Eduardo Barroso Neto is Brazilian and traveled to Portugal to learn about the traditional embroidery of this Portuguese municipality.
The city of Castelo Branco, located in the Central region of Portugal, will deliver a dossier to UNESCO in June as part of its candidacy to become a Creative City of Handicrafts and Popular Arts, through “Traditional Embroidery”.
In order to strengthen this initiative, which intends to reinforce Castelo Branco’s “positioning on the world map with regard to the region’s embroidery and the county’s economic development potentialities through creativity”, the local government authorities held the first International Meeting of Creative Cities, between April 12th and 15th, in the Castelo Branco Cultural Center facilities, which gathered dozens of participants, including experts and responsible people from several cities in the world, such as Brazil, Spain, and Cape Verde.
One of the participants was Eduardo Barroso Neto, who, besides being a consultant in the “Creative Economy and Design” area, is a specialist in processes to be submitted to UNESCO in the scope of Creative Cities. To our report, this person, who has lived and worked in Switzerland, said that the Portuguese municipality is able to receive a positive response from the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization.
“I think that the most important thing we saw was the consistency, the importance of Castelo Branco’s embroidery, a tradition that is almost three centuries old and that remains. It is not an activity that is limited to museums. It is a living activity, there are people who live from it and it is an important touristic asset, mainly in the experience economy”, highlighted Eduardo Barroso Neto, who mentioned that “one of the objectives of the UNESCO network is the sharing of best practices”, which, still according to Eduardo, “is already in process in Castelo Branco, through the proposal of creating a cooperation agreement between the cities that visited this municipality”.
In one of his passages through Europe, Eduardo Barroso Neto studied and worked in Lausanne, a city on Lake Geneva in the French-speaking region of Vaud in Switzerland.
“My background is in Industrial Design, but I ended up specializing in Urban Design, I did a master’s degree in Lausanne in this area and had the opportunity to work for the local municipality, implementing some urban real estate projects, some projects in the area of culture. These are all experiences that consolidate a professional path. I worked for the municipality of Lausanne for six months, at the end of my master’s degree, and it seems to have left its mark on the local authority. I was the first designer hired, which opened the way for other opportunities to arise. And, in this way, my hiring and the experiences we lived through contributed for my profession, design, to be increasingly valued and understood as indispensable in urban development,” said Eduardo Barroso Neto.
This professional emerges in this process at an important moment for Portugal. Eduardo keeps in his curriculum dossiers approved by UNESCO that distinguished territories as Creative Cities in several aspects.
“Since the beginning of the World Network of Creative Cities, I have collaborated a lot for its consolidation, not only in Brazil, but throughout Latin America, promoting applications that were mostly successful. Starting with Florianópolis, in the South of Brazil, which joined the Network as City of Gastronomy. Then, João Pessoa, which is a City of Handicrafts. Next, Fortaleza, which joined as City of Design, and then Campina Grande, which joined as Media City. Currently, I am working to help Penedo join the Network as a City of Cinema. These are successful experiences, which demonstrate that the Network is an irreversible process that only tends to grow and consolidate itself”, mentioned Eduardo.
In the last few weeks, in Portuguese soil, besides remembering his past in the Swiss country, Eduardo Barroso Neto evaluated the importance of Castelo Branco’s candidacy process to UNESCO.
“During the meeting in Castelo Branco, proposals came up, ideas emerged. Winning the UNESCO seal is not simply winning a tourism distinction stamp. It’s more than that! It is the city’s commitment to cooperate with the others and to promote sustainable development, where culture is at the center of this development. (…) What makes these territories so interesting is the preservation of cultural identities, but also diversity. Cities that have a strong identity, but are receptive to the entry of other cultures, but, above all, this intertwining that is part of this cultural dynamic and vitality. This is the most important thing”, pointed out this specialist.
Finally, this consultant talked about what a territory needs to be recognized by UNESCO.
“I think that, first of all, it needs to raise its cultural vitality, its cultural assets. That which a locality has done most relevant in recent years, the most vivid and authentic expressions of the territories. But more than that, a project for the future, a project that is innovative, impactful, and shareable with the other cities in the UNESCO world network. That’s how things happen. This vision of the future shared with the population, built in a democratic and participatory way”, attested Eduardo Barroso Neto.