Graz as a UNESCO City of Design

Awareness & Location

Graz is a UNESCO City of Design and part of a global network that links the global creative scene. Last year, the capital of the State of Styria celebrated its 10th anniversary as a UNESCO City of Design.

Since becoming a UNESCO City of Design, Graz has increasingly participated in numerous events, conferences, calls and competitions, establishing itself as a popular design hotspot. At the same time, membership in the UNESCO City of Design network facilitated knowledge transfer with other UNESCO Creative Cities and opened up new markets.

Creative Industries Styria is responsible for networking and subsequently communicating invitations to participate in calls and competitions from the UNESCO Cities of Design and other UNESCO Creative Cities. Cooperation has increased as a result. Creative Industries Styria’s tasks include content management for the joint website of UNESCO Cities of Design, designcities. net, and creation of a monitoring report for Graz as a UNESCO City of Design. For the period from 2016 to 2020, the monitoring report was compiled in cooperation with the City of Design Coordination Office of the city of Graz. One of the transnational projects of the UNESCO Cities of Design is “Auto Fiction – Mobility of the Future”. As one of the Cities of Design with a thriving automotive industry, Graz was represented with numerous contributions.

In 2021, 49 new cities were added to the UNESCO Creative Cities Network. The network has grown to include 295 cities, 43 of which are UNESCO Cities of Design – the newest members here being Covilhã in Portugal, Doha in Qatar and Whanganui in New Zealand.

Awareness & Location

Conferences and meetings On behalf of Graz, Creative Industries Styria leads the Design & Business working group together with Kortrijk. On April 29, a Working Group Session took place online. From October 12 to 14, 2021, a Subnetwork Meeting under the motto “Re:imagine, Re:new, Re:generate” was held online, organized by Geelong. On July 6 and 7, 2021, a UNESCO Creative Cities Meeting titled “Creative Cities responses to COVID-19” took place online as an alternative to the planned Annual Meeting in Santos. Furthermore, a Virtual Design Day for the Cities of Design was held on July 8, 2021.

Auto Fiction – Mobility of the Future The project “Auto Fiction – Mobility of the Future” showcases collective knowhow of leading automotive cities in the UNESCO Cities of Design network. Saint-Étienne has been at the helm of the project since 2020. Graz was represented with several projects: the cooperation project “One for all” by moodley industrial design and Siemens; “WoodC.A.R”, a cooperation of the Innovationszentrum W.E.I.Z. with industrial companies, research institutions and the Holzcluster Steiermark as well as the degree program Industrial Design of FH JOANNEUM. Besides Graz, other partner cities in this project are Detroit, Kortrijk, Puebla and Turin. Results and projects from the individual cities were shown in the traveling exhibition “Around Autofiction”, which was on display in the Cité du Design in 2021. The show was also presented in the French Pavilion at the EXPO Dubai. Several workshops took place in the course of the project, including an online meeting by SaintÉtienne and a physical one in Kortrijk, in which Graz creative professionals also participated.