"The creative city...when do we actually get to see it?" 09-04-2008 "We hear so much about the creative city, but when do we actually get to see
it?", Scott Burnham, curator of Urban Play wonders. "Urban Play gives cities the
opportunity to show the inherent creativity of its people." The Urban Play
project is part of the international design biennial 'Experimentadesign' that
will take place in Amsterdam in fall 2008. The biennial was originally a project
from Lisbon, but has been transformed to a progressive co-production of the two
European cities. The event is strongly supported by the Amsterdam City Council,
which considers it to fit perfectly with the city's ambitions to become one of
Europe's top 5 cities for businesses. The theme of the biennial is 'space and
place', which is exactly what the Urban Play project is about. It encourages
people to take back the street, by actively and creatively interacting with the
public domain. A special walking route along the IJ-riverfront will be designed
for Amsterdam residents and visitors. This route will contain so-called urban
interventions - consisting of objects, tools and toys - created by international
designers. People will hereby be stimulated to play and be creative with the
objects they find on the way. The objects should trigger people to take an
active part in the shaping of the environment. According to Scott Burnham this
is important, because the relationship between people and the city they live in
has changed remarkably over the years.
How has the interaction and relation of people (residents) with
the city changed over the years?
"Both the level of interaction between residents and the city, and the
relationship between the individual and the city has changed remarkably in
recent years. It has increased dramatically.
Fundamentally, our relationship with the city has changed in the past two decades. We have gone from a sense of our habitat being in the city to the realisation that our habitat is the city. What has followed is a level of interaction between people and the physicality of the city in ways which blur and at times entirely remove the distinction between public and private areas and objects. Urban objects and visual environments are increasingly expected by the people who use and experience them each day to contain and reflect personal significance, and if they do not do so, spontaneous interventions often step in to correct this and ensure the personal is woven into the public fabric." Why has this interaction between people and the
city changed?
"The reasons for this are numerous. For one, increasing urban density makes
the shared space in the city much more of a daily aspect of people’s lives. It
has also been argued that increasing property prices forces city residents to
live in smaller apartments, so the shared spaces of the city take on an even
more vital role in the lives of urban residents than they have in the past.
At the same time, this space is increasingly devoted to commercial messages
and advertising – communication that is exclusively one-way: the public is being
spoken at, in areas where the social expectation is one of shared
interactions between people, so the same is expected of the shared visuals of
the areas. So the one-way visuals and communications of the city run in
opposition to the instinctive behaviour of people in the city. Therefore people
are increasingly reversing the communication streams of the city and are
communicating back.
So far, this process has largely occurred through subversive and marginal
activities as people take individual action to shape their own urban spaces, to
surround themselves with adapted objects and visuals in the urban environment
with the same passion usually applied to domestic spaces."
Why do you think it is important for people to be able to be
creative and play in their cities?
"Because it is the individual who experiences the city, who calls it
home. His/her own micro locations within the city are part of personal
experience on a day-to-day basis. At the same time, an architect, designer, or
local planning authority who is responsible for the creation of these areas does
not have the daily interaction with these same locations that the average person
does. So it is important that individuals feel the ability and the allowance to
have a more organic and ongoing sense of creative interaction with their city
instead of operating exclusively in the existing framework that you can share
the spaces of the city, but you can’t physically interact with the space or
alter anything about it."
How do you think the public in Amsterdam will react to Urban
Play?
"To be entirely honest, I do not know how people in Amsterdam will react to
Urban Play – and that is entirely the point of the project. To learn from the
project and people’s interaction with it at the same time we are creating and
realising the project.
At the heart of Urban Play is the notion of exploring an approach towards
open source urban design - creating urban objects and areas that exist as the
starting point, the catalyst, to enable a direct, open and creative dialogue
with people and the design of their city. This is design for the people -
developed, altered and enhanced by the people."
Do you think people would react differently in other European
cities?
"I do think that people in other European cities would react differently, and
that is exactly the point of Urban Play. There are plans to take Urban Play to
cities other than Amsterdam, for exactly that purpose – to explore how this open
design model would develop differently in other cities, dictated entirely by the
residents of that city.
We hear so much about “the creative city”, but when do we actually get
to see the creative city? Urban Play gives cities the opportunity to
show the inherent creativity of its people."
The borders between legal and illegal are rather thin in the
Urban Play project. The message behind Urban Play seems to be rather close to
the message of events/movements like ‘Reclaim the streets’. In how far does this
create problems when it comes to cooperation with the Amsterdam City
Council?
"A related question is - why are there movements like ‘Reclaim the Streets’
in the first place? It is because people feel a need to take action to reclaim a
personal sense of connection or contribution to the city, and they know that if
it is to be done at all, it has to be done at a “grass roots” level. If you were
to do a survey at the number of grass roots organisations and collectives that
exist to organise people in reclaiming a personal connection and sense of
contribution to the city, you would find that there has been an exponential
increase in the numbers of these organisations which have been started in the
last decade. This is not a coincidence. Yet instead of trying to work
collaboratively with this spirit, cities often move in the opposite direction,
enacting zero tolerance policies and enforcing codes of conduct in public
spaces. This ultimately only inspires more action outside the control of the
city. It is the classic scenario – the more rules you put in place, the more
people want to push against those rules.
The only reason that notions of illegality are raised with this action in the
first place is because in the current climate of most cities, almost any action
done on an individual basis falls outside of the city’s zero tolerance policy
towards public intervention, so even something as innocent as putting paper cups
in a fence to spell out a sentence is technically an illegal activity. Yet I
have seen this specific intervention done in several cities, and the response of
the public isn’t to call the police, it is to walk over to the fence and begin
re-mixing the words in the sentence to spell out different things. If you give
people the ability to creatively interact in public spaces, they will. Yet
cities rarely do. The city of Amsterdam should be commended for at least
exploring a different model of how people can engage with their city."
Many City Councils in the (Western) world now show increased
involvement in creativity and culture, because they feel it will make their
cities more competitive and attractive. Do you think this rather instrumental
approach to creativity forms a problem when it comes to the message behind
events like Urban Play?
" There is always a crisis within any city’s
“creative city” desires. Cities love to promote festivals, design quarters,
create ‘cultural zones’ and so on. But again, this is creativity by municipal
committee, which is a very different type of creativity than that which exists
at the more organic, individual level of a city’s creative development.
A good friend of mine, the late music producer Tony Wilson, was responsible
for some of the most influential music acts to come out of the UK in the 80s and
90s. He was once asked by a UK government commission on the creative industries
what the government could do to nurture the creative industries, to which he
replied, “leave us alone”. While I don’t necessarily subscribe to Tony’s
absolute statement, there is an element of truth there, that creativity needs to
work in both directions, from the top-down at a government level, but also to be
allowed to happen from the bottom-up. Amsterdam has done a very wise thing with
Urban Play – they have enabled it to happen, but then allowed it to develop on
its own. As they say… watch this space."
Scott Burnham is the curator of Urban Play and the 2009 Montreal Biennale.
Between 2003 and 2006 he was the Creative Director for Urbis in Manchester (UK).
Contact Scott Burnham:
sb@scottburnham.com
LinksClick here to visit the Urban Play websiteClick here to visit the Experimentadesign websiteClick here to visit Scott Burnham's website back |
