Poetry of Cities

Pier Giorgiho Di Cicco, the Poet Laureate of the City of Toronto, on the future of cities (hat tip: Amanda Styron.  It captures the essence of  the creative community, its great potential, its contradictions, and the challenges we all face. Read it and share your thoughts.

The creative city is more than just innovative. It manufactures an appetite for life. It respects the random, not just as new information for design, but as the currency of civic allowance. People will not volunteer their ideas if they live in the regulated environment of gentrified enclaves, free only to exercise imagination in front of computer screens. All this to say, that a knowledge economy depends on knowing the roots of creativity.

Innovation falls under the banner of creativity, and creativity does not occur where there trust is lacking in social capital.

The job of generating civic trust is in the hands of governance, innovators, entrepreneurs all those who understand that civic spirit is the engine of a good economy, In the future all cities will be distinguished by one thing only. The nature of their enthusiasm. IT, virtuality, globalization, consumer isotropy will make all cities equally enticing to tourists and investors. Though it will appear that a city is attractive because of certain types of technology, the city wants to attract people who not only specialize in those technologies, but who see that city as a livable place with a strong creative ethic.

An aesthetic of the city is more than its expertise in innovation. Besides which, innovation begins on the street in the casual genius of civic encounter. A city that is not creative in all sectors cannot hope to be creative in some sectors.

Wealth generation is limited when wealth is not seen as a product of civic allegiance. The very word allegiance sounds archaic. Does it still have a place on the competitive stage? People need to belong, to a work place, a community, a way of life. Out of that emerges love and loyalty. A city with these qualities is a perpetual motion machine. It is prosperous because it has city spirit. This spirit is seductive to investors and visitors. It makes for a livable town.

Collaboration is not how a city is made Collaboration exists by converging alliances and partnerships, often provisional. It is a transactional model. The job of making a city cohere in spirit is about loyalty, is about joining together. When business is the interest, the most intelligent thing is to re-invest in the spirit that made invention possible-- the city. And that spirit in turn, becomes the engine to economy.

The creative city is more than just innovative. It manufactures an appetite for life. It respects the random, not just as new information for design, but as the currency of civic allowance. People will not volunteer their ideas if they live in the regulated environment of gentrified enclaves, free only to exercise imagination in front of computer screens.

All this to say, that a knowledge economy depends on knowing the roots of creativity.

A knowledge economy is more than information. It  isn't seduced into the quick harvest. It doesn't barge on insight before insight has had a chance to flower. A knowledge economy understands that the outsourcing of design is at an end, if the design of the architecture between citizens isn't attended to.

And the architecture between citizens is very vulnerable in the future city. It is negotiated space that we live in. It is not adventure, but security that has become the municipal zeitgeist. Surveillance, excessive protocol and proceduralism are  becoming the ambience of urban life. In such an environment, it won't belong before innovation is demoted to merely new-level growth.

The factors accomplishing this are many. I would suggest to you that the lack of civic and national commonality accounts for colonies of life styles, ideologies and extremist positions that bewilder the field of policy. The industry of appeasement is replacing the industry of civic care. The ethic of entitlement replaces the ethic of sufficiency, and though this may appear good for capitalism, it spells bad news for sustainability.

Many are the dangers for the future of cities, But the worst thing that can afflict a city, even in its apparent prosperity, is the deterioration of city-soul, that which inspires citizens to self-identity and mutual recognition. Its recovery depends on (1) seeing another citizen as a resource of sacrifice and not just as a resource.  (2) using the concept of innovation as a forum of shared wonder and delight.  (3) seeing the city not just as opportunities of networks, but as a gracious forum of encounter and unexpected intimacies, with gratitude for what that city has yielded.

With these elements recovered, we are guaranteed creative cities and competitive cities, because we will have cities that will have stayed human.

The task of business and governance is to enact a psychology of creativity with a credible benevolence, beyond the machinery of excitement, acquisition and entertainment. For just as there is an ecology of environment that demands more than the short term solution, there is an ecology of the human heart that demands a faith witnessed in and by the most talented members of our society.

Comments

[David Crowley]

I appreciate this piece from my perspective here at Social Capital Inc., where we are dedicated to improving the civic climate of local communities. Interesting, your posting it seems to suggest you value social capital and civic trust. I've heard a number of people that have read your work and that of Robert Putnam suggest they are opposing theories. I don't really get that reading your work myself.

[Richard]

David-Thanks for writing. The "opposition" thing may have been years ago. I have tremendous respect for Putnam's work. And I met a couple of years ago with his team. We agreed there is considerable overlap. Two members of my own team have done work on this: Gary Gates and Brian Knudsen. They distinguish between bonding (within-group) social capital and bridging (between-group) social capital. While the former tends not be associated with my creativity measures, the latter is quite close to our measures and particularly our diversity measures. My own sense, given that, is that we have paid perhaps too much attention to bonding, and not enough to bridging. What do you think?

[Meredith Whipp]

I couldn't agree with you more Richard (a need to spend more time on bridging) and this, it seems, is what Di Cicco's work illustrates as well. Being from Toronto, I am somewhat familiar with his work and writing on the architecture of the space between people. It offers a progressive and refreshing shift - away from a focus on our interesting differences and toward an appetite and enthusiasm for our common humanity. It is working wonders to unleash a unity of spirit in Toronto where, in recent years, a felt-but-unspoken fractiousness has prevented us from reaching our full potential as a city.

[Richard]

Meredith - Every single human being is creative. And our creativity does not understand and cannot be bounded by the social categories we have imposed on ourselves. Creativity not only makes us individuals with a basic right to use our talent and self-express, it binds us to each other as its expression is quintessentially inter-subjective. Each requires the other, just as Jane Jacobs long ago said. I think you are correct: Toronto is emerging as the world's model for this.