The "creative city" was a concept developed by urbanist Charles Landry in the late 1980s and has since become a global movement reflecting a new planning paradigm for cities. It is described in his The Creative City: A Toolkit for Urban Innovators and other writings.
Origins
The Creative City when introduced was seen as aspirational; a
clarion call to encourage open-mindedness and imagination implying a
dramatic impact on organizational culture. Its philosophy is that there
is always more creative potential in a place. It posits that conditions
need to be created for people to think, plan and act with imagination in
harnessing opportunities or addressing seemingly intractable urban
problems.
These might range from addressing homelessness, to creating
wealth or enhancing the visual environment. Its assumption is that
ordinary people can make the extraordinary happen if given the chance.
Creativity is seen as applied imagination. In the Creative City
it is not only artists and those involved in the creative economy that
are creative, although they play an important role. Creativity can come
from any source including anyone who addresses issues in an inventive
way be it a social worker, a business person, a scientist or public
servant.
It advocates that a culture of creativity be embedded in how urban
stakeholders operate. By encouraging legitimizing the use of imagination
within the public, private and community spheres the ideas bank of
possibilities and potential solutions to any urban problem will be
broadened.
This requires infrastructures beyond the hardware - buildings, roads
or sewage. Creative infrastructure is a combination of the hard and the
soft. The latter includes a city’s mindset, how it approaches
opportunities and problems; its atmosphere and incentives and regulatory
regime. To be a creative city the soft infrastructure includes: A
highly skilled and flexible labour force; dynamic thinkers, creators and
implementers.
Creativity is not only about having ideas, but also the
capacity to implement them
The Creative City identifies, nurtures, attracts and sustains
talent so it is able mobilize ideas, talents and creative organizations.
The built environment – the stage and the setting - is crucial for
establishing the milieu. A creative milieu is a place that contains the
necessary requirements in terms of hard and soft infrastructure to generate a flow of ideas and inventions. A milieu can be a building, a street an area, a city or a region.
The popularity of creativity came about because of the increased
recognition that the world and its economic, social and cultural
structures was changing dramatically. This was driven in part
information technology revolution.
The old way did not work sufficiently
well. Education did not prepare students for the demands of the new
world; organization, management and leadership with its control ethos
and hierarchical focus did not provide the flexibility, adaptability and
resilience to cope in the emerging competitive environment; cities
whose atmosphere, look and feel were industrial and where quality of
design was low were not attractive and competitive. Coping with these
changes required a re-assessment of cities’ resources and potential and a
process of necessary re-invention on all fronts
