A Creative Places + Spaces Legacy?

Well, it's the final session of this very exciting conference. Charles Landry and Pier Giorgio di Cicco will do the wrap-up. Charles reflects on the process of starting a revolution - from the individual idea to the broad movement. It is an extended transformative moment, but the question is whether it will linger long and lastingly, so that a legacy is created. He suggests that the resolution has already started, as the many projects mentioned along the way over the last couple of days show - and these are the generators for further action.

The art of city-building is about fine judgment of what is right and what is wrong, too. But in order to have fine judgment there is a need for reflection, and this may be what is required now in the aftermath of this conference. Reflection interconnects and addresses the fragmentation which is inherent in dealing with specific examples. It also helps to work out when we do (or don't) take the risk of pursuing creative solutions.

Reflection enables a rethinking, which can change the landscape of one's mind - should Toronto be the best creative city in the world, for example, or the best creative city for the world? Should creativity always deal with the exciting, or is it not more important to apply creativity to the dull, in order to make it more exciting? Charles returns to the idea of 'soft creativity', which isn't necessarily the stuff for a movement, but can be if it is aligned to ideas - and this could lead to our places becoming works of art.

Finally again to Pier Giorgio di Cicco, Toronto's poet laureate and advocate for the arts. He continues the theme - perhaps citizens should think of themselves as the authors of the everyday art of the city, engendering a climate of creativity (rather than an architecture of creativity) in the city. Everyone is looking for 'leadership' - and yet the city continues to develop: it is building itself, and the leadership follows. Creativity is happening, and cannot be kept down.

Trust as the climate in which risk takes place; a civic ethic, grounded on a groundbed on which these flowers of invention must land; the psychology of invention, which requires that people reacquaint themselves with the random, the unpredictable - these are needed for the development of creative cities. What is the random the unexpected - it is the first pledge of a currency of faith amongst citizens, who embrace the unknown and depart from the safety of what they know. There is no creativity without a climate of civility. The world must again have the spine of civic grace before it can embark on creativity. A literacy of grace is what we need before a literacy of invention, and they have the same dynamic - it is assumed self-esteem, it is about reciprocity without negotiation, spontaneous and courageous self-giving of creative urge that trusts in reciprocity but does not wait for it.

Mistakes and failures cannot be obstacles here. Mistakes are what make successes happen. Regulations, jargons, strategies must be dropped where necessary. Creativity encourages itself, and there is a need to instil an ethic of welcome and response amongst citizens to support this. Patience and humility command us; creativity commands our allegiance and care. We must have a strategy of care, patience, and intolerance for fear, and must not imagine the possible by what is impossible.

Well, folks, that's all from here. As always, all mistakes in these notes are mine and not the speakers. Now for a day off in Toronto, and then on to Chicago for AoIR...