The Creative City: A Toolkit for Urban Innovators

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The Creative City: A Toolkit for Urban Innovators

Landry, Charles, Comedia/Earthscan, 2000,

This ambitious book is a vehicle to disseminate the Creative Town Initiative (CTI) of Huddersfield, the first urban strategy project of its kind which won EU Urban Pilot Project status in 1997. Beyond that, the book aims to change the mindset of decision makers and offer a mental toolkit to influence policies, strategies and actions undertaken in cities. An example is to perceive transport as accessibility instead of mobility, or citizens as potential instead of victims.

Landry defines what he means by creativity: it is value free, only the purpose to which it is put defines value. While scarcity defined value in industrial society, post industrial value lies in abundance. Only new perspectives of understanding can harness this new situation. This leads to a permissive paradigm enhanced by training focused on 'urban software': identity, social development and network dynamics. Alternatively, creativity, imagination and innovation are the tools for context evaluation from which coping capacity can be derived and the genius loci released. However, the proposed processes, such as free for all procedures and collective management or open systems and localised power struggles are often contradictory. Traditional leadership rather than talent is still considered essential in resuscitating sense of place and local identity. In fairness there is a caveat that leadership should be depersonalised by becoming a renewable resource with inbuilt stepping down mechanisms. This would make it a building block of civic capacity considered as important an urban infrastructure as roads and sewers.

Throughout the loosely composed book with its many repetitions there is a problem of compatibility between prescriptive tools and unleashing creativity spontaneously. It advocates best practice models, as well as efforts at integrating approaches and blurring boundaries between established disciplines and their engrained assumptions. However, some of the proposed alternatives, such as super fast food paid for by minute of consumption do not strike lovers of a better urban life as palatable. Such examples show that creativity can also have adverse effects on urban quality of life. It is hard to see, for example, how Landry can associate Heseltine's Urban Development Corporation in Liverpool with a creative turnaround of the city, considering that the park along the Mersey is fenced off to protect the public from the methane leeks, the refurbished Albert Docks are home to empty restaurants and many unlet shops despite the Tate 'anchor', and whole streets of the Georgian town centre are boarded up.

All this shows how difficult it is to shed one's cultural baggage, including training and education, inherited mental models and ways of life. It is alright to criticise accounting systems which focus exclusively on financial capital and to suggest to include measuring of building human capital. But is it not a matter of rethinking the whole system of mechanistic measurements and target setting instead? This would provide greater room for manoeuvre to accommodate the unavoidable failures of experimenting with creative solutions from which precious lessons can be learnt. Even bi-polar thinking, denounced as hindrance to creativity reappears in many of the recipes included in this 'toolkit for urban innovators'. Despite the many fascinating examples of urban improvements, the cultural perspective is as biased as the specific perceptions of social scientists or those working with the physical fabric of the city. For example, London is perceived to have ghettos and an underclass, as well as beneficial clustering of creative production, although the more scientific analysis of Working Capital (see reviewed in UDQ 86) dispels these features unequivocally.

What does the book offer to urban designers besides an extensive bibliography? The cultural perspective of the discussion on public space and city centres focuses on their function as places of commonality. It would be interesting to confront Landry's toolkit with UDAL's placecheck or Campbell and Cowan's Re:urbanism. Landry's public realm is conceived as 'neutral territory'. While denouncing the privatisation of public spaces, he does not seem to attribute much place to design quality in their role as innovative or creative milieu. This leaves a window for the creativity of urban designers in a book which tends to attribute the solution to all urban ills to the rather broad brush of creativity and vision.

Judith Ryser(This review was first published in Urban Design Quarterly 87, Summer 2003 and is reproduced with the Editor's kind permission).