Charles Landry has been talk­ing about cre­at­ive cit­ies for the past 30 years — long before the term he coined became pop­u­lar — and long before we real­ized that a new approach to cit­ies is essen­tial for the future of our planet.

In this inter­view with Cre­at­ive Cit­ies, Landry explains his demo­cratic approach to the ideas of city-making. Landry defines cre­at­ive cit­ies as “places where you can think, plan and act with ima­gin­a­tion”, and sug­gests that the best way to unleash the cre­at­ive poten­tial and energy of a city is through a com­bined bottom-up and top-down approach – coup­ling artistic, grass-roots chal­lenges to the status quo with flex­ible responses from author­it­ies who adapt reg­u­la­tions and cre­ate incent­ives to encour­age “civic cre­ativ­ity” (ie, ima­gin­at­ive prob­lem solv­ing for the pub­lic good) from the people.

Through his writ­ing, Landry encour­ages us to see our cit­ies in new ways, and to adjust our value sys­tems to a new age.

Landry describes the ima­gin­a­tion of people as the greatest resource a city can call on, which prompts the ques­tion: how are we invest­ing in this resource when shap­ing our cit­ies, or build­ing cit­ies for the future?

Through his work, Landry encour­ages us to expand this poten­tial resource by recog­niz­ing the artistic in every­one, and inspir­ing people from out­side the fields tra­di­tion­ally recog­nized as “cre­at­ive” to see them­selves as cap­able of being agents of innov­a­tion and change in daily life. He encour­ages us to see the act of city-making as an art, rather than a sci­ence or purely tech­nical pur­suit, with all the intu­ition and nuance that requires. Import­antly, he notes that the respons­ib­il­ity for this art falls to no-one, or lies only with any one pro­fes­sion or lead­er­ship pos­i­tion – and should be shared by everyone.

We’re pleased to announce that Charles Landry will be a reg­u­lar con­trib­utor to the Cre­at­ive Cit­ies East Asia 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.

While cit­ies con­sist of phys­ical pieces of archi­tec­ture and infra­struc­ture, Landry high­lights that cit­ies are also exper­i­ences for those who inhabit them, places exper­i­enced through the senses, recor­ded in memory and col­oured by emo­tion. Do we lose our place in that sens­ory land­scape when we try to fol­low a for­mula for build­ing a global city? How do we bal­ance the com­pet­ing interests of the global and the local, order and chaos, duty and pleas­ure, in our shared civic spaces? We hope Charles Landry’s con­tri­bu­tion to the dis­cus­sion here will stim­u­late responses and help us extend this cru­cial con­ver­sa­tion into your city.