Building Creative Cities in Toronto and Munich

After a brief break, the second part of this 'Creative City-Building' session has now begun. The first speaker is Rita Davies, the Director of Culture for the city of Toronto.

Rita Davies: Piloting the Creative Iceberg

Rita begins by noting that the key ingredient in any strategy is the creative talent pool. Toronto, she says, has it 'in spades', but how do you work with that talent pool in support of a city-building agenda? The problem is somewhat like piloting an iceberg, but you never known when you're going to run into the Titanic and go seriously off course. Also, what most see and focus on is the relatively small tip of the agenda, but the bulk and power of it lie deep down beneath the surface. The process is key, and stumbling around in the dark sometimes is inevitable; a dogged perseverance sometimes is required.

Rita's realisation at the start of the process was that there was a need for a strong strategy document, a clear expression of a plan in writing which was first developed in Toronto in 1984 as Cultural Capital. This was a pioneering, seminal work, and showed how culture translated into jobs and economic impacts in Toronto, not treating culture as a charity case and expense but as an investment which created surprising dividends. It developed a benchmark based on per-capita funding for the arts in municipalities, and the Toronto arts council budget grew by 2500% over six years (if from a very low base).

Artscape itself, the organiser of this conference, was set up through this process. The importance of having regulations relaxed in order not to strangle good ideas was also recognised, and is shown in the Distillery district where we now are. Cultural workers, it became obvious, created economic value in every area where they move to live and work. Artists, in some ways, then are also the stormtroopers of gentrification, however - they are the heavy lifters in changing neighbourhoods but do not necessarily profit from it themselves, and this needs to be addressed through strategies as well.

Strategies must also be broken up into small steps and achievable actions; manageable chunks which can lead to significant advances. This is a bureaucratic process as well, of course, and requires perseverence. There is also some discomfort from artists with such more economic approaches to the arts, of course, further complicating matters. What is required here is to see the whole city as the neighbourhood which is undergoing change - and ultimately this has led to Toronto's recent strategy document, then: The Creative City.

It is important here for planners to listen to their instincts as well - and Richard Florida's research was instinctively useful for the Toronto planners, for example, as was the example of Manchester in England. Further, the ability to mediate between artistic, bureaucratic, and political worlds is a key skill for planners; having set up the vision it is now necessary to deliver on it, and this is no easy task. But as creativity and culture are recognised as central to city-building strategies.

Lydia Hartl: Courage and Enthusiasm for Munich's Creative Industries

Lydia Hartl, Rita's counterpart from Munich, follows on. She notes the longstanding conflict between the conservative state government of Bavaria and the progressive local government of the city; it has long been a cultural capital in Germany, and a highly multicultural city. Some of its key industries also include many design areas. It competes with New York as a publishing city, and is third worldwide as a media centre as well as the seat of the European patent office. It is the key competitor for Berlin in a German context, with some 25% of the population made up of migrants.

This places Munich under an obligation of developing a policy which focusses on the creative class and on building on its cultural heritage with a view towards the future. The city focusses on contemporary arts, education (also adult education), and other cultural programmes, and Lydia suggests six theses for change management:

1. There is a need for research on urban cultural heritage, and urban knowledge. Urban life is key in the 21st century, and as the traditional bases for life vanish in a globalised environment new approaches need to be found.
2. City regions are centres of creativity and require life-long learning, open spaces, and low barriers. There is a need to support innovation, increase investment, and increase efficiency. A home-grown potential needs to be supported here, through public education. But there is a problem that in a European mindset often education and freedom of the arts are mutually exclusive, and there are prejudices dividing high and low arts. This is addressed through the concept of low barriers for education, participation, and self-expression for citizens, including also temporary public art projects which have led to encouraging results. This also means that urban planning in general has to be reconsidered to provide more open spaces for the exhibition of and engagement with such art.
3. As a result of former failures, it is necessarily to identify target audiences. Institutions have not investigated what the younger generations actually mean when they speak of 'culture', and cultural institutions need to change this; it is also still unclear what characterises a high-level canon of education - what are the key cultural qualifications we need for the future? This also links to the rise of multiculturalism, religious diversity, and alternative lifestyles.
4. There is an obligation of maintaining a culture of remembrance of the past in order to maintain a tolerant, non-discriminational environment. Openness to discussion of past failures (such as Germany's Nazi past) is essential, and helps the development of courage and ethical conviction especially also amongst young people. As a heartland of the early Nazi movement, Munich has a very significant obligation here, and is working for example with Jewish groups who are have established centres in what used to be Nazi spaces, as well as working more widely on building centres documenting genocide.
5. Subsidy is a forward-looking investment in civic future, yet arts bodies still struggle to legitimate spending in this area. Quality and quantity of projects must therefore be documented, and it is important to include contemporary management strategies in arts and creative industries agencies. This may mean a fundamental reorganisation of such public agencies - but privatisation, Lydia says, is not the right path.
6. Networking with other cities and regions is crucial. It represents a chance for networking on shared interests and experiences and enables an investigation of sustainability and of indicators of possibility. But it will not happen without an explicit sense of political determination to do so, and requires a convincing argument that creativity is the motivator for the 21st century - this, then, needs courage and enthusiasm.

Will Alsop: Promoting Uncertainty

Up next is Will Alsop from Alsop & Partners in London, who also works in Toronto and Shanghai. He prefers the term 'innovation' to 'creativity' in the present context, and makes a critique of the speakers in the previous session - he favours learning by doing rather than the mapping projects which are used to develop creative city strategies, and believes that this also better supports grassroots creative movements. There are no real rules, he says (speaking as an architect), and this means that the strategies may codify processes rather than develop new approaches.

Rather than consulting people, then it may be useful to engage people, to involve them - rather than aiming to extract information from people, wanting to know everything, the point is to realise one's own lack of knowledge and work with knowledgeable people to fill in those gaps. Further, it is also important to do nothing, to observe others, and to know one's location and understand where one is in relation to other locations.

Uncertainty, too, is one of the great generators of creativity and invention, he suggests - it's permissible to get things wrong sometime (most office buildings are torn down in 50 years or less anyway). Indeed, some of the most successful spaces, he finishes, have built their success not on clever planning or design but on the 'what the fuck's that?' principle: it is their very oddness which attracts audiences.