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Co-creating the Creative City
Communities Entering Policy and Planning Practice
Copyright Remarkk! Consulting, 2007. Distributed under a Creative Commons license:
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.5/ca/

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A Work in Progress...
Municipal Cultural Planning
The Creative Convergence Project
Open Creative Communities
Tools, methods and practices of self-organization and emergence
Creating new spaces for co-creation to happen
Can policy and planning perceive the creative community?
Can the creative community perceive itself?

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Municipal Cultural Planning
Integrating culture into municipal planning - more than a Culture Plan!
A “whole systems” approach to cultural, social and economic development
Four pillars of sustainability: Economic, Cultural, Social and Environmental
Bottom-up resource-based approach: Cultural Mapping
Tangible assets: museums, galleries, theatres, heritage, artists, cultural and
creative industries
Intangible assets: stories, meaning, identity, character, sense of place
Municipal Cultural Planning: the strategic and integrated planning and
use of cultural resources in urban and community development

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Creative Convergence Project
Artscape, MaRS Discovery District, Evergreen Foundation, Toronto International Film
Festival Group, Canadian Film Centre, Ontario College of Art & Design
The Cultural Ecology meets the Creative Economy through acts of creative
collaboration
Towards “Collaborative Competitive Advantage”
Place-based approach to creative sector development:
Hubs, Districts and City are platforms for sustainability, collaboration, interaction and
intersection
Research:
Mapping the creative sector: core arts, cultural industries and creative services
Surveying creative people about the relationship between place and practice
World Cafes: open conversations with creative neighbours

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Critique of the Creative Class
The “cultural value” of products and services in the global economy IS increasing
Place quality IS important to economic development
Gentrification effects need to be mitigated for long-term sustainability of the cultural
milieu
Something appears to be emerging, but is it a “Class”?
Artists and Marketing Professionals?
Poets and Hollywood Film Producers?
Dancers and Software Developers?

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What
Connects
The
Creative
City?
PLACE?
PRACTICE?
VALUES?

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New Lenses:
Communities
Communities of Practice
Communities of Proximity
Communities of Interest
Communities of Values

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Virtual community
meets physical place.

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Toronto TransitCamp
“Not a complaints department,
a solutions playground”
Passion and fun meet practice
Diverse communities
Design Slam
Institutional change
Instantiating community
Modelling for replication

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Results for TTC
Noticeable shift in relationship: from combative to collaborative
A new model for community engagement and communication
New open-source projects: openttc.ca, opentransit.info
TTC received expertise unavailable in-house
New strategies for a web site RFP:
embraces community and peer-production concept
maximizes brand and service impact with limited resources

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Modelling TransitCamp
Discovery and play
passion
fun
practice
Intersections of communities
professional and amateur
interest groups and creators
Community leadership
shared values
alignment of self-interest

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From Burning Man...
...to transit geeks??
http://flickr.com/photos/thomashawk/150268856/

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Open Creative Communities
Open: No artificial barriers to entry; membership comes from creative
citizenship, both professional and amateur
Creative: Production of ideas and inventions that are personal, original and
meaningful
Community: any group of individuals who interact and share some common
characteristics; those characteristics may include practices, interests, values
and proximity
“What is an Open Creative Community?”:
http://remarkk.com/2007/02/25/essay-what-is-an-open-creative-community/

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City Repair Project, Portland
Text
How do we
create space
for play?

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What is Open Space?
A meeting/conference method
“The invitation to take responsibility for discussing your passion”
“Unconference” - the participants create the content
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unconference
Principles of self-organization
Law of Two Feet
Supplements formal, explicit learning with tacit knowledge and
network building

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What is compelling to me?

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Design for Energy
Communities are naturally occurring social systems
Social systems demonstrate emergent biological properties
Starts with passion and human desires
Intentional communities require design of a loose framework of rules/
norms
Play is what happens in the space between the rules
Tapping emergence means activating passion and the play instinct

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Collaboration

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Web 2.0 is Us
Collaboration inside the organization
Collaboration among stakeholder organizations
Collaboration with diverse communities
Mass Collaboration

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What do we want to do together?
Awareness
Meet
Learn
Enable
Practice
Share
Succeed
Tell

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Co-Creation Rules
Yes, and... Love the 1%ers
Make an offer to do something Get vernacular
What you want me to do, and why? Make mistakes
Give me a platform Lower barriers
Create opportunity Let the mess show
Play Share your secrets
Understand the environment Be changed
Work at it Show the humanity
Adapted from J. Moore & J. Cherkoff, http://www.changethis.com/29.03.CoCreationRules,

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Mark Kuznicki
http://remarkk.com
mark@remarkk.com