development initiatives.
Hosted by TEH member Aparaaditehas, an important landmark in the Estonia independent arts and culture scene, the event focused on the difficulties art and culture centres face in these changing times. The conference’s theme “Arts of Survival” referred to the knowledge, skills, and values essential for navigating today’s challenges in order to build a culturally diverse and exciting future.
TEH is a network of over 160 cultural venues across Europe that support each other through networking, knowledge and resource sharing, advocacy and joint projects. Levente was invited to talk about the perspectives in the collective ownership of cultural venues, building on Eutropian’s experience in researching and supporting community-driven real estate development, based on projects like Funding the Cooperative City, ACTive NGOs, The Power of Civic Ecosystems, CO4Cities and Open Heritage. Here’s below a description of the session:
Over the past few years, the issue of collective ownership has been echoing through the corridors of Trans Europe Halles, chilling some and exciting others. Faced with the increasing number of evictions among network members, the Sustainable Buildings Hub proposes to raise the question of sustainability through this issue of collective ownership: buying buildings, cultural commons forever, based on several European experiences that are already well advanced. Who, what, how, when? And what if we were stronger together? And what if we created a tool capable of supporting members’ acquisition when a dialogue with the owner is no longer possible or when rent or real estate prices.