Let's Learn About City-Remaking from Art

(Oita Godo Newspaper, January 14th 2009, morning paper)

On January 15th to 18th, the Non-Profit Organization who is always doing activities to promote city-making, held an event under the theme "welfare" in the city, gathering many people from different fields of work and providing "crossover",  a place for them to share their experiences with the purpose to stimulate and energize the activities of city-making even more.

The NPOs such as "Beppu Hattou Trust", "Hattou Onpaku", "Self-Independent Center Oita", and "Beppu Project" participated in a cooperating national assembly to promote the re-making of Beppu City. They are all aiming for Beppu to be "a place where human talents can gather and be stimulated", "a place where the talented people can be scouted and educated for the purpose of city remaking", "a place where you can actually stay and enjoy".

During the period of the "crossover" event being held, talk even was organized to provide a "platform" and utilized it as a place to share ideas and experiences about city revival. For example, there is an opportunity to listen to people from Onpaku, an organization which is already spread all over the nation, and the people who pioneered the activities of city remaking, as well as to provide a place for the people to make networks.

Besides the Beppu Art Festival-The World of Mixed Bath, which started from April 2009, there are some arrangements of activities that were opened to public. From the artistic point of view, "ArtTourism" was proposed. And also, there was a workshop with the theme of "creating barrier-free toilet" for the physically challenged citizens, which was considered to be an advantage for the tourism in Beppu City.

Comment: The activities of city-remaking that are going on are indeed interesting because they are organized in small scales within each city and involve a lot of people, whereby each person can have a room to contribute. And this kind of gathering event is indeed helpful to provide a platform for people to meet and share experiences, so that they can enrich one another.

NUGROHO Katarina Marsha Utama

APM 2nd year

Ritsumeikan Asia Pacific University