Why Culture Must Be Understood as Care
by András Farkas, Co-Founder and Strategy Person at PONT Group | Policy Coordinator at Culture Next | Strategy Person at Romanian Youth Capital | Trying to do social innovation through youth, participation, cities and collective futures.

The signing of the Europe for Culture – Culture for Europe Declaration by the European Commission, the European Parliament and the Council of the European Union is more than a symbolic moment. It signals something important: culture is not peripheral to Europe’s future. It is part of how Europe thinks about democracy, cohesion, belonging, resilience and the quality of public life.

In this context, Culture Next has launched a new policy report: Culture as Care: Participation, Health and Collective Well-Being in European Cities.

I was glad to contribute to this work, together with colleagues from across the Culture Next network. But rather than presenting the report only as a publication, I would like to pause on the idea behind it.

What does it mean to speak about culture as care?
For me, the most important point is that culture should not be reduced to an instrument for solving social problems. Culture is not a substitute for health policy, social policy, education policy or climate policy. It should not be treated as a soft add-on to harder policy fields.

At the same time, culture does something that many policy fields struggle to do: it creates spaces where people can meet, express themselves, recognise one another, negotiate meaning, imagine alternatives and act together. In that sense, culture creates care when participation is real.

Care is often understood as something one person or institution provides to another. But in cultural life, care can also be relational and collective. It can emerge through shared rituals, common spaces, storytelling, intergenerational encounters, informal creativity, neighbourhood practices, artistic experimentation and public imagination.

This is why participation matters so much.
If culture is only something people consume, its social role remains limited. But when culture becomes something people help shape, it becomes part of the infrastructure of democratic life. Participation is not only about access to events or audiences for institutions. It is about agency, recognition, belonging and shared responsibility.

This also changes how we should think about cities. European cities are not only places where cultural programmes are delivered. They are laboratories where new forms of participation, care and collective well-being can be tested. Libraries, theatres, museums, cultural centres, schools, streets, neighbourhood spaces and informal cultural scenes can all become places where social connection is strengthened.

But this requires a shift in how cultural policy is imagined:

from culture for people to culture with people;
from audiences and visitors to participants, co-creators and contributors;
from isolated cultural projects to cultural ecosystems that support care, trust and long-term belonging.

One of the strongest dimensions of this discussion concerns young people.
Youth participation is often discussed as a question of access: how do we bring young people into cultural institutions, cultural programmes or cultural audiences? This question matters, but it is not enough.

Young people are already cultural agents. They create, curate, organise, remix, mobilise and build communities, often outside formal cultural structures. They are active in informal, digital, local and hybrid cultural spaces that are not always recognised by institutions or policy frameworks.

So the challenge is not simply to make existing cultural offers more attractive to young people. The deeper challenge is to share power, resources and decision-making. Youth participation becomes meaningful when young people are not treated as future audiences or symbolic beneficiaries, but as present co-creators, curators, organisers and decision-makers.

This is where culture and care meet again.
To take young people seriously is to care about relevance, trust and agency. It is to recognise that participation cannot be designed only on behalf of people. It must be shaped with them, and sometimes by them.

This is not always easy for institutions. It means accepting uncertainty. It means giving up some control. It means valuing processes whose outcomes are not fully predictable. It also means addressing practical barriers: unpaid labour, precarious conditions, lack of space, lack of representation and the distance between formal cultural governance and the realities of young people’s lives.

But without this shift, cultural policy risks speaking about inclusion while reproducing distance.

The idea of culture as care therefore asks us to think beyond programmes. It asks us to think about the conditions that allow people to participate meaningfully in shaping their communities and futures.

It also asks us to defend culture’s intrinsic value. Culture contributes to well-being, social cohesion and democratic resilience, but it does so precisely because it is not only a delivery mechanism for measurable outcomes. Its power lies in meaning, imagination, ambiguity, beauty, conflict, memory, experimentation and shared experience.

At a European level, this conversation feels timely. If culture is now recognised more clearly as a strategic priority, then the next question is how this recognition is translated into policy, funding, governance and everyday practice.

For me, one answer is clear: culture must be understood as a public good and as social infrastructure. Not only because it produces events, attracts visitors or supports creative industries, but because it helps people relate to one another and to the places they inhabit.

Culture becomes care when people participate. And participation becomes meaningful when people have agency.

The report is available here.