Members of the local community (artists, architects, activists, social entrepreneurs, curators), designed our tours to cater, primarily, to the needs of the city and only secondarily to the needs of the tourist market. Simultaneously and symbiotically, this creates more content and more opportunities for the tourists to enjoy, thus enabling a positive feedback loop that helps grow a city in dire need of urban and social development.
NGO Asociatia Coolturala “Noua Ne Pasa!”
Interesting Times Bureau
was launched with the purpose of supporting local cultural and artistic projects that relate to urban life and environment and fund them by developing sustainable urban tours and workshops.
Bucharest ranks on #68/100 cities.
according to MASTERCARD’S GLOBAL DESTINATION CITY INDEX (2023)
As the study shows, there is a deep connection between a city’s cultural and artistic, its social and economic development and tourism:
“The impact of travel on destination cities that receive visitors are very significant from the business, social, and cultural perspectives. International visitors’ spending constitute an increasingly important source of business revenue in a destination city, encompassing the hospitality, retail, transport, sports, and cultural industries, among many others. In many instances, it is a major economic engine for employment and income generation for the city in question. Along with the flow of visitors comes the flow of new ideas and experiences that benefits both the visitors and the destination cities, which are just as important as the flow of pending. As a result, the more connected a destination city is to other cities, the more vibrant and dynamic it becomes.”
Our first initiative was all about street art:
a true transformative urban art form, with a deep social message and profound local impact. Interesting Times Bureau.
Unfortunately, street art is still perceived, in Bucharest, as a form of glorified vandalism. So, while communities such as East London, Berlin, Gdansk and Lodz (in Poland) have learnt to embrace, support and promote street art, in Romania, we are still fighting old mentalities and the genre is still in its infancy.
With virtually no support from local authorities, the little progress being made, should be credited to the local street art community or civil society movements such as STREET DELIVERY. A good example is the video above.
Interesting Times Bureau, in collaboration with local street artists and promoters, has developed a street-art tour and a street-art workshop that will help both showcase current works to tourists and locals and also finance new murals in city areas that badly need them: central disadvantaged neighborhoods or bedroom quarters.
