From the creative to the vital city (original) (raw)
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This article engages with the current research and debate about the creative city and the importance of cultural infrastructure in contemporary cities. It argues that much of the focus has been around the investment of cities in specific regeneration projects or flagship developments rather than addressing the nature of the infrastructures, networks and agents engaging in the city's cultural development. The complexity theory and its associated principles can provide a new understanding of the connection between the urban space and the systems of local cultural production and consumption. Drawing on interviews with creative practitioners in the North East region of England, the paper argues that the cultural development of a city is a complex adaptive system. This finding has implication both for policy makers and academic research. It emphases the importance of micro-interactions and networks between creative practitioners, the publicly supported cultural sector and the cultural infrastructure of the city.
Regional Studies
This paper sheds light on the middleground of creative cities, highlighted as a crucial intermediary between creative scenes on the underground and formal institutions on the upperground. Tracing the spatiotemporal dynamics in the emergence of the Berlinbased design field over time, our study suggests that a productive middleground is itself historically and spatially conditioned. Elaborating extant knowledge on creative field emergence, we show that middleground structures can emerge bottom-up through space-specific rather than sector-specific creative practices and require active organization and configuration. They can, increasingly, also be of a virtual nature.
CONSTRUCTING METROPOLITAN LANDSCAPES OF ACTUALITY AND POTENTIALITY
2007
The Flat City space syntax model , has been developed to extend the functionality of the space syntax method into the 'periphery' (the metropolitan) of the contemporary metropolitan city, and to provide a method for describing and evaluating the form of contemporary urban landscapes. The Flat City model proposes that the environment is structured into strata of 'place-regions', each with their own definitive scales and each with their own connective matrix enabling the 'regional' movement which realizes places. A detailed empirical study of spatial centrality as revealed by the distribution of street-edge commercial functions in the metropolitan territory around Amsterdam, is presented and evaluated in the terms of this model in another paper . The results of this research suggest that actual physical urbanization or the emergence of settlement form, does not simply follow connectivity, but depends very often for the precise location and character of its emergence, on a factor of 'grounding' within place-region strata at lower scale-levels. This implies immediately a critique of current connectivity-led urban development practices in the Netherlands and a brief critique is developed here in relation to two recent urban development plans. The results also begin to suggest a different mechanism of the transfer of economic and social potential from networks to urban place. This mechanism of transfer has been broadly understood in terms of technologies of connectivity and their simple imbuing of pre-existing places with higher-scaled potentiality -and, for example, Saskia Sassen evaluates a number of global city places in terms of 'connectivity indices' . Our results suggest a strong interdependence between matrices of connectivity at different scale levels, and that the potentials of connectivity emerge out of scaled layers of connectivity considered right down to the matrices of the street grid of the urban fabric. But this also means we can develop a clearer understanding of the relationship between the global, the metropolitan and the local. These terms do not imply any dualistic opposition, as in global-local -rather the properties of the global and the metropolitan become incorporated in the local in a capture of the potentials of larger 'worlds' within smaller, and a realization or materialization of these potentials in the smaller. This implies a monadology of, for example, Leibnitz or Whitehead, more than a straightforward network spatiality of connectivity. This paper will continue to develop this notion as a possible way to understand urban spatialities, by suggesting possible ways of understanding the potentialities of real local fabrics as 'worlds of incorporation'.