Post-congress statements from Mogens Kirkeby and Vicenzo Manco
Presidents of both ISCA and UISP, the organisations responsible for organising the MOVE Congress 2014, give their post-congress statements, highlighting the conclusions from the successful event, the lessons learnt and how we can apply them to our everyday lives.
President of ISCA, Mogens Kirkeby
Open cities – Active Cities, that is our dream. Unfortunately, the very strong global trend of urbanisation is creating many barriers for an active lifestyle, with only little room for recreational physical activity and sport. We need to change and develop our cities in such ways that physical activity is integrated in the daily life of the citizens and recreational sport is easily accessible.
The question mayors should ask themselves is “How do we create a ‘political infrastructure’ for cross sector collaboration, aiming for more active cities?” This is not an easy task, but necessary to make the urban environment more liveable.
MOVE Congress 2014 has showed that there is a growing interest from various sectors to find solutions – and that is very encouraging, but not enough. There is a need for a strong “political infrastructure”, a solid platform for cross sector collaboration to make an efficient and sustainable impact. Otherwise, the single cross sector initiatives will remain good, but small initiatives with very little impact. With strong “political infrastructure”, sectors like city planning, transportation, public health and recreational sport, can establish cross sector collaborations with a much higher impact and more sustainability.
President of UISP, Vicenzo Manco
Move Congress in Rome has sent a strong message to the European Parliament and the Italian Government, which is that “sport for all” is an internationally recognised movement. It is also a concrete reality, made of active citizens able to self organize and create networks, through good practices.
ISCA has been able to coordinate and represent this movement at a global and European level, by promoting a better understanding of the social values of sport and integrating it in projects that tackle health and well being issues, education of citizens on matters of sport and physical activity, as well as promoting integration, solidarity and environment sustainability.
For UISP it has been an honour to organise the 8th edition of MOVE Congress in Rome and I wish to thanks all of the volunteers, congress staff and the all the performers who contributed to this success. We have presented a series of good practices from different countries, for improving the liveability of the cities and their citizens. Recognising the social values of sport and working towards the sustainability of the urban development, lead to improving the society we live in. Increasing the people’s level of movement, it means more physical efficiency, but also higher awareness in its own means and rights. UISP is engaged in Italy to support the heritage of sport practice, participation and civil commitment, represented by more than 110.000 sport clubs in Italy.
We hope that in short time, we will have a law regarding the social value of sport, which is currently under discussion at the Italian Parliament. Moreover, UISP believes in a deep change of the sport culture in our country, which underlines the importance of the movement as education, expression and sociality. We believe that the interaction with other European cultures could strengthen this perspective.
