Charles Landry, an inter­na­tional leader of the cre­at­ive cit­ies move­ment, will be con­trib­ut­ing to our con­ver­sa­tion over the next few months. In his first post, Landry dis­cusses the “geo­graphy of bland­ness” that is appear­ing as more cit­ies aim for the “global city” ideal.

“Busi­ness dis­tricts and sub­urbs win out on bland­ness.” Is there any­thing dis­tinct­ive about these cit­ies? Top: Tokyo, Middle: Seoul, Bot­tom: Hong Kong | Pho­tos by Charles Landry

Look from afar at the city­scape of most big cit­ies and what do you see. A cluster of sky­scrapers gath­er­ing height and shap­ing them­selves into a ragged pyr­amid as you move to the city core. Usu­ally they are straight and stiff, ver­tical, sharp edged and angu­lar, cube like and occa­sion­ally staggered. They glisten with their reflect­ive glass towers com­pet­ing to be seen often with a sig­na­ture logo at top. To cre­ate greater dis­tinc­tion more now try to bend, slant, skew and con­tort them­selves to gen­er­ate pres­ence and prom­in­ence espe­cially in expens­ive areas. They say ‘I am here, look at me’.

Range your eyes across the edges of the city’s sum­mit and build­ings become smal­ler and char­ac­ter and qual­ity often decline. There is cheap con­crete and cement rather than steel and glass. Sharpen your focus and there is a battered look even shabby, if not seedy. Mater­i­als can be shoddy, it can look bedraggled, grimy and in hot­ter cit­ies the build­ings sweat and stain.

How many of these city­scapes do you recog­nise? I remem­ber very few. In Seoul if you show me a pic­ture of Cheonggyecheon, the recovered river, I know where I am. Any­thing else and I am lost. The same goes for Shang­hai. If I see the Ori­ental Pearl TV Tower I get it, but for the rest it could be any­where. The finely craf­ted golden towers of the Grand Palace give Bangkok away, but oth­er­wise there is a mod­ern­ist same­ness. Icon mania seeks to get us instantly to recog­nize some­where, but how many city icons do you know? I can think of just a few.

Any­thing but bland these days, Cheonggyecheon is a stream through the heart of Seoul that has recently been reclaimed for the pub­lic. Covered over dur­ing the post-war period, a huge urban renewal pro­ject exposed the stream to day­light once again and cre­ated a unique pub­lic space over 6 km. | Pho­tos by Charles Landry

Busi­ness dis­tricts and sub­urbs win out on bland­ness. Think of busi­ness areas like Gang­nam in Seoul, Otem­a­chi in Tokyo or Dongmen/Luohu in Shen­zhen, they could be any­where Dal­las, Cal­gary, Sao Paolo, Frank­furt or Dubai.

Top: Shen­zhen Busi­ness Dis­trict, Middle and Bot­tom: Shen­zhen Design Dis­trict | Pho­tos by Charles Landry

The inter­na­tional, mod­ern­ist style has a pre­ferred tem­plate and set expres­sions and motifs. They look pro­fes­sional, effi­cient, clean and this can be seduct­ive and give the assur­ance of pre­dict­ab­il­ity, but with their hard unfor­giv­ing glass or marbled sur­faces they lack the soft and the tender. The build­ings seek to impress but by so doing dis­tance them­selves from you. The cold, effi­cient pro­fes­sional feel becomes pal­lid, dreary and life­less as it ages over time. It wear­ies the soul. Yet at night they are bet­ter when they glow, glint and dazzle. Places like Hong Kong look­ing onto the island from Kowloon are a ver­it­able light show.

Com­mer­cial dis­tricts are dif­fer­ent and when you lower your sights to street level the visual lan­guage betrays where you are. The order dis­ap­pears and we see the intens­ity of Asia’s visual vocab­u­lary. The planned gives way to the unplanned and the more chaotic. Spaces are less con­trolled, things spill onto the streets. Col­ours are brighter, things flicker and flash. The sign clut­ter over­whelms. The poorer the dis­trict the messier it is. It stim­u­lates with its spe­cial­ist shops and stalls with their vast food ranges and gad­gets of every kind. This is strangely com­fort­ing. But the posher the dis­trict the more the same it looks.

We are in the world of brands and we are back to the lurch­ing feel­ing of dull­ness, the march of the mall and growth of mono­tony. Always the same pic­ture, always the same names. The upscale mall and it is Prada, Gucci, Louis Vuit­ton, Bul­gari. Mid­scale mall and it is the fash­ion concept stores from Calvin Klein, to Giord­ano, H&M, Guess, La Senza and now even Gap, which has 3100 stores world­wide. This is the death of diversity. The bland makers know this and so shop­ping itself is enriched by cre­at­ing the lure of excite­ment and themed experiences.

“Travel out of the urban heart and what you see and feel is a fur­ther dose of bland­ness — an asphalt end­less­ness.” Top: An Osaka hous­ing estate, Bot­tom: Osaka, near the train sta­tion | Pho­tos by Charles Landry

There is a dif­fer­ence between a more authen­tic self-generated exper­i­ence and one that is themed. The lat­ter is pre-digested. It will dif­fi­cult if not impossible to be an act­ive par­ti­cipant and shaper, maker and co-creator of that exper­i­ence. People who have been to many places increas­ingly feel the over­all exper­i­ence is bland, which is why as a guest you are likely to be taken to a counter cul­tural or altern­at­ive space.

Travel out of the urban heart and what you see and feel is a fur­ther dose of bland­ness — an asphalt end­less­ness. You pass by lower qual­ity hous­ing and light indus­trial estates. The col­our is gone and the greys and light beige pre­dom­in­ant. In many cit­ies these build­ings have num­bers. It is as if they had no name. They are more like ware­houses for people than homes.

Of course there is more to cit­ies than their bland­ness. There is occa­sional beauty and delight. Yet for all us the ques­tion is: can we cre­ate more pleas­ure in the city? One idea is civic cre­ativ­ity, to which we turn next month. This is where pub­lic bur­eau­cra­cies find ways of being ima­gin­at­ive for pub­lic good pur­poses and where the private ener­gies are dir­ec­ted to higher pur­pose more col­lect­ive goals. Here the sense of place of non-branded space could be developed and the ima­gin­a­tion of the ‘what could be’ dis­played in action.

Have you noticed the “geo­graphy of bland­ness” and death of diversity in your city? How do you think we can main­tain local iden­tity and a visual vocab­u­lary unique to our cit­ies as more and more move towards a rather bland global city ideal? Share your thoughts below to join the discussion.