Melitopol Forum 2015 launches its Intercultural City Strategy 2015-2020 and marks a new era in the development of national ICCUA network

The development of interculturality

On September 28-29, 2015 the city of Melitopol hosted a second intercultural forum, one year on from a prior event entitled ‘Intercultural Melitopol Supports a United and Integrated Ukraine’. This year’s theme was ‘Revisiting the concept of Intercultural Cities in the contemporary Ukrainian reality’. And, indeed, it might have been thought that that ‘reality’—no more clearly manifested than by the fortified military checkpoint outside the city, at the junction with the road to the strategic city of Mariupol, little more than 200km away—would make a discussion of interculturalism appear at best irrelevant and at worst indulgent. The conflict focused on the Donbass region continues to simmer and, just two days after the event ended in Melitopol, National Guard officers were killed in clashes with nationalist protesters at the parliament building in Kiev, as elected representatives hotly debated new decentralisation arrangements which, while applying across Ukraine, is hoped to ease secessionist sentiment in easternmost part of the country.