Reignite XVII- Culture as Infrastructure, Stories as Power
As part of BAFTA-Qualifying Aesthetica Film Festival, Reignite XVII brings the UK’s UNESCO Creative Cities Network in York for a landmark conversation about the role culture can play in shaping the future of places. The event will be opened by Mayor of York and North Yorkshire, David Skaith, setting the stage for a programme of panels and talks from cities across the network,. Representatives from Edinburgh, Perth, Norwich, Nottingham, Aberystwyth, Exeter, Bradford, Manchester, Glasgow and Liverpool will gather to explore the relationship between creativity, identity, resilience and place. Across literature, film, music, craft and media arts, these cities demonstrate how cultural practice can become embedded in the ways communities understand themselves and respond to change. At a moment of accelerating climate uncertainty, technological disruption and social fragmentation, Reignite XVII asks this: can culture function as infrastructure in a rapidly changing world?
The UNESCO Creative Cities Network offers a powerful lens through which to consider this proposition. Its cities are connected not simply by a shared designation, but by a belief that creativity can actively contribute to sustainable development, social cohesion and the distinctive character of place. At Reignite XVII, this network becomes a space deliberately curated for mutual exchange: an opportunity to consider what different cities are learning, what they can share, and how cultural approaches can travel between places without erasing their differences. Edinburgh, Norwich and Manchester, as Cities of Literature, bring questions of language, storytelling and the written word into the conversation, while Aberystwyth and Exeter add further perspectives on how literary culture can create connections between people and place. Perth, as a City of Craft and Folk Art, demonstrates the importance of material knowledge, tradition and making, while Glasgow and Liverpool, as Cities of Music, reveal to us the social and transformative power of sound; Bradford, as a City of Film, brings the moving image directly into this dialogue.
This is important because places are never fixed at any one point in time. They are continually constructed through memory, imagination, representation and lived experience. The stories told about a city can influence how it is perceived from the outside, but they can also alter how its communities understand their own possibilities. Cultural activity can provide the means through which post-industrial cities reinvent themselves, historic cities find new relevance, and communities negotiate complex questions of identity and belonging. From Bradford’s evolving cultural narrative to Glasgow and Liverpool’s histories of music-led regeneration, creative practice can become a mechanism for reimagining what a place is and what it might become. Reignite XVII therefore asks us to look beyond the idea of culture as an economic sector or programme of events, and towards its deeper capacity to shape the social, emotional and imaginative infrastructure of a city.
The question becomes increasingly urgent in an age of constant digital acceleration. Across global platforms, cities compete for visibility within an attention economy defined by algorithms, constant connectivity and an overwhelming volume of cultural content. Distinctiveness can become difficult to sustain when every place is encouraged to speak the same language of innovation, experience and destination. Against this backdrop, the UNESCO Creative Cities Network offers another model: one based not on uniformity, but on exchange, specificity and the value of local cultural ecosystems. Reignite XVII considers how cities can remain visible without becoming homogenised, and how storytelling can create meaningful forms of attention rather than simply generating more noise. The festival environment itself becomes an attention sanctuary: a space in which audiences can pause, take a closer look and engage with ideas that require time, conversation and reflection.
That conversation will extend beyond the discussion, through a visit to the UNESCO City of Media Arts EXPO, where the wider creative ecosystem of York and the region comes into view. Bringing 40 businesses from across the region and beyond, the EXPO offers a chance to meet the people and organisations actively building the creative industries, working across film, games, design, production, visual effects (VFX) and more. It provides a tangible expression of what it means for culture to operate as infrastructure, revealing the networks of skills, ideas, technologies and enterprises that enable a place to create. The visible relationship between cultural ambition and economic activity shows that the creative city is not an abstract concept but a community of practitioners, businesses and innovators. For delegates from across the UNESCO network, the EXPO creates a space for discovery and collaboration, bridging York’s creative economy with a wider global dialogue.
York is central to this proposition. As the UK’s only UNESCO City of Media Arts, the city occupies a distinctive position at the intersection of heritage and emerging technology, historic place and future-facing creativity. Its cultural identity is inseparable from storytelling, while its media arts designation recognises the ways digital practice can transform how people experience and understand their surroundings. Bringing the UNESCO Creative Cities together here creates an opportunity to consider how York can contribute to, and learn from, a wider national network of creative places. Reignite XVII is part of that forward movement: positioning culture not at the edge of conversations about the future, but at their centre. Through Aesthetica Film Festival, York becomes a meeting point where film, literature, music, craft and media arts can encounter one another, and where the ideas explored in panels and talks can connect directly with the businesses and practitioners putting them into practice.
At the heart of the event is a belief in the power of connection. No city exists in isolation, and the challenges facing places – from climate change and technological disruption to cultural homogenisation and changing patterns of attention – cannot be addressed through individual disciplines or institutions alone. The UNESCO Creative Cities Network creates a framework for cities to share knowledge while retaining the particular qualities that make them distinct. Reignite XVII extends this exchange through a programme of panels and talks, inviting each participating city to bring its own perspective, experience and creative practice to the conversation. Alongside these contributions, Cherie Federico, Director of Aesthetica, will reflect on the role of culture, independent creativity and the arts in creating spaces for new ideas and meaningful exchange. Together, the programme becomes less a showcase of individual achievements than a collective investigation into what comes next.
Reignite XVII: Culture as Infrastructure, Stories as Power proposes that stories do more than describe places – they help construct them. The narratives a city tells about itself influence what its communities value, what visitors see and what its future might make possible. In a time when the pressures on places are increasingly complex, culture provides the imaginative capacity to respond: creating new connections, preserving knowledge, challenging assumptions and opening up alternative futures. York’s role is not simply to host this talk, but to drive it forward as a city where media arts, storytelling and cultural innovation are shaping how place is understood -from the work of its creative businesses to the wider networks bridging it to cities across the UK and beyond. Reignite XVII brings the UNESCO Creative Cities together around a shared proposal: culture is infrastructure, storytelling is a form of power, and the future of place is something we can collectively imagine into being.
Aesthetica Film Festival 2026 runs 4-8 November in York, UK. Click here to book your festival pass.
Reignite XVII runs on Thursday 5 November, 18:00-21:00, Yorkshire Museum and then on to De Grey Rooms.
