INOPINATUM. The unexpected impertinence of urban creativity

Creativity has a transversal presence in contemporary society. It promotes growth and it is the root of various other concepts. From John Howkins's Creative Economy to Richard Florida's Creative Class, creativity exceeds the artistic realm, being an active agent and solving complex problems, particularly when it comes to the cities. Creativity appears on the megascale first, before it can be transferred to a small scale. Based on the need to take local action, the encouragement of urban micro-plans generate creative results; hence, Bottom Up initiatives are born. Bottom Ups are constantly manifesting and being proliferated all around us, in unusual territories. This article discusses the polyvalent, hybrid urban structures, similarly present in the cities of Paris, New York and São Paulo (respectively at the Promenade Plantée, High Line and Elevado Costa e Silva, the latter also known as Minhocão). Furthermore, this article is concerning the non-technological and innovative microscale realm within those cities, as well as describes creative actions that hybridize, ressignify and reinvent many territories.

This chapter investigates the consequences of local ‘scenes’ for urban development. It treats the particular constellation of amenities in a place – cafes, galleries, pubs, music venues, fashion houses, dance clubs, antique shops, restaurants, fruit stands, convenience stores and the like – as constituting the local scene. These constellations of amenities define the scene by making available an array of meaningful experiences to residents and visitors. Scenes give a sense of drama, authenticity and ethical significance to a city’s streets and strips. Depending on its particular configuration of amenities, a vibrant scene can transform an urban area into a theatrical place to see and be seen (glamorously, transgressively or in other ways), an authentic place to explore and affirm local, ethnic or national identities (among others), an ethical place to share and debate common values and ideals (such as tradition or self-expression). The availability of these experiences varies substantially across and even within cities and regions. These variations have significant consequences for urban economies and populations.

Creative Spaces: Urban Culture and Marginality in Latin America, 2019

This paper is an Afterword to the volume Creative Spaces, edited by Adriana Massidda and Niall Geraghty. As well as reviewing the main lines of argument of the book, this chapter examines what "creativity" may mean in an urban context, in its imaginary, material and political dimensions. It engages with recent concepts elaborated by urban theorist AbdouMaliq Simone, from which the word "uninhabiting" of the title is taken.

Ilja Van Damme, Bert De Munck and Andrew Miles (eds.), Unlocking the Creative City: Re-assembling why cities are agents of change and innovation, 2017

Тhe idea of creative city/Тhe urban policy debate | Cracow

Activating Values in Urban Transitions: A novel approach to urban innovation in Romania , 2021

The study presented in the accompanying publication illustrates a novel approach to urban innovation that we call a Values-Based Urban Living Laboratory (VBULL). It demonstrates the importance of imagination, memory, and active power-sharing in achieving sustainable, community-supported innovation, аnd it provides ample evidence for the centrality of artists and artistic processes in the work. In realizing a VBULL, artists are catalysts for imagination; they add layers of critical remembering, and they communicate possible pathways for sharing power. The role that art plays in urban innovation is not just representational. Far more than pretty pictures, the artists engaged in this effort created the aesthetic and affective platform for meaningful participation. They did this by creating a space for collective imagination, or what is called civic imagination.¹ This active imagination, shared with a community of people, serves to bind different stakeholder groups and communities together with common purpose. Artistic practices of all sorts are emerging in urban innovation settings. Urban comics and graphic narratives are growing in popularity as well as recognition in a range of interdisciplinary formations. A series of recent studies use it as a referential tool to understand the representation of cities and the shaping of urban spatialities,² as well as the reimagining and rethinking of cities' materialities,³ in new territories or geographies.⁴ ¹Henry Jenkins, Gabriel Peters-Lazaro, and Sangita Shresthova, Popular Culture and the Civic Imagination: Case Studies of Creative Social Change (New York University Press, 2019). ²Dominic Davies, Urban comics: Infrastructure and the global city in contemporary graphic narratives (Routlege, 2019). ³Benjamin Franse, Visible cities, global comics: Urban images and spatial form (University Press of Mississippi, 2019). ⁴Giada Peterle, Comics as a Research Practice: Drawing Narrative Geographies Beyond the Frame (Routlege, 2021).

PUBLIC ART, URBAN ARTS ON AESTHETICS, PRACTICES AND LANGUAGES IN THE CITY, 2023

In the last decade, urban creativity has manifested itself in many proximity spaces, in particular, among its visual expressions, with the 'new muralism' (unlike 'graffiti writing' and 'street art'). This has corresponded with an often-desired resignification of public spaces that has affected the geographically, politically and linguistically more marginal territories. In such uncertain areas, networks of meaning have developed, i.e., homogeneous spaces which, simultaneously or diachronically, have begun to concentrate a plurality of works in relation to the territory to which they belong and the community. This phenomenon has been investigated in the following work, which proposes the definition of urban creativity systems. The work also deepens, among the many case studies, the urban creativity program for the social called "Parco dei Murales" conceived and promoted by INWARD-National Observatory on Urban Creativity, launched in collaboration with the resident community in a social housing complex in the Ponticelli district in Naples.

The role of creative workers in stimulating urban growth and employment has been the subject of intense recent discussions. This chapter reviews the lineage of the debate, illustrating that although there is no doubt that the cultural creative sector is an increasing part of the new urban economy, the wider concept of what creativity constitutes, how it is measured, and how it relates to urban life in general, is less clear. One of the most recent and key proponents of the Creative City, Richard Florida has gone further than his predecessors arguing that talent in the so-called creative class, combined with technology and tolerance, are the 3T's for future economic success. Traditional ideas in urban and regional economics have been reversed as he suggests that if cities attract talent the high technology companies will follow. Despite the success that this approach has met in policy circles and the value of the idea in stimulating support for the arts, culture, and regeneration, there are clear flaws. Researchers increasingly argue that there is no proven causality between the presence of the creative class and urban success, while the adoption of these strategies has significantly contributed to state sponsored gentrification and greater marginalization within cities.