Creativity and the City: Thinking through the Steps (original) (raw)

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.