The UNESCO Creative Cities Network (UCCN) was created in 2004 to promote cooperation with and among cities that have identified creativity as a strategic factor for sustainable urban development.

These cities work together towards a common objective of placing creativity and cultural industries at the heart of their development plans at the local level and cooperating actively at the international level, according to UNESCO’s Creative Cities Network website.

The Network covers seven categories – Crafts and Folk Arts, Media Arts, Film, Design, Gastronomy, Literature and Music.

Recently, 49 cities across the globe were added to the earlier list of 246 cities.

Srinagar became the third Indian city to be thus inscribed after Mumbai and Hyderabad.

Some of the other cities that were added along with Srinagar are Abu Dhabi (UAE) for music, Bida (Nigeria) for crafts and folk art, Bohicon (Benin) for gastronomy, Cannes (France) for film, Doha (Qatar) for Design, Tbilisi (Georgia) for media arts, etc.

Image credit: Photo by Divya Agrawal on Unsplash