EUKN - European Urban Knowledge Network - Creativity and the City: thinking through the steps

Creativity and the City: thinking through the steps

Introduction

Creativity is like a rash; it is all-pervasive. Everyone is in the creativity game. Creativity is a mantra of our age, whether referring to creative individuals, companies, cities and countries; and even creative streets or creative buildings or projects. At the author's last count 60 cities world-wide claimed to be creative cities.

Description

Creativity is not the answer to all our urban problems but it creates the pre-conditions within which it is possible to open out opportunities to find solutions. Most importantly it requires a change in mindset. Urban creativity requires an ethical framework to drive the city forward not in a prescriptive sense. At is core this ethic is about something life giving, sustaining, opening out rather than curtailing. This requires us to focus on soft creativity, which is the ability to nurture our cities and their cultural ecology.

Cities look to creativity because for different people for different reasons they say creativity has something in it for them. They feel it can provide answers to the problems and opportunities of the changing global terms of trade, economic restructuring, the IT driven economy and a society where a greater focus is on creating wealth through ideas. This adds up to dramatic change that feels like a paradigm shift.

Creativity has risen too because people have realized that the sources of competitiveness now happen on a different plane and they need to learn afresh how to compete beyond merely low cost and high productivity.

Conclusions

The art of creative city making involves fine judgement based on experience and for example the ability to know when to push for innovation and when to hold back. The city maker is an artist of the highest order, because they have a grasp of all the arts concerned with city making and it is complex. At its best city making is the highest achievement of culture. Our best cities are the most elaborate and sophisticated artefact humans have conceived, shaped and made. At their worst they are forgettable, damaging and destructive. For too long we believed that city making involved only the art of architecture and land use planning. Over time the arts of engineering, surveying, valuing, property development, project management began to form part of the pantheon.

If a city wanted to focus on being a creative city what would it do?

A crisis helps because this opens the opportunity to rethink and re-assess. A crisis doesnot need to be negative, it can be a declining industry, but the crisis can be pushedahead by creating very high expectations. Then the gap between existing realities andwhat you want to achieve creates the self generated crisis that can be a spur to action.
Identify a large group of project champions from different sectors who are interested in the broader creativity agenda. If this is not possible pursue some of the work listed belowwith a more narrow grouping, but constantly with a view to building wider alliances.
Undertake an audit of creative potential and obstacles. This would assess creative projects across the whole spectrum in your city as well as the incentives and regulatoryregime. Are there any incentives or policy initiatives that foster creativity? Who and whatis creating the obstacles?
Identify some key projects in your own city that stand as examples of good practice. Visit these with mixed teams and promote how they work. Similarly identify key projects elsewhere, this is recognized as creating one of the most transformative effects.
Develop the evidence that proves your arguments about the value and impact of the nexus of culture, creativity broadly defined and the arts. Highlight examples from parts of the world and especially those you perceive to be your competitors.
Seek to influence the city ‘master’ strategy. This is usually spatially or economically driven. Try to insert to cultural and creativity agenda within it. If this fails develop your well-publicized, alternative strategy. Show an appreciation of all the issues a traditional plan would have but go well beyond it. Show by example the power of working across boundaries in interdisciplinary teams.
Create a series of pilot projects that can be seen as experiments, perhaps under the cover of a major event, such as an Expo, a festival or large physical regeneration project.
Assess how the story of your city is told internally and externally. Is the story still true and relevant to what you want to achieve? Generate a new story.
Create an advocacy lobby group that embodies in the way it acts, holds meetings or arranges seminars the creativity you are aspiring to.
Do not call yourself a creative city - let others do that by respecting what you have achieved.

Contact info

Comedia
The Round - Bournes Green
Near Stroud Gloucestershire
United Kingdom
Charles Landry (Director of Comedia), tel. +44 (0)1242 250270

Publication date

/06/2007

Researcher

Charles Landry

Links

Click here to visit the website of COMEDIA Click here to visit the website of the Online Journal The Urban Reinvestors

Download the full article "Creativity and the City: thinking through the steps" (PDF, Eng, 807 kB)

Document type

research

Themes

Urban Policy

Keywords