Snurb's blog

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.

This is a conference on the move - from the posh (and very old-fashioned) surroundings of the Fairmont Royal York Hotel Concert Hall we have now been bussed to Toronto's historic distillery district - a rejuvenated area east of the city centre where grand old distillery and factory buildings have been converted into cafes, restaurants, boutiques, and events spaces. Clearly the sort of creative space everyone at this conference has been talking about. I'm now in the Fermenting Cellar, waiting for the start of the 'Creative City-Building' session; this involves two parts with Arian Hassani, and speakers from Toronto, London, Munich, and beyond.

The next session at Creative Places + Spaces is called 'The Art of Creating Beautiful Places' - a panel involving five speakers mainly from Toronto itself. Lance Alexander from the City Manager's Office in Toronto makes a start. He begins by discussing the question of beauty itself - is there a common definition for what a beautiful city is, and therefore how policy and urban development could aim to build one? Architect Mark McClelland suggests that for buildings this is perhaps also a question of age - when they're built they might be in fashion or close to fashion, and fall out of fashion later on; if they survive long enough it may be possible for them to be seen as beautiful, iconic, and timeless - and even historic - again.

We're now starting the second day of the Creative Places + Spaces conference, with another conference plenary. This is facilitated by Mary Rowe, a community artist from Toronto, who begins by congratulating the Artscape organisers for the conference so far (yay!), and now introduces the first speaker, Glen Murray from the Centre for Urban and Community Studies at the University of Toronto; he is also the former mayor of Winnipeg.

Glen Murray: Avoiding Irritable Bilbao Syndrome

Glen notes that there are a number of issues of concern at the moment. We are living in a very risk-adverse culture - in Canada, for example, people like their politicians to do what is predictable, not to be creative and original. Breaking with past practice escalates into an experience of higher rate risks of failure. The more original you are, the more people you will upset, and this raises the risk of failure. But why build political capital and popularity if you're not prepared to invest it in supporting and driving new projects and ideas? The media have a lot to answer here, too, as they reinforce sameness and the mainstream.

My afternoon was spent presenting the Creative Industries Faculty and especially my work in KKB018 Creative Industries with the Ipskay Creative Town scenario at the CP+S Creativity Marketplace. Unfortunately DHL messed up, so my QUT brochures never arrived at the hotel, but with the materials and student posters I brought along I think I had enough information to go on. I ended up running out of business cards (and out of voice), so that' s a great indication of strong interest in what we're doing. Also, good to meet a few fellow travellers - some of the folks from the Danish Kaospilots group, as well as some lecturers from the University of Breda in the Netherlands who have also developed a creative industries programme. I'll have to follow up to see if a student exchange between them and us is feasible.

Charles Landry, author of The Creative City, is the keynote speaker this morning. He notes how creativity has become something of a universal mantra, and is generally seen as entirely good and positive. It may be important to take a more critical view of creativity now, and especially of the claims to creativity which so many cities now make. Most creative city strategies are about enhancing the arts as well as the creative industries, which is fine, but what's important is also to expand from this - what would be a creative bureaucrat, or a creative environmentalist?

The idea of the creative community, the creative city, is different - it is far more all-embracing, and encourages openness and tolerance and thus has massive implications for organisational culture which must be addressed. It is important to create environments where we can think, plan, and act with imagination - where ordinary people can act in extraordinary ways if given the chance. One of the principles is to involve those affected in creative city plans. This means thinking on the edge of your competence rather than at the centre of it. Innovation happens at the boundary of difference, where things can really start to occur. This means asking practitioners to act in slightly different ways from their established practice. The creative city, then, is an attitude of mind; it is dynamic, not static. Landry argues for a culture of creativity to be embedded in the places in which people live.

Alan Webber, Irshad Manji, Roberta Bondar and Joe Berridge make up the first panel of the morning, and Joe begins by setting the tone.

Joe Berridge: Four Principles

So, what is a creative city - would we recognise it if we were in it? Is it simply determined by creative festivals - in which case becoming a creative city is a universal ambition. How can creative cities distinguish themselves in 'the post-Richard Florida world'? Joe suggests that the creative city of the future is a Creative City - where the entire organisation of the city is creatively designed. About 25% of employment in a city is in the public service, which usually is anything bit creative in its operation - so how can creative principles be introduced into the local government environment? The effective achievement of its ambitions combined with creative approaches will set apart the creative city from others, and local government has the greatest potential for creative chance. This is the case in Toronto itself as well, where local government still remains an unreconstructed area of the city, even amidst so many creative projects.

(Toronto) Well, we're here for the Creative Places + Spaces conference in Toronto now. Early this morning I set up my stall in the Creativity Marketplace, presenting some of the work we're doing with the Ipskay fictional environment in KKB018 Creative Industries, and there were already a number of interesting conversations with visitors. Now, we're on to the start of the conference proper, with the opening speech by Artscape CEO Tim Jones. He begins by noting the rising interest in creativity and innovation from a large number of stakeholders, also including governments and policymakers. But how to create the conditions for that creativity and innovation to thrive? How can the best and brightest in diverse fields be attracted to this environment? How can creativity bubble up from the bottom and be connected to global networks? In many of these issues, aversion to risk is what's holding us back. A mindshift, a movement, isn't enough - a revolution is what's needed: hence the subtitle of this conference: risk revolution.

(Buffalo) I went out to Niagara Falls this morning - just a 30 minute trip up the highway from Buffalo itself, right up to the Canadian border. In theory I could have just continued on from there to Toronto, my next stop on this trip, which wouldn't have been too much further to go, but strangely enough I'm booked on a flight this afternoon which takes me there via Toronto (adding a good three or four hours of transit time to my day). Not entirely sure my travel agent checked the map when we made the booking...

Niagara was beautiful, if windy and quite chilly - but the intermittent sun brought out multiple rainbows over the falls and really blew up the mist from the water cascades. I can't imagine what the falls would have been like before the power generation scheme reduced the flow over the actual falls themselves. It's clearly going towards autumn here - I saw plenty of squirrels (including one of the rarer black ones) burying their nuts and other goodies in the ground for the cold season.

(Buffalo) Well, that went well - some very good discussion at the 'Produsers and Produsage' workshop today, and a few critical questions which I'm looking forward to thinking about further. I recorded the workshop and will try to post an edited version soon after I'm back in Brisbane... The evening talk was great as well - excellent turnout, with people even sitting in the aisles and corridor. Again, some good questions, and I hope people found it useful. Check out the photos from the workshop and talk on the iDC site, too! Tomorrow Trebor and I will record a brief video summary of the produser idea - more details soon. And I capped off the day with a beautifully al dente Maine lobster ravioli. Good night!