Creativity: The Challenge of Today’s Cities

There's a new mantra buzzing in the minds of city managers and urban policymakers: creativity. It is invoked to resurrect those city neighborhoods in need of physical restructuring and economic overhaul. It's a global fad which is affecting the debate on the future of cities. Milan is also discussing about creativity, since the city has problems finding a proper role for culture.

The creative city is a pattern of urban development led by what Richard Florida calls the creative class. In order to attract this segment of the population, a veritable proliferation of dazzling festivals and exhibits has taken place, as well as projects of urban renewal anchored to forms of cultural consumption. The classical approach which saw the city as a necessary infrastructure for economic production has now been reversed in favor of a model where the driver of urban development is cultural consumption.

The economic crisis will probably expose the limits of this approach, especially in terms of its financial sustainability, since most of such initiatives are financed by either public funds or real estate developers. Also, a policy exclusively linked to consumption risks being cosmetic, because it does not affect employment growth and cultural identity. If we really want to talk about the creative city, we have to be aware that creativity and innovation cannot be bought wholesale. We know that today more than half of the population of the earth lives in cities. Even in advanced countries, after a minor trend toward depopulation, cities have started growing again.

Creative or not, cities hide profound socioeconomic transformations, which cannot be explained by changing consumption patterns alone. In fact, the cognitive and cultural economy has an ever larger role in the political economy of metropolitan areas. It is redesigning whole sections of cities, penetrating in old industrial areas and dilapidated central neighborhoods. The rise of innovative styles and narratives is often linked to these new urban contexts, which produce new types of imagery that are able to better express the identity of whole chunks of the city.

It is in these urban spaces that new linguistic codes emerge, on which creative industries thrive and where social groups, including the creative class, express their identity. By generating symbolic capital, cultural industries and creative segments have facilitated metropolitan renewal and created new cultural geographies and modes of urban living.

That also goes for the possible types of policy actions around which the future of cities linked to creativity and culture can be built. There are policies geared toward implanting cultural production activities in areas where they can find the right socioeconomic conditions for growing. And there are cultural policies that should incubate the production of new collective imageries, by supporting those artistic productions, even if they are marginal, that take place outside institutionalized contexts. The ability to negotiate between creativity understood as incubation and creativity understood as new forms of cognitive production is among the most important challenges facing cities today.