Creating Creative Cities

David Engwicht
 

Adapted from a chapter of unpublished book on creativity which examines the 9 creative geniuses we all carry in our heads.

In this article we cover:
— How belief systems shape urban environments
— How urban environments can inhibit creativity
— How urban environments can provoke creativity
— The city as a creative crucible
— Importance of increasing 'marginal territory'
— Our flight from the creative potential of the city
— Letting paradox stand.

How belief systems shape urban environments

In workshops I do with planning professionals, I ask them to pretend they are anthropologists examining the African tribal compound of the Ambo people. I ask them what they can tell me about the beliefs, culture and mythologies of the Ambo people just by looking at this diagram. [ to see diagram in pop-up window.]

There is a lot you can tell about the Ambo people by looking at a map of their Kraal. They put a high value on cattle — invaders must first get past the boy's sleeping huts before they can steel the ox or calves. They are a polygamous society — indicated by the second wives quarters, other wives' quarters and the bride sitting place. Conversation and social interaction are of primary importance to the life of the kraal — the meeting place is central to the compound. Alcohol is a highly valued commodity — the brewery is closer to the Kraal Heads sleeping quarters than the first wife's sleeping quarters.

Everything we build — from our individual house to large cities — contains a 'body language' that tells us about our beliefs, values, and mythologies. And because beliefs, values and mythologies also shape social relationships, the environments we create will reinforce these patterns of social relationships. The women and children in the Kraal compound do not need to get up every morning and ask themselves, 'What is my place in this society?' It is written for them in the very structure of the compound.

The arrangement of space is more than just an 'indicator' or 'artifact' of social relationships and thinking patterns. It is an 'incarnation' of those relationships and thought forms. Incarnation is a theological word meaning 'God made flesh'. It carries the notion of an invisible spirit taking on a bodily form in order to communicate and make visible their essential nature. Similarly, societies can only exist as they take on a physical and material form in the spatial realm. A built environment is not just an artifact of a society. It is the 'body' of that society which facilitates both internal and external relationships.

It is unlikely that the Ambo people sit down and consciously think through what arrangement of space would best reflect the social relationships within the tribe and their belief systems. It is rather an organic and unconscious process guided by the culture of that tribe which will include deep-seated beliefs about the roles of particular groups.

How urban environments can inhibit creativity

My major thesis on creativity is that many of the inhibitors of our natural creativity are our personal beliefs and cultural beliefs. For example, seeing childhood as a transition phase to adulthood means that we believe that play and fantasy is something that we 'outgrow'. Yet play and fantasy are foundational to any creative process. Individually and as a society we place high value on certainty and view chaos as unproductive. Yet it is impossible to create anything new in a totally ordered world (there are no opportunities for new connections). However, I argued above that our personal and cultural beliefs become incarnated into the environments we create. Therefore, the inhibitors to creativity are not just in our belief systems but in our houses, our streets, our parks, and our public places. They are in the design of everything, right down to the design of the seats we put in malls and parks.

For example, if a society, and in particular the planning professionals, have cut themselves off from the Child that lives in their heads (one of the nine creative geniuses we all carry in our heads), then this will manifest itself in the way space is arranged. Segregated and specialized areas will be created for children's play. Play and the activity of children will not be integrated into adult space and therefore child's play will not intersect with the serious activities of the adult world.

Traditionally, the space where children's play and the adult world intersected, was the street. But this has become the exclusive province of adults moving to an adult activity, or a space for driving children in isolation to some organized play activity. This segregation of the child's world is no accident. It is an incarnation of our belief that being a child is to be in training to be a productive adult, something we outgrow when we graduate into adulthood.

Similarly, if we are addicted to certainty then we will build urban spaces that exclude diversity. As Sennett argued in Concience of the Eye; "This reduction and trivializing of the city as a stage of life is no accident... The way cities look reflects a great, unreckoned fear of exposure. "Exposure" more connotes the likelihood of being hurt than of being stimulated... What is characteristic of our city-building is to wall off the differences between people, assuming that these differences are more likely to be mutually threatening than mutually stimulating." (1990: xii)

Every minute detail of urban design determines whether the creative geniuses in our minds are welcomed or excluded from participation in city life. For example, the orientation of public seating either encourages or inhibits people-watching, an activity loved by the Storyteller in our head. Even the fact of whether a seat is bolted to the ground is important. A loose chair automatically faces you with a choice: 'Will I leave the chair here or move it?' At that moment of decision, you are transformed from citizen into urban designer. You will decide how this square will look for a few moments of time. The artist in you is forced to make an artistic decision. By contrast, seats bolted to the ground shouts many messages, including: 'We don't trust your design abilities. Us professional designers know what looks best. If we give you a say in design, you will do what people with no taste do worldwide; create a space that is messy and chaotic, lacking in any design sense.' Loose seats therefore encourage and feed the creative geniuses within, while fixed seats say that the creative geniuses within can not be trusted.

How urban environments can provoke creativity

The presence of people evokes in us the Storyteller. The presence of water welcomes the Mystic and Child. Art welcomes the Dreamer, Sensual One and Jester. Seating welcomes the Old Wise One. The best of urban spaces encourage all creative geniuses to interact simultaneously. It is out of this interaction that the richest creativity emerges.

Planners generally take a rationalist and mechanistic approach to space — spaces must have a single, defined function in order for the urban machine to operate efficiently. For example, streets and roads are defined as space for movement of cars, therefore children playing in this space would make it inefficient. However, if we examine spaces that people find instinctively attractive, they are spaces that have not been rationalized into a single use. There is ambiguity, layers of contradictory meaning, a certain amount of unpredictability, and a using of the space for activities for which it was not originally designed. In fact the spaces are often quite chaotic. They assault our senses with sights, sounds and smell. The Dreamer and Storyteller within weave these chaotic elements into a meaningful plot. We can return to these spaces time and again, and every time there is a new story to construct. Planners, in their effort to create order and rationalize space, destroy the poetic nature of urban space and turn it into a sanitized scientific formula. Not that we should blame the planning professionals. They are but an expression of the dominant beliefs and values in our society — the deep-seated desire for certainty and the deep-seated distrust of the creative genius within us all.

The city as a creative crucible

Why do we create cities? The macro answer should surely be to progress the ongoing evolution of life on earth — to improve the survivability and quality of life. Throughout this book we have discussed under what environmental conditions the creative genius of evolution is maximized. The city, in its purest form, meets these environmental conditions. It is a place of purposeful diversity. The chaos of the city provides a meeting ground for that diversity — a hot-house for evolving and nurturing new life. Cities are the meeting ground of diverse worlds — the marginal territory where new life can proliferate. The key function of a city is exchange. I define cities as 'inventions to maximize exchange and minimize the cost of that exchange'.

Mike Greenberg agrees: "A city's mission is exchange, and that mission ought to be the foundation for a city's master plan and the context for narrower policy decisions. The most useful criterion for measuring a city's quality of life and economy is this: Does the layout of the city, as a whole and in its details, facilitate the manifold process of exchange?" (The Poetics of Cities, 1995: 71)

To state what may appear to be the bleeding obvious, there are two ways in which exchanges take place in cities — planned exchanges and spontaneous exchanges. Public space (streets and squares) usually perform two basic functions; a movement corridor to take people to destinations where planned exchanges will take place and a 'stage' or 'outdoor living room' to facilitate exchanges both planned and spontaneous.

It is the spontaneous exchange which is the most valuable in feeding our creative geniuses and therefore in facilitating the basic role of the city which is to extend the creative processes of evolution. Planned exchanges, by very definition, are exchanges with that which is already known. These exchanges are not without artistic worth. The play we see, the art gallery we visit, the stories our friend tells us over coffee, all feed the creative geniuses within. However, it is through the spontaneous exchange that we are exposed to the worlds of which we are not aware. Just as we argued that chaos is the matchmaker of evolution — the chaos of streets and squares is the matchmaker in the eco-city.

It is here that we begin to catch a glimpse of the paradoxical nature of public space, or why I argue it must be viewed as poetry rather than prose. Movement through public spaces facilitates both planned and spontaneous exchanges. However, the movement also destroys the potential for some exchanges to take place. While this erosion factor is more severe with car traffic than bike or pedestrian traffic, excessive volumes of any form of traffic will eventually destroy the potential for movement space to perform its function as exchange space. What is interesting is that the people who are driving through public space in private cars are people who are on their way to a planned exchange. In the process they destroy part of the realm of the spontaneous exchange. These lost spontaneous exchanges can only be replaced in one way (if at all) — more planned trips. If this cycle is allowed to escalate, our cities are moved increasingly towards planned environments in which opportunities for spontaneous exchanges are reduced. Such a move undermines the essential nature of the city as a crucible for creativity.

Importance of increasing 'marginal territory'

Marginalized groups (including children, those who are elderly and those with disabilities) tend to rely more on the spontaneous exchanges for making their contribution to society. While walking to the corner store we stop to have a chat to the children playing hopscotch, or the eccentric that sits playing his tin whistle on a milk crate outside the shop. We rarely plan our interactions with those on the margin. We rely on the spontaneous encounter for our contact with these people. The downgrading of the 'spontaneous encounter' realm therefore reduces the opportunity for us to interact with these people who are the incarnation of edge territory. To exclude or minimize the participation of these people in society is not only an attack on them, but an attack on the Child, Marginal Person, Mystic and Old Wise One within ourselves. It is to starve our own inner artist and denigrate our own dignity as extensions of the creative drive in nature.

Our flight from the creative potential of the city

A cultural reality which undermines the creative potential of the city is a deep anti-urban bias. Most of us don't like the city and see it only as a 'necessary evil'. This anti-urban bias came to its full flowering about one hundred years ago with the birth of the modern city planning movement. At this time there was a mass social reform movement which went hand in hand with a number of utopian urban visions, each with their own prophet — Ebenezer Howard and his Garden City; Frank Lloyd Wright and his Broadacre City; Le Corbusier and his Radiant City; and Daniel Hudson Burnham and his City Beautiful. The mythology and symbols that informed this utopian dreaming came from a long tradition of Christian theology, which stretches back into Jewish mythology and cosmology, and in all probability is connected to mythologies and cosmologies developed in the first cities. (For a fuller explanation of this section see the article The connection between religion and urban planning.)

The problem is that the symbolism handed to us through religious thought contains a two edged sword that destroys the very thing sought — maximized quality of life. The diversity and chaos of the city is unsettling. It assaults the senses and challenges dogma. Illegitimate children result from the illicit liaisons facilitated by a stage for exchange which looms too large. The 'evils' of the city must therefore be controlled. On the other edge of the sword is a utopian vision of the city which results from the imposition of perfect order. Sacred geometry is the Messiah. The evolutionary model of creativity would suggest that both edges of the sword can equally slay the potential for new life to emerge. Diversity, chaos and illicit liaisons are the divine stuff of the universe.

Letting paradox stand

In the opening chapter of this book we explored the environmental conditions under which creativity is maximized in nature. I argued that these same environmental conditions determine the level of creativity within our brain. One of those environmental conditions was paradox, the greatest paradox in nature being the laws of life (evolution and creativity) and the laws of death (entropy). Yet these two are bound together in a dance of intimacy. Without death there is no life or drive to create life, and without life there is no death. At the source of the drive to creativity is always some kind of paradox. Above, and elsewhere on this site, we have explored some of the great paradoxes of urban spaces: planned exchanges versus spontaneous exchanges; movement space (the need for adventure) versus exchange space (the need for a sense of home); or the need for certainty versus the need for chaos. Often in the past, planning has resolved these dilemmas quite simply; it rationalizes the dilemma and privileges one side of the paradox over the other. For example, the street can only be used for movement not for residing, or all traces of chaos are eliminated to deliver greater certainty. This destruction of paradox in urban spaces is fundamentally damaging to the creative potential of the city.

Planners who have been raised on a diet of rational, scientific thinking often find it hard to conceptualize how you allow paradox to stand in the urban environment. Their training says you must at minimum privilege one over another. But if you view dealing with these dilemmas as an art, it is possible to allow both sides of the paradox to exist in the same time/space just as it is possible to juxtapose black and white on the same canvass and to use this juxtaposition as the very thing that brings the canvass to life. I believe that urban spaces that resonate with the human spirit and call forth our deepest creative urges are the spaces that contain the same irreconcilable contradictions that are an essential part of human nature.

Another way of conceptualizing how you allow paradox to stand in the urban environment is to think of it as a dance, like the waxing and waning of the seasons or the dance between life and death. Earlier in this book I argued that the greatest enemy of the creativity of our brain is its creativity. Our brain has the incredible capacity to take chaotic elements and create order out of this chaos. But in doing so, it destroys the environmental conditions essential to creativity: chaos, diversity and paradox. I argued that this does not mean that we should stop creating, but rather that we must build into our creations ambiguity, chaos, diversity and paradox. We must even be willing to let our creations die or metamorphose into something entirely new. Applied to urban environments, this means there are times to create order and there are times to mess up that order, there are times when movement takes precedence, and residing takes the back seat and times when these should be reversed. The key here is that this flux must happen within the same space. If one space takes on a fixed state while another takes on the opposite fixed state, then there is no dance. Instead you have two potential dance partners who never meet. Or to return to the art analogy, the black and white paint stay in their respective pots and are never applied to the same canvass. And if there is no dance, no painting, the city has lost its creative potential.