Centre for Cities and Creativity

Yesterday approximately 100 people attended the Urban Garden Growthshop in Aarhus to green the city. Alongside the planting activism the organisers, Center for Urban Kunst, had put together an interesting seminar. The seminar speakers included both academics and practitioners from arts, urban planning and related disciplines.

Some of the main things I took away were:

Lone Koefoed kicked off with an insightful presentation about public space and outlined four main strategies for creating street art or interventions in the public space:
a) The temporary
b) Emphasise detail
c) Surprise
d) Change our perspective

Lone Koefoed also dwelled at the fact that life in city space is often staged through the commercial, offering the example of how expensive cafés in Aaarhus own the right to serve edibles in the public urban space along the banks of the re-opened Aarhus river.

In his presentation Jesper Elg discussed his experience of working with art in public space. Interestingly, Jesper talked about street space and public space as an alternative to commercial space. Jesper works with large public works of art and recently invited the American artist Shepard Fairey to Copenhagen to work on eight murals, temporary works in the public space. For Jesper a key theme for this type of work is to make public spaces which are in dialogue with users and citizens.

In her presentation Kristine Samson talked about the performative city. She talked about urban gardening as an urban phenomenon. She also talked about new ecologies in the performative city, in Copenhagen this is exemplified by events like Copenhagen marathon and the music festival Distortion. Referring to the French philosopher Georges Bataille, she talked about operative architecture and suggested that urban gardening could be seen as being operative in this type of way too. Kristine suggested a long list of ways to do urban gardening – here are the three first:
#1 Guerilla gardening and urban activism – contesting the masterplanned city
#2 Pimp your pavement – skilling up, building identities, aesthetic
#3 Reuse/recycle the materiality of the city.

Trevor Davies, who is heading up Aarhus’ bid to become European Capital of Culture in 2017 shared some of his thinking around what makes cities successful. He sees a trend of cities which define ethical paroles as becoming the frontrunnners in the coming years and mentioned Toronto as an example. Also cities are removing themselves from the national discourse because this discourse is no longer useful for them. He also mentioned that when we talk about public spaces in cities, we need to use these also to exhibit in public our issues and challenges as citizens.

Finally, Louise Fabian from Aarhus University gave and thought-provoking presentation on how DIY urbanism usurps public space with a series of strategies – and finally asked whether events like the Urban Guerilla Gardening workshop signify a new bottom-up urbanism and if they do – how can we interpret this?

The event also had a visit by the Danish Minister of Culture who asked the panel the interesting question of what can be done to leave space in cities for experimentation for new thinking and innovation in cities. I will leave this question to you to answer.

On Saturday, 5 May, I will be giving a talk about the importance of creativity in cities at the Urban Gardening event in Aarhus. This is a key issue for me and for Centre for Cities and Creativity.
In a radio interview Grayson Perry listed the following five (untrue) myths about creativity, which I always find a useful point of departure for a discussion about creativity:

1) Eureka moment
2) Anyone can do it – we can’t all be brain surgeons…
3) Drugs are good for you
4) Creative people are a bit mad
5) Britain’s got talent – the notion that there are geographically some countries where creativity is more inherent

Basically this sums up to one thing – you can do it, but you need to work hard for it and there are no shortcuts.

In his think piece What makes cities creative?, Charlie Leadbeater offers a useful distinction between a “narrow” and a “broad” understanding of creativity in the city. The narrow definition mainly focuses on the creative class, ie. people working within the creative industries, to provide creativity in the city and for this relatively small group to act as a kind of driving force for creativity. However, Leadbeater argues that cities will in the future need to look at a much broader understanding of creativity to tackle the complex challenges they are facing. This creativity will not only deal with culture but will look at all aspects of life in cities. It is still unclear exactly how this will look like. The Urban Gardening workshop in Aarhus tomorrow may be a good first step to get people to realise that creativity can applied to many spheres of city life.

Yesterday I had the pleasure to participate in the first Gaming Forum in Athens through an invitation from British Council in Greece. The event was hosted at The Hub in Athens, a great space for this type of event which combined the practical with the theoretical in a wonderful way. The lobby area was packed with game consoles and there was a nice big, cool conference hall for the presentations. There were lots of presentations – about 15 in total – and lots of good presentations.

I took the following four things away with me.

1) Importance of games. In is introductory remarks, Dr Gregory Yovanof said that games are so important because people of all ages play. He also mentioned games as being a participatory and experiental learning style.

2) Will violent computer games produce violent kids. Elina Roinioti and Eleanna Pandia gave an interesting paper on their research into this topic .They argued for the need to distinguish between violence and aggressivity. Violence mainly being reaction of the psyche when under too much pressure and not causally related to gaming per se. Agressivity in gaming, however, is the planned, contained conflicts within certain perimeters of the game.

3) Athens Playathon. Chloe Varelidi and Maria Saridaki gave a great presentation about the Athens Playathon which takes place in late September and most certainly turn the city of Athens into a big gameboard with an urban backdrop. There is a chance for all gamers to submit there ideas under the Open Call until 8 June.

4) Finally Eric Parkes from Gipht.me shared his thoughts on the coming trends in gaming
a) Niche markets – games will need to cater for smaller niche audiences. The time of games covering large audiences may not be over but there is a better chance of success if you focus on niche.
b) Alternate reality games will be a growing market. ARG are games that mix game play with the real world. Eric share the example of ARG being used at the launch of the Steven Spielberg film AI – where a fictional character appeared in the credits of the trailer – when people googled the name, they would be led to a website with puzzles to be solved.
c) Games as art. Games with a high aesthetic quality and with a creative edge that will keep people captured.

You can find the full list of speakers from the event here