The creative city: its origins and futures, Charles Landry

The contrast of old and new Qingdao city, China

Kuala Lumpur

The Creative City: Its origins and futures

Charles Landry challenges urban designers to observe the Creative City’s needs

Transitions in the global economy shape both urban development and the urban planning paradigm, and this varies according to a city’s stage of development. Consider their differences and priorities in a period of labour-intensive industrialisation to that of mass-production, then hi-tech or knowledge-based development, and now the need for cities to be cradles of creativity. Quality, beauty and a rich experience come to the fore, as do new governance models to match.

The Creative City concept was developed nearly 20 years ago in response to the dramatic economic, social and cultural transformations happening in Europe, as cities needed to restructure and rethink their role and purpose. Now cities everywhere and of every size in every location face periods of deep transition largely brought about by the vigour of renewed globalisation and changes in the world’s urban hierarchy.

When first introduced the concept was seen as aspirational; a clarion call to encourage open-mindedness and imagination; it was intended to have a dramatic impact on organisational culture and its philosophy was that more potential exists than we think. The concept posits that conditions should be created for people to think, plan and act with imagination harnessing opportunities or solving seemingly intractable urban problems; ordinary people can make the extra-ordinary happen if given the chance. It acknowledges that creativity is context-driven and that not only artists and those involved in the creative economy are creative, but they play an important role. Creativity can come from any source including anyone who addresses issues in an inventive way - a business person, social worker, scientist or public administrator. Yet creativity is legitimised in the arts, and artistic creativity has special qualities that chime well with the ideas-driven knowledge economy.

The Creative City embeds a ‘culture of creativity’ into how urban stakeholders operate. Encouraging creativity and legitimising imagination within the public, private and community spheres broadens the ideas bank of possibilities and potential solutions to any urban problem. Divergent, broad-ranging thinking generates multiple options; convergent thinking narrows down the possibilities and urban innovations emerge once they have passed through the reality checker.

This Creative City identifies, nurtures, attracts and sustains its talent to mobilise talents, ideas and creative organisations to keep and attract the young and gifted. Being individually or organisationally creative is relatively easy, yet to be a creative city is harder given the amalgam of cultures and interests involved. The characteristics tend to include: taking measured risks, wide-spread leadership, a sense of going somewhere, being determined but not rigidly deterministic, having the strength to go beyond the political cycle, and crucially being strategically principled and tactically flexible. To maximize this requires a change in mindset, ambition and will. It requires an understanding of new competitive urban tools like a city’s networking capacity, cultural depth and richness, the quality of governance, design and eco-awareness. Stability comes from a framework that provides the overall guiding principles to evolution.

The built environment is crucial for establishing a milieu. It provides the physical platform upon which a city’s activity base or atmosphere develops. A creative milieu is a place containing necessary ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ infrastructure to generate a flow of ideas and inventions. A milieu can be a building, a street or an area and ultimately a whole city. The best way to think of the Creative City is to contrast the metaphors ‘the city as a machine’ and the ‘city as an organism’; only with the latter can a creative city happen.

The city as a machine

The model that we have in mind for a city determines how we conceive things, how we think, plan and act, the projects we do and solutions we find. The focus on physical infrastructure tends to see the city as a complicated machine with component parts that need adjusting, aligning and oiling. Issues are addressed in a linear way, with the whole builds from the parts. Problems and opportunities are discrete technical issues that separate specialists fix; with little interdisciplinary working and people working across boundaries. This ‘urban engineering paradigm’ is hardware-focused and the engineering mindset shapes the city.

A city that encourages people’s imagination goes beyond that paradigm. Soft infrastructure pays attention to how people meet, exchange ideas and network. It shifts focus and encourages physical developments and place-making that foster communication between people. It is sensitive to culture and balances being globally-oriented and locally-authentic. It encourages artistic imagination in putting the city together. This is more likely to attract the highly skilled and flexible labour force that the Creative City needs. This city wants dynamic thinkers, creators, as well as implementers (as creativity is not only about having ideas). It requires a large formal and informal intellectual infrastructure. The old-fashioned types of university that are massive, monolithic production factories are often not very creative places. This means rethinking what universities and other institutions look and feel like, and considering new kinds of more informal learning spaces.

The city as an organism

The contrast is to see the city as an organism. All issues are inextricably interwoven - hardware and software. How people experience and feel the city emotionally and psychologically takes centre-stage in planning. Its guiding principle is urbanism or place-making rather than to urban development.

This difference in approach determines how a vision is executed and has dramatic consequences. It addresses the physical, spatial and land use conditions that help people to think, plan and act with imagination, and how the city can become a satisfying sensory, atmospheric and psychological experience.

The first model sees the city like a Sudoku puzzle - difficult to complete but logical. The latter acknowledges complexity where one action affects another and adjustments are made as things move along. Bringing up a child is complex as both parent and child adjust as change occurs.

The shifting paradigm

The following principles illustrate a creative approach to place-making by re-assessing our priorities and ways of working:

• Sustainability considers environmental, economic and social issues as best practice. Yet culture is the fourth pillar of sustainability as it drives a city’s differentiation and identity
• Making the city attractive is key - attractiveness is too narrow; well-being, quality of life and liveability are now important
• Hardware predominantly shapes the city - think of the hardware and software simultaneously
• The quantity and the growth in numbers is central – focus on the quality of growth and types of people attracted
• Ever-increasing city size is everything - more appropriate critical mass achieves goals
• Culture is a cost and happens after the main urban elements are in place - yet culture is an asset shaping distinctive development and so is more important.

Management and organisation

• Efficiency is focused on inputs and outputs with result costs and profit management - effectiveness is about outcomes by allocating resources to achieve goals
• Subject specialists dominate - cross-disciplinary thinkers 
are key
• Silo structures and departmentalism dominate - partnership and collaboration provide the platform for effectiveness
• Civic participation and consultation are a cost and take more time - but build in long-term social resilience and success.

Planning and design

• Planning projects is the primary task - planning communities, neighbourhoods and liveability is the central concern.
• Real estate development drives city-making - developers are given freedom within a set of strategic public-interest principles
• Quality and aesthetics are small considerations – these are now a key for urban design and planning.

Transport

• The movement system is a transport and traffic concept - mobility, accessibility and connectivity define how we see the city
• A fixed and rigid movement system – make one that is scalable, flexible with the capacity to grow incrementally
• The needs of the car and building roads are predominant - public transport needs to be the primary spine, building streets to encourage pedestrians and walkability is vital.

Resources

• Waste: out of sight and out of mind - waste is a resource and an opportunity
• The environment is a free ‘good’ and does not reflect market costs - the true environmental cost is now calculable
• After targeting resource efficiency - achieving eco-effectiveness
• The energy crisis is a problem – yet opens the way for a clean industrial revolution with promising business opportunities.

Infrastructure

• Infrastructures are provided through centralised systems - decentralisation increases resilience and flexibility
• Largely an engineering-driven output – yet its provision embeds eco-arguments in planning and developments
• Once purely functional and not connected to urban design – now part of the city-making panoply as aesthetic considerations reflect how infrastructures are presented.

Charles Landry, Director of Comedia. His books include The Art of City Making (2006); The Intercultural City: Planning for Diversity Advantage (2007) with Phil Wood; The Creative City: A toolkit for Urban Innovators (2000); Riding the Rapids: Urban Life in an Age of Complexity (2004), and Innovative and Sustainable Cities (2006), with Sir Peter Hall.