Thinking through the Steps
by Charles Landry
COMEDIA

Pag.1 of 2

Preface

The aim of creative city making is to think of your city as a living work of art, where citizens can involve and engage themselves in the creation of a transformed place. This will require different creativities: The creativity of the engineer, the social worker, the planner, the business person, the events organizer, the architect, the housing specialist, IT specialists, psychologists, historians, anthropologists, natural scientists, environmentalists, artists of all kinds and importantly ordinary people living their lives as citizens. This is comprehensive creativeness. It involves differing forms not only the thrusting creativity of discovering a new technical invention but also the soft creativity of making interaction in the city flow.Every period of history requires its own form of creativity. Today’s will be different from yesterday’s and tomorrow’s. Now we need to focus on the creativity of working across disciplines in an interconnected whole so we can see issues and solutions in the round. We need to think both horizontally and vertically, to see strategy and detail, the parts and whole and the woods and the trees simultaneously.
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.

Why do cities want to be creative?

Creativity is like a rash; it is all-pervasive. Everyone is in the creativity game. Creativity is a mantra of our age, whether we are referring to creative individuals, companies, cities and countries; and even creative streets or creative buildings or projects.

At my last count 60 cities world-wide claimed to be creative cities. 20 were in Britain. From Creative Manchester to Bristol to Plymouth to Norwich and of course Creative London. And ditto Canada. Toronto with its Culture Plan for the Creative City; Vancouver and the Creative City Task Force; or London, Ontario’s similar task force and Ottawa’s plan to be a creative city. In the States there is Creative Cincinnati, Creative Tampa Bay and the welter of creative regions such as Creative New England. In Australia we find the Brisbane Creative City strategy, there is Creative Auckland. Partners for Livable Communities in Washington launched a Creative Cities Initiative in 2001 and Osaka set up a Graduate School for Creative Cities in 2003 and launched a Japanese Creative Cities Network in 2005. Even the somewhat lumbering UNESCO through its Global Alliance for Cultural Diversity launched its Creative Cities Network in 2004 anointing Edinburgh as the first for its literary creativity.

Why do people want to be creative cities? Where did the obsession with creativity come from? Firstly, creativity was always present in cities, it is just that we called it by another name: Ingenuity, skill, inventiveness. Venice did not emerge in its time through a business as usual approach, nor Constantinople or Dubrovnik formerly Ragusa. For example, Ragusa was for several centuries one of the world’s quintessentially creative places. It became a link between the Latin and Slavic civilizations and a powerful merchant republic. It maintained its independence by coming under the protectorate of the Byzantine, Venetian, Hungarian and Ottoman empires and by brokering knowledge, acting as a haven and refuge, inventing services. It required intense cleverness and astute positioning. Perhaps today Singapore is striving to be an equivalent.

Creativity seems like the answer

Today 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. Many cities or regions are flailing and many are locked into their past either because of physical infrastructure or because of their mindset. The adjustments require changes in attitudes and in how organizations are run. Yet whilst many organizations claim to have changed through ‘delayering’, ‘decentralizing’ or ‘decoupling’ in reality they have remained the same.

Creativity and the new competitiveness

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. It includes: A city’s cultural depth and richness, which might mean heritage or the availability of contemporary artistic facilities; the capacity to network globally and to keep abreast of the best, the ability to create imaginative partnerships so that the impact of projects can generate the equation 1+1 equals 3, seeing design awareness and quality not just as an ad-on but an intrinsic part of development, to understand how urban imagery works through the media, the need for eco-awareness to tap into peoples’ aspirational desires, to develop language capacity to ease communication, to unblock obstacles to interaction whether this be concerned with bureaucracy or by creating gathering and meeting places.

Creating open conditions

The goal of cities which try to be creative is to create conditions which are open enough so urban decision makers can: Rethink potential such as turning waste into a commercial resource; revalue hidden assets such as discovering historic traditions that can be turned into a new product; reconceive and remeasure assets such as understanding that developing social capital also generates wealth; reignite passion for the city by for example developing programmes so people can learn to love their city; rekindle the desire for learning and entrepreneurship by for instance creating learning modules much more in tune with young peoples’ desires; reinvest in your talent by not only importing outside talent but fostering local talent; reassess what creativity for your city actually is by being honest about your obstacles and looking at your cultural resources afresh; realign rules and incentives to your new vision rather than seeing your vision as being determined by existing rules; reconfigure, reposition and represent where your city stands and by knitting the threads together to retell your urban story that galvanises citizens to act. To elaborate on learning it might mean: Rethinking the curricula to teach higher order skills, like learning to learn and to think, rather than more topics or alternatively to think across disciplines beyond the silos rather than learning facts. The resilience to survive requires new educational curricula. The Australian curriculum is an example of moving in this direction.

Given that people now have more choice and mobility about where they want to be the physical setting, ambiance and atmosphere is key. This is the stage, the container or platform within which activity takes place and develops. It generates the milieu or environment. The milieu mixes hard and soft infrastructure. The hard consists of road, buildings and physical things, the soft the interactions between people, the intangible feelings people have about the place.

The creative milieu

A creative milieu can be a room, an office, a building, a set of buildings, a refurbished warehouse, a campus, a street, an area, a neighbourhood and occasionally a city. These places can equally be completely uncreative. What makes a milieu creative is that it gives the user the sense that they can shape, create and make the place they are in; that they are an active participant rather than a passive consumer, that they are an agent of change rather than a victim. These environments are open but they have unspoken rules of engagement, they are not wild for the sake of wildness so that things dissolve in chaos, but they accept we need to be stretched. Things are being tried out and there are experiments. Hidden away in an office it might mean someone is experimenting with new software and in the public realm it might mean a new type of restaurant either in terms of food or décor and style. It is likely to mean that the products and services of the local area are sold and used there. There is likely to be a focus on being authentic, what this means will always differ in context.

The danger is that such an environment will attract outsiders who only consume and give nothing back. They borrow the landscape, chew it, digest it and spit it out. These local or foreign tourists can drain and suck out the identity of these places if their critical mass overwhelms the locals. Look at the trendy areas in most cities.

Diversity as a driver of creativity

Just as bio-diversity guarantees the well-being and resilience of the natural environment the same is true for cities. Creative places seem to need to influx of outsiders to bring in new ideas, products and services challenge existing arrangements and bring together new combinations where insiders and outsiders meet. The history of successful cities in the past, from Constantinople to Hangchow to Florence, where the role of merchants as traders of products and ideas was tantamount, suggests the capacity to absorb and bring cultures together was key. This did not mean cultures were subsumed, identity was still shaped by where you came from. There was, however, sufficient mutual influence and counterinfluence, coalescing and mixing over time to create a special fused identity as older and newer citizens changed. The same is true today in the large multi-cultural cities of London, which bills itself as ‘the world in one city’, New York, Sydney or Toronto.

The creative challenge is to move from the multi cultural city where we acknowledge and ideally celebrate our differing cultures towards the intercultural city. Here we move one step beyond and focus on what can do together as diverse cultures in shared space. Our contention is that the latter leads to greater well being and prosperity.

Creative Spaces

Planners and urban designers play a critical role in building city culture and creating conditions for creativity. Their decisions can have a profound impact on the way we lead our lives and express our collective and individual cultural values. Diversity in public space is key as Jane Jacobs reminds us. Jacobs identifies four significant conditions; diversity of activities, fine grain of urban form, diversity of building stock and the all important critical mass of people. To which we should add a fifth the length of history of a building where the diversity of experiences is etched into the patina of the fabric. This intricate web of diversity is rather like environmental diversity. As with ecological conditions if a city or district becomes too homogenous, it becomes vulnerable. If for instance one form of activity or business is dominant, and it no longer works in the new environment, the entire area may be at risk. Therefore too new mega developments rarely encourage inventiveness.

Cities often get carried away with the physical form of public places, placing great responsibility on the urban designer to transform a place through new paving, elegant street furniture and improved lighting. The reality is that many places are dead or decaying for other reasons than poor public realm design, such as failing business or traffic domination. Too often major city or dockland redevelopments focus on iconic buildings as a drawcard but fail to build in the finer grain of diversity and urban life.

Diversity in its many forms is the primary element of a vibrant place, diversity of business, diversity of activities and a diversity of built form creating visual stimulation. Think of the street markets. The most successful are those with a great diversity of product, every stall has a different range and somewhere there is a treasure to be found. They also provide the setting for intercultural interaction as people from many cultures go about their business.

The task of contemporary planner, architects and urban designers is to help build rich textures that draw from the past but are living expressions of contemporary life. Yet it is not always city planners and designers who have primary influence over the look and feel of the built environment. Increasingly it is those that frame regulations and standards who affect the way a city infrastructure is delivered. In addition a large proportion of public realm infrastructure is created not by the city but by private sector developers. This presents a challenge to city officials who must establish a clear vision for the city and evolve strong planning criteria to influence the work of others.

We must be culturally literate in our own cities. Modernity has brought with it professional classifications and boundaries between professions and responsibility. Ideally a built environment professional should be deeply engaged with his or her local culture given the dramatic impact their professional practice has. There is a need to gain knowledge prior to the formulation of a brief for master planning from as many different sources as possible. A mosaic of knowledge gathered from people of different ages, cultures and association with place.

Creativity is culturally determined

The capacity to be creative is culturally determined. If the culture of a city, region or country is autocratic or corrupt it is difficult for ideas to emerge, potential to be harnessed and the free flow of possibilities to be turned into inventions. Rigid hierarchy too makes creativity more difficulty as creativity relies on tolerance, listening and a strong degree of equality. Clearly creativity can happen in controlled situations. For example the invention of weapons or advances in aerospace in war time happened in secret tightly controlled environments and even today new developments in computing in Silicon Valley occur in enclosed campuses, within which there is a free flow of ideas amongst colleagues. The same is true for scientific discoveries especially when intellectual copyright is at stake. Even here there is openness in the confined setting in order to harness individuals’ imagination. However many innovations are concerned with services, trading or presentation and these require free flow of movement, up and down hierarchies and across disciplines and institutions. A democratic culture and a culture of enquiry, where questioning is cherished strongly favour the development of imagination.
Different cultures and contexts, different creativities

Creativity means different things in different cultures. For instance, within certain cultures good imitation is deemed to be the apex of creativity. The imagination is then steered to producing with perfection. And again perfection is also a relative term. To the Japanese eye the lack of symmetry is what creates perfection. For the West symmetry is associated with harmony and has a high value. In Western culture, by contrast there is also an obsession with the new. As global culture is swept up with a similar obsession so the Western perception of creativity tends to dominate especially given the over-riding capitalist economy itself is driven by the need for continuous innovation. The challenge is to create a working definition of creativity that both addresses tradition and the future as well as a quality of nurturing the existing and pushes the boundaries into the new.What, most importantly, is Japanes creativity? What is the same as in other Asian places or in Europe or the Americas? What is specific and unique about it, what is different? The answer should be beyond the trivial, such as our cuisine, clothes or heritage is different. Does Japanese creativity work on different principles and are these then visible in the urban landscape?

Creativity is context driven. What was creative in a period long past is not creative now, although it may still be necessary, such as the public health advances in the 19th century. What is creative in Britain may not be creative for Japan and in turn what is deemed creative in Japan may appear normal in Britain.

Individual creativity and urban creativity

We understand what creativity can mean in individuals, for example the capacity to think across boundaries, roam across disciplines, ideas and concepts, to grasp the essence of an issue and to connect the seemingly unconnected; or equally creativity in teams or organizations, which is the capacity to draw out individuals’ diverse talents, open out the barriers between individuals, to reduce obstacles and procedures to allow many people to contribute and to meld potential into a cohesive whole. But to think through and implement a ‘creative city’ agenda is of a different order of magnitude as it involves co-joining the interests and power of different groups who may be diametrically opposed and whose goals may contradict each other. It involves certain qualities, such as: the capacity to bring interest groups around the table within a commonly agreed agenda; to learn to work in partnership between different sectors that share mutual respect; the ability to generate civic creativity whereby the public sector learns to be more entrepreneurial and the private sector to be more socially responsible in pursuing joint aims; the willingness to share power with a goal of having greater influence over an enlarged whole.

Creativity and the past

So if the overall culture of a city is key in establishing creative potential. What about cultural heritage? What about the arts or cultural institutions? The triggers for creativity can be contradictory. For example heritage can inspire because of past achievements, it can give energy because deep thought has gone into its creation, it can save time because much has already been thought through, it can trigger the desire to emulate, it can give insight and generate pride, because it has withstood the test of time - it is still there. But equally heritage and tradition can put a weight on peoples’ shoulders, it can constrain and contain, it can overwhelm, it can force the mind to go along familiar patterns and furrows of thinking and so make people less open and less flexible. Which side of the coin over-rides the situation depends on circumstance.

If the new generation perceives its role as only safeguarding the past for which it has had no input it might mean heritage and tradition is drowning a vibrant emerging identity. Heritage works best when we perceive ourselves to be part of its continual creation. This is why museums of galleries are often more successful that encourage the audience to ask new questions and do more than just let the viewer admire. Instead they engage their audiences in an act of co-creation and co-interpretation of the past. Contrast the failure of those who just present things as a given immutable canon. When heritage and its interpretation is allowed to ossify the past and the present begin to disconnect.

Culture inevitably involves a past as a place’s culture is the residue and what is left and deemed to be important after the ebb and flow of argument, fashion and negotiation about what is valuable has passed. Culture when acknowledged, and this might also mean the ability to reject it, gives strength in moving forward. It becomes a backbone that can create the resilience that makes change and transformation easier. Confidence is key for creativity. When cultures feel threatened or weak or that another culture is superimposing themselves upon it they go into their shell. Culture then becomes a defensive shield not open to change, imagination and creativity.

Cultural institutions, anchoring and creativity

Museums, galleries and libraries can give confidence and most of them are in cities often giving the city its identity. Indeed when you people to identify a city it is often a cultural facility or icon they refer to.

At their best they tell us who we are, where we have come from and where we might be going. In so doing they show us the routes that reconnect us to our roots. They do this through storytelling; a story that fits us, our community, our city, our country, our cultures and even our worlds into a bigger human and natural history showing us connections, bridges and threads that can enrich our understanding. Museums and galleries confront us with some things that are familiar and comforting and at other times they challenge us to look afresh to see the world in a new way or to experience things that require imagination to grasp. A local history exhibition is an example of one, a contemporary art show of another and an Aztec exhibition is an instance of the latter.

Some museums too allow us to contribute our personal stories in an act of co-creation. By triggering imagination museums entice us to explore so providing opportunities for testing out, for chance encounter, for discovery and also inventing things afresh. At their core museums and galleries are involved in an exchange of ideas where we as the visitor come to grips with displays. In effect we converse either with ourselves or more publicly about what our culture or those of others is so we think about what we value and what our values are. The recent Madame de Pompadour - Images of Mistress exhibition at the National Gallery in London is an example as is the Bodyworks exhibition which uses human body parts presented in a non-museum space.

By placing us, the visitor, at the crossroads of what has gone before with what could be and what others have thought museums, libraries and galleries become platforms for dialogue, discourse and debate revealing the multi-layered textures that make up any society. In these processes of creating, questioning and anchoring identity, of imagining and re-imagining and of discovery the object or artefact, ideally real, is the catalyst.

In fact the cultural institutions communicate with every fibre of their being - their artefacts, their setting and the way it projects to the outside world. What it feels like and looks like sends out innumerable messages and its values are especially etched into its physical fabric as well as its programming. Thus our older museums often speak more to a former age; an age of deference where the expert told the inexpert what to know and how to know it and where you - the humble citizen - were to be elevated by the museum experience. And the physical elevations themselves spoke in a more grandiose style, often going back to a classical age with their Corinthian columns, reflecting a different kind of confidence and attitude. Yet good contemporary design has often helped museums to combine old structure to new ways of engaging an audience. Today we attempt to live in a more transparent and democratic age. Consequently more buildings reflect a greater lightness of touch in the materials they use - glass, light-weight steel or tented structures, or in the way audiences are invited in. Again the best of the old and the new can communicate iconically so that we grasp the totality of what a cultural institution is about in an instant.

When we take an eagle eye view we see there is a special ‘museumness’ about museums or librariness about libraries, they are:

A place of anchorage, which is why so often in a world that speeds ahead of us we see museums as refuges or places of reflection;
A place of connection so enabling understanding of our pasts and possible futures;
A place of possibility by letting us scour the resources of the past and memories to stimulate us to twist them to the contemporary condition;
A place of inspiration to remind us of the visions, ideals and aspirations we have made for ourselves and continue to make;
A place of learning …as when these things come together we know more about ourselves, our surroundings, what things work or don’t work and how things could be made better.

The arts and the creativity of cities

Most of the literature on creativity concerns the arts and science. The question is whether there is anything special about the category of arts called singing, acting, writing, dancing, performing music or drawing especially in relation to the development of the city.

Engagement with these particular arts is a combination of stretching oneself and focusing, to feel the senses, to express emotion, essential to it is mastering the craft through technical skill on top of which is layered interpretation. Discipline and patience are required until the result might look artless. The arts use different thought processes, such as being more precise or striving for perfection, there is a single mindedness attached to it. Most importantly it involves acts of imagining and turning an idea around into a reality that sums up something meaningful to the listener or viewer. The result can be: to broaden horizons, to convey meaning, with immediacy and or depth, to symbolize complex ideas and emotions, to see the previously unseen, to learn, to uplift, to encapsulate previously scattered thoughts, to anchor or by contrast to stun, to shock by depicting terrible images for social, moral, or thought-provoking reasons, to criticize or to create joy, to entertain, to be beautiful and it can even soothe the soul and promote popular morale. And more boradly it is a way of passing ideas and concepts on to later generations in a (somewhat) universal language.
The arts use the imaginary realm to a degree that other disciplines do not such as sports or most of science. Turning the imaginary into reality is an act of creation so the arts more than most activities are concerned with creativity, indeed it is one of the few areas where it is legitimized.
The best of our past arts ends up in museums and so the arts contribute to creating destinations, visitor attractions and help foster a city’s image as well as generating an economic impact, as do the best of the contemporary arts which are found in galleries, theatres, performance venues or bookshops.

Importantly a lively city needs old arts and new arts. Counterposing the two creates dialogue, argument, at times even conflict and the negotiation as to what is significant is the process of making a dynamic culture. A static urban culture just focuses on what has been achieved in the past. This has happened to many beautiful places such as Florence where its beauty has become a prison.

The arts help cities in a variety of ways. First with their aesthetic focus they draw attention to quality, and beauty. Unfortunately this is expressed in a limited way typically a piece of public sculpture in front of an ugly or ordinary building. Yet in principle they challenge us to ask: Is this beautiful? This should affect how urban design and architecture evolve. Second the arts challenge us to ask questions about ourselves as a city. This should lead us to ask: ‘What kind of city do we want to be and how should we get there?’ Arts programmes can challenge city leaders by undertaking uncomfortable projects that force leaders to debate and take a stand. For example an arts project about or with migrants might make us look at our prejudices. Arts projects can empower people who have previously not expressed their views, so artists working with communities can in effect help consult people. For example a community play devised with a local group can tell us much more than a typical political process. Finally arts projects can simply create enjoyment.

Go to page 2 of Charles Landry’s essay
Pag. 1 2

Confronting Strategies in Urban Reinvention :: The Urban Reinventors :: #1 Issue - June 07