Joe Jeff Goldblatt is delivering a keynote speech at the 2018 Chengdu Global Events Summit. (Photo/Zhang Jian)

Nov. 14 (NBD) – Culture and creativity could be a city's unifiers, said Joe Jeff Goldblatt, founding father of the U.S. event management education, in a keynote speech entitled The Trend of Global Culture Events at the 2018 Chengdu Global Events Summit collaboratively hosted by National Business Daily and the American Event Management Institute Tuesday.

As an expert engaged in the cultural and creative industry for over 40 years, the amiable celebrity has extensive experience, which will definitely make a contribution to Chengdu's efforts in building itself into a world-renowned cultural city.

At the very beginning of his speech, Goldblatt expressed his pleasure in visiting Chengdu, a beautiful city with 4,500 years of culture. According to him, Chengdu offers successful experience and practices for reference to other places, thus people all over the world are eager to visit the city.

The cultural and creative giant then shared his views about Chengdu's cultural and creative industry and provided suggestions to the future development of the city.

In Goldblatt's view, culture and creativity could be a city's unifiers. And culture is always the catalyst for humanity since cultural production and creation exist even in the poorest corner of a city. Therefore, cities could seek growth through cultural development, he noted.

He suggested great places like Chengdu should attract hallmark and mega events through proper future planning and grow in wisdom by listening to others and adapt best practices of others to create a world renowned cultural city.

Besides, Chengdu's cultural and creative industry could ride on the technological achievements for further growth. Technologies have made great strides over the past three decades, especially in the cultural and creative events sector, Goldblatt stated, and technological products such as smart phone, internet, and e-mail have improved people's way of dealing with things.

In his concluding remarks, he highly praised Chengdu's inclusiveness and diversity since an inclusive environment provides soils for the development of the cultural and creative industry and showed great optimism to the future of Chengdu as well.

He stressed that occasional failures might occur in the pursuit of development but the future of Chengdu would be as bright as a crowd of fireflies, which can even spread the light to the darkest corners of the planet, he added.

Email: wenqiao@nbd.com.cn