Approaching Creative Places and Spaces

(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.

Another introduction now from the Toronto poet laureate Pier Giorgio di Cicco. Risk revolution, he says, is not an option, but a necessity. He notes that creativity is not a rare gift, but a dormant genius waiting in everyone, which global strategies must understand and enable, well beyond questions of creativity as an economic driver. Creativity must be released from its deathgrip within industry and capitalism. It is about mutuality, the joy of discovery in the forum of shared wonder. A strategist, then, is one who helps people relax into their creative skills, an artist and enabler - people won't be ordered, legislated, branded into creativity. They guard their creativity the way they protect legacies, family, and the sacred; they can't be rallied unless an idea is beautiful and speaks to their life instincts - they are already creative but it is important to help them realise it, through the strategy of the creative city. We must awaken in people the sense of wonder that creativity brings; this restores hope, and the visions will follow of themselves.