Al-Ahsa Mayor Essam Al-Mulla chaired a UNESCO Creative Cities Network meeting in Gabrovo, Bulgaria, where officials from 20 cities gathered to talk about culture, creativity and sustainable development. The language was all cooperation and future-building. The machinery underneath was familiar: cities, networks, coordinators, and a polished international forum where power speaks softly and calls it culture.
The State's Soft Power Circuit
The meeting brought together representatives from 20 cities in the network’s Crafts and Folk Art subnetwork, according to the Saudi Press Agency. Al-Ahsa joined the UNESCO Creative Cities Network in 2015 through an initiative by Al-Ahsa municipality. That detail matters. The city did not arrive as a grassroots collective or a neighborhood assembly. It arrived through a municipality, then entered a global network built to manage culture through institutions, branding and official coordination.
According to UNESCO, Al-Ahsa preserves about 50 traditional crafts and folk art practices, including palm-based textiles, pottery, weaving and joinery. Those crafts support its economy through markets and cultural festivals. The article presents that as heritage preservation. It also shows how culture gets folded into administration, tourism and economic planning, with the municipality and UNESCO as the gatekeepers of what counts as valuable tradition.
Al-Mulla said Al-Ahsa’s experience showed how culture and creativity could support sustainable development, strengthen social cohesion and build bridges between peoples and cities. He also spoke about culture and innovation, technology and human skills, investment in the future and cooperation among creative cities. The vocabulary is smooth, managerial and harmless on the surface. It is also the language of institutions that prefer managed participation to anything messy, autonomous or outside their control.
Heritage, Managed
Al-Mulla said Al-Ahsa’s approach was rooted in cultural resilience, extending beyond heritage protection to developing ways to preserve, practice and pass on traditions to future generations while adapting to change. He said technology and artificial intelligence offered opportunities to develop traditional skills and knowledge, and open new avenues for artisans.
He added that technology should complement rather than replace heritage, helping craftspeople innovate, document their work and reach wider audiences and markets while preserving the authenticity and identity of their crafts. Investment in culture and creativity, he said, was also an investment in people and human relationships that strengthens belonging, communication and social cohesion.
That is the official script: preserve, adapt, market, connect, manage. No conflict, no coercion, no mention of who gets to decide which traditions are funded, packaged or displayed. The meeting’s purpose, according to the article, was to expand cooperation and knowledge-sharing among member cities and advance joint work in crafts and folk art, reinforcing the role of culture and creativity in shaping cities’ futures. The future, in this version, belongs to networks of institutions.
Ibrahim Al-Shubaith, coordinator of Creative Al-Ahsa and lead coordinator of the network’s Crafts and Folk Art cluster, described culture as a form of soft power for peace, as well as an effective means of fostering understanding and bringing communities closer together. He highlighted the importance of coordinating efforts and exchanging experiences to develop the crafts and folk art sector, and strengthen its contribution to sustainable cultural development.
Soft power. Peace. Understanding. The usual vocabulary of international cultural management, where the state and its partners turn living practices into policy objects and call the result social cohesion. The article offers no grassroots organizers, no independent craft collectives, no workers or artisans speaking for themselves. It gives us municipalities, coordinators and UNESCO. The people are there only as beneficiaries, audiences or future generations.
Al-Ahsa’s presence in Gabrovo was framed as cooperation across cities. What it actually shows is how cultural life gets routed through official channels, with international institutions and local authorities deciding how tradition is preserved, narrated and sold. The crafts remain real. The apparatus around them is the part that keeps getting polished.