Creative Cities: Principles and Practices (original) (raw)
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CREATIVE TORONTO: HARNESSING THE ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT POWER OF ARTS & CULTURE
Over the 2000s, Toronto initiated and instituted a process of cultivating itself as a creative city. Entrepreneurial city visionaries found that in order to enter the global market, their planning had to be strategic. This paper explores how Toronto's policy entrepreneurs used planning, partnerships, and an expanded definition of economic development to create a " Cultural Camelot. " In addition to competing on the financial and revenue-generating fronts, a coalition of cross-sector leaders took on the challenge of fostering a livable city with a deep social ethos imbued within a variety of dimensions of urban life. This new focus gave Toronto the chance establish itself as a center for innovation, which strengthened urban cultural capital and helped promote the strategic agenda of becoming a competitor in the creative economy sector. Investment in research and creative city strategic planning, coupled with the allocation of financial and human capital resources across a variety of industries, served to encourage creativity, promote culture and competitiveness, and drive economic development. Creative Toronto: Harnessing the power of arts & culture The decade of the 2000s in Toronto was one in which there was a 'Creative Cities Coalescence,' wherein cultural policy, economic development, and state and private support came together in a window of opportunity and played highly visible roles (See Figure 1). The ability of Toronto's policy entrepreneurs to attach solutions to key problems, within both the cultural community and the municipal framework, resulted in a very visible outcome in that decade. Stakeholders, including urban planners, policymakers, elected officials and the cultural community, put forward an agenda based on a variety of planning documents with the goal of branding Toronto as a creative destination and cultural powerhouse. Through the lens of policy theory, this paper looks at the factors that coalesced to bring this goal to fruition, including the identification of an opportunity, political will, timing, and the creation of powerful alliances. Figure 1. Toronto's Creative Cities Coalescence (Goldberg, 2012)
Cultural Economy Planning in Creative Cities: Discourse and Practice
While a growing body of research analyses the functional mechanisms of the cultural or creative economy, there has been little attention devoted to understanding how local governments translate this work into policy. Moreover, research in this vein focuses predominately on Richard Florida’s creative class thesis rather than considering the wider body of work that may influence policy. This article seeks to develop a deeper understanding of how municipalities conceptualize and plan for the cultural economy through the lens of two cities held up as model ‘creative cities’ — Austin, Texas and Toronto, Ontario. The work pays particular attention to how the cities adopt and adapt leading theories, strategies and discourses of the cultural economy. While policy documents indicate that the cities embrace the creative city model, in practice agencies tend to adapt conventional economic development strategies for cultural economy activity and appropriate the language of the creative city for multiple purposes.
What next for the creative city?
City, Culture and Society, 2014
Forming the conclusion to the special issue, this paper begins with a critical engagement with a recent robust, informed, nuanced and eloquent claim by two leading scholars in the field that strategies for a cultural economy are central to the notion of the creative city. The paper suggests that seeking to support the 'intrinsic value' of the cultural economy does introduce a crucial aspect to any progressive urban cultural policy-but that this is not sufficient. The paper suggests the idea of the creative city is not no longer available as a progressive urban cultural policy and that a cultural economy approach on its own does not rectify this. The paper suggests that the more recent origins of the creative city discourse were dependent on much older notions of the 'good city' but that these have been progressively reduced to their economic dimensions. The paper concludes by showing how these older discourses went beyond the purely economic in ways the creative city now finds difficult to capture. A new way of talking about the aspirations towards the good city now need to be found.
Creativity, Culture & the City: A question of interconnection
There is a need to switch the question: Not what is the value of imagination creativity, culture, heritage, the arts or design for city development. Instead, what is the cost of not thinking of imagination, creativity, culture, design, art and heritage. Name a city that is globally important, but weak in these spheres. All cities need to gain recognition and to get onto the global radar screen in order to increase their wealth creation prospects and to harness their potential. Creativity, the cultural distinctiveness of place, the arts and a vibrant creative economy are seen as resources and assets in this process. 'Creativity' whose essence is a multifaceted resourcefulness is a primary asset since human cleverness, desires, motivations and imagination are replacing location, natural resources and market access as key urban resources. Creativity is legitimized within the arts and should spread to other spheres from encouraging social innovations or establishing more creative bureaucracies. Most cities are in transition, especially those with an industrial past, and need to renew and revitalize their economic base in order to move up the value chain and to become more knowledge intensive places. To keep and attract the increasingly mobile workforce the attractiveness and vibrancy of place and the opportunities it provides matters as never before. The atmosphere, look and feel of a place and activities of the people who live there are its culture. The arts and cultural institutions contribute significantly to generating interest and vitality. Too many cities are developed within a limited, hardware focused technically driven urban engineering paradigm as distinct from creative city making which combines hardware and software perspectives, which also focuses on the sensory and experiential and seeks to create the conditions for exchange, transaction and networking. Retrofitting the conditions for conviviality and rediscovering the power of the public realm is increasingly important. Culturally literate good urban design helps this process. City renewal at its core is a cultural project as it involves not only economic and physical transformation, but also a shift in mindset and perspective. To bring people with you cities need engage them in their renewal story. Cities on the move need a compelling story to drive motivation and commitment and the arts are good at helping provide these messages. The best cultural policies combine a focus on enlightenment, empowerment, entertainment and creating economic impact. Our view of cities is a mix of reality and truth, hype and perception usually filtered through media representations. The overall culture of a place and the arts help define and shape identity, perception and image within the city's own terms.
Creativity and the City: Thinking through the Steps
2005
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 preconditions 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 worldwide 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.
Cultural Resources and the Idea of the Creative City
The Limits of Heritage. The 2nd Heritage Forum of Central Europe
The aim of the paper is to give an overview and an assessment of the concept of 'creative cities,' which is increasingly popular around the world. The idea developed by Charles Landry ('The Creative City: a toolkit for urban innovators', 2000) has become influential in the last decade also due to the works of Richard Florida (e.g., 'Cities and the Creative Class', 2005) and John Howkins ('The Creative Economy', 2001). The paper addresses their ideas of the creative city, its foundations, and links between culture and urban development (including the concepts of culture development and cultural planning). In the European context, it is important to think of the cities' rich heritage as a potentially crucial factor in attracting talented people to boost the urban economy. By examining some specific cases from around the world, I'm trying to answer the following questions: To what extent can heritage and other cultural assets and soft attributes of cities be used in attracting the so-called 'creative class' (people working with ideas)? What are 'heritage strategies'? What are their outcomes? How can heritage, both in tangible and intangible forms, help to create inspirational environment 'where we can think, plan and act with imagination' (Landry, 2000)? What lessons can Central European cities learn from urban cultural planning in other corners of the world?
CREATIVE CITY PLANNING FRAMEWORK 1 The CentreVenture Development Corporation was created by the City of Winnipeg May 13, 1999 to be the city's duly constituted authority to provide leadership and form partnerships to create and sustain business opportunities and economic growth in downtown Winnipeg. In the context of the city's Centre Plan (for the downtown district), the Corporation is assigned a range of tools, assets and resources to support and enhance development. These include: loans, equity, grants and tax incentives to support heritage preservation as well as direct control of vacant and surplus City owned buildings and land. The Corporation plays a role in brokering partnerships and collaboration among existing and potential investors, businesses, renters, developers, arts groups, all levels of government, and all citizens of the City of Winnipeg to achieve the goal of economic, physical and social revitalization of downtown Winnipeg. It assists project and development proponents in understanding and contributing to City planning goals and advocates for development proposals through the city's planning approval process. The board is composed of business leaders who are actively invested in the downtown and was chaired by the Mayor in its first transitional year. In subsequent years the Mayor became the sole shareholder of the Corporation on behalf of the city which preserved the autonomy of the organization while allowing the annual general meeting of the corporation to provide non-interferring accountability. In Ontario, evidence of the power of cultural planning in municipalities is the formation of the Municipal Cultural Planning Partnership (MCPP). MCPP is a coalition of 6 provincial ministries (Culture, Municipal Affairs and Housing, OMAFRA, Economic Development and Trade, Tourism, Citizenship, Northern Development and Mines); the Association of Municipalities of Ontario; individual municipalities, creative and culture sector leaders, and the Centre for Cultural Management at the University of Waterloo working together to implement municipal cultural planning in communities across Ontario. All see it as a powerful tool to support economic restructuring and renewal in municipalities of all sizes. The Creative Convergence Project is a unique consortium of leading creative sector institutions in Toronto . Its purpose is to support and advance the region's creative infrastructure enabling innovation, entrepreneurship and exploration. The Project is exploring the hard and soft infrastructure needs of Toronto's creative sector and the policy and planning practices needed to support habitats for creative collaboration. Outcomes will include: Creative Convergence Centres Strategy; Tools and Practices for place-based planning and development; Public Policy recommendations to support place-based creative sector development; a Communications Strategy to communicate project findings and promote the second-wave of Toronto's creative renaissance -putting creativity to work.