The Art of City Making

The Art of City Making

Charles Landry, Earthscan, 2007, £19.99

This book goes a step further from Charles Landry’s initial reflections on the Creative City (2000, UD87, p40)and is closer to the concerns of urban designers. He kick-starts what is a very personal perspective by asking whose responsibility city making actually is. In his views it is not just the professions or politicians and investors but citizens, everyone in and concerned with the city. He proposes ten principles to make cities which accommodate and stimulate creative activities. Openness, an ability to listen and learn, encouraging others, cooperating between and integrating economic, social and environmental aspects to assess their success, as well as privileging the senses and balancing individual needs against the common responsibility towards the planet are common sense. His prime message is that cities should not strive to be the best in the world but for the world.

He discusses these aspects in turn and gives critical views of orthodox approaches, asking whether de-civilisation has started, with universal surveillance to deal with the urban ills of crime and poverty. He considers that the desires of urban users are not being fulfilled and designers, reinforced by the herding behaviour of investors, are killing diversity and everyday life distinctiveness. He considers that routines spur resistance, and the marketing approach to city-making is favouring instant gratification; penalising slow food movements, pondering and meandering, rather than using the city as a tool to achieve efficiency.

In his didactic chapter he puts forward a framework to discover complexity, the fault lines of the urban fabric, its paradoxes and traps, all of which require a daring attitude to city-making. He is critical of traditional professional mindsets and silos to which people retreat, instead of stepping out into the real urban environment and inventing a future by changing places with those who use it or want to contribute creatively to it in their own terms. He thinks that ‘legitimate’ city makers do not have sufficient knowledge or understanding of emotions, lack cultural literacy and are remote from artistic ways of doing things and diversity. He discusses emotional intelligence and appreciates the findings of environmental psychology, not something that everybody looking for innovative approaches to city making may want to share. He puts great emphasis on reinventing institutional frameworks within the local business environment and civil society, using the creation of public realm as a common ground for them to cooperate on, especially in an urban world made up by increasingly diverse ethnic cultures.

He critically assesses some of the cities which are assumed to be ‘creative’ such as Dubai, Singapore, Barcelona, Bilbao and Curitiba without judging them definitively. He also revisits the meaning and purpose of creativity, praising its chaotic and anarchic streaks, but ends up with check lists as guiding principles for the art of city making, although not without being aware of such a contradiction in his own approach. A short review cannot do justice to this very inspiring and thought-provoking book, especially for mainstream urban city makers.