Izmir Metropolitan Mayor Tunç Soyer participated to the culture-oriented online event "Cities Listen" organized by the United Cities and Local Government Organization (UCLG), of which he is a member of the Board of Directors and the Council.

Mayor Soyer, who started his speech after UCLG Secretary General Emilia Saiz at the event which has been organized to reinforce the dialogue between global cultural networks and local and regional governments, expressed his happiness that Izmir will host the UCLG Cultural Summit in September.

Inviting all actors in the world related to culture to contribute to the Izmir Cultural Summit, Mayor Soyer said, “In this way, we will work to make cities more active at the national and local level in order to implement the 2030 Agenda. For this reason, we invite local governments, cultural institutions, practitioners, experts, academicians to the Cultural Summit. We will strengthen our response to our common problems. I invite you to the digital launch of the Summit on June 10th and the physical sessions to be held in Izmir starting from the 9th of September”

As a result of Izmir Metropolitan Mayor Tunç Soyer's vision and work called “Another culture is possible”, the United Cities and Local Government Organization (UCLG) Cultural Summit, the fourth of which will be hosted by Izmir, will be started with an online session on 10th of June and will be held simultaneously with the Izmir International Fair (IEF) between September 9-11, 2021. The summit, which will bring the world's leading cultural producers, artists and opinion leaders together with the people of Izmir, will focus on cultural agendas and policies at the global level. The meetings at the Summit will focus on Culture, Culture and Sustainability, Environment and Culture, Cultural Rights and Communities, Culture and Gender, Creative Economy and Cultural Diversity, Cultural Heritage and Tourism after Covid-19. In addition to the meetings, numerous cultural events will be held in the city as part of the summit.

UCLG, one of the largest unions in the world covering local government and cities, organizes a cultural summit in a different city every two years in order to promote culture, cultural diversity and tourism, which are the main pillars of sustainable development. The UCLG Cultural Summit was held in Spain-Bilbao in 2015, Korea-Jeju in 2017 and Argentina-Buenos Aires in 2019. At the UCLG Congress in Durban, South Africa to which Mayor Soyer appeared in person on November 11-15, 2019, Izmir took a full score by leaving Kazan, Russia, and Merida, Mexico behind and was entitled to be eligible to host the Summit.