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Cocreating the Creative City
Open Creative Communities meet City Policy & Planning
Copyright Remarkk! Consulting, 2007. Distributed under a Creative Commons license:
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.5/ca/

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Creative Class, Rise!
Richard Florida’s Three-T’s:
Tech n o logy
Talen t
Toler an ce
• In case you haven’t heard, Richard Florida - regional economic development superstar - has chosen to live in Toronto.
• He argues that places that score high in terms of technology, talent and tolerance will outperform their peers in the global economy.

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Florida’s Creative Class
Arts
Architecture & Design
Entertainment & Media
Science & Engineering
paid to create
share a “creative ethos”
are attracted to “creative habitats”
• Florida’s creative class includes everyone from artists and designers to scientists and software developers.
• They are paid to create, share a “creative ethos” and are attracted to certain kinds of “creative habitats”.

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BarCamp to Burning Man
• This is Burning Man, a week-long arts festival that takes place in the Nevada desert where participants cocreate a temporary city of 40,000 inhabitants.
• The community self-organizes for radical self-expression in an atmosphere of radical tolerance.

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Cultural Creative Values
heterarchy: horizontal power & control
reject the materialist notion of success
self-actualizing, integrated and balanced life
believe in authenticity, emphasize relationships
prefer intimate, visceral & engaged learning
idealism, activism, globalism and ecology
believe that a little creative chaos is a good thing
Source: Ray & Anderson (2000), “The Cultural Creatives”
• Cultural creatives believe in horizontal power and control, reject materialism, are self-actualizing, believe in authenticity, prefer engaged styles of learning, are idealistic and global in outlook
and believe that a little creative chaos is a good thing.

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Modernist Values
hierarchy: big-company OR big-government knows
best
support financial materialism
life is compartmentalized into “work”, “family” &
“friends”
climbing the “ladder” of success
industrial paradigm: creation, production, distribution,
consumption are separate and professionalized
being “in control” is a priority
Source: Ray & Anderson (2000), “The Cultural Creatives”
• By contrast, Modernists believe in hierarchy, materialism, live a compartmentalized life, work within a tiny slice of the industry value chain and use control to manage the complexity of work
and life.

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•
BarCamp Values?
• I see links between the BarCamp community and cultural creative values.
• Authenticity is important, hierarchy is shunned;
• They make meaning, think globally, are engaged in their communities and thrive in what some would call a chaotic environment.

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Values-Embedded Technologies
Open standards:
“our systems need to talk”
Open source:
“globalized commons production”
Social networks:
“transparent social identity”
Blogs:
“join the global conversation”
Wikis:
“emergent order from the chaos of
the crowd”
Enterprise 2.0:
“lateral collaboration, silo-busting”
• These values are expressed in the technologies that we adopt and build.
• Open standards, open source, social networks, blogs and wikis reflect cultural creative values
• They are global, horizontal, heterogenous and help us create order from chaos.

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Values-Embedded Practices
Unconferences: “leadership can come from anywhere”
Startups: “be your own boss & change the world”
Conversational marketing: “markets are conversations”
Communities of practice: “peer-led learning”
Peer-production: “wisdom of crowds”
Coworking: “shared workspaces for independents”
Creative Commons: “copyright for the digital age”
• The community also uses practices that are infused with these values.
• Unconferences, Startup culture, the Cluetrain Manifesto, peer-production and the notion of a community of free agents all reflect cultural creative values.

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Coevolution?
Human Capital = Labour + Technology
Cultural values Millennials (born after 1980)
Creative practices Emerging creative communities
Technology tools Social Web
• For economists and city-builders to understand what’s happening to Human Capital, they need to look at our coevolving values, practices and tools.
• this coevolution is seen in the Millennial generation and in the thousands of communities like BarCamp that employ social web tools to self-organize.

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What are the values of the City?
• Policy-makers avoid talking about values in the mistaken belief that their work is values-neutral.
• in order to enable the creative potential in each and every one of us, we need to be explicit about values and we need to consider how to engage the diverse communities of the city in the
collective act of city building.

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City Policy & Planning Paradigm
Developed for and by the industrial economy
Separation of “working” and “living” through zoning
Powers are restrictive, not permissive: “you can’t”, rather than “you can”
Professionalized: “father knows best”
City is struggling under its own weight, unable to adapt quickly enough to a changing
global social and economic environment
Much talk about a “Global Creative City”, but not much to show for it
• City policy and planning practices are embedded in the industrial economy.
• We have segregated work from life, and the city expresses itself in what we can’t do, rather than exploring the possible.
• We cannot wait for government to transition us to the Creative Age on its own.

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City Policy & Planning Paradigm
Developed for and by the industrial economy
Separation of “working” and “living” through zoning
Powers are restrictive, not permissive: “you can’t”, rather than “you can”
Professionalized: “father knows best”
City is struggling under its own weight, unable to adapt quickly enough to a changing
global social and economic environment
Much talk about a “Global Creative City”, but not much to show for it
Who will save us? WE will!
• City policy and planning practices are embedded in the industrial economy.
• We have segregated work from life, and the city expresses itself in what we can’t do, rather than exploring the possible.
• We cannot wait for government to transition us to the Creative Age on its own.

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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
• For example, TransitCamp took the BarCamp model and applied it to the user experience of the TTC and its website.
• Designed to be a safe third place where the transit authority could join the community in creative problem solving;
• the TTC received insight and research from the community unavailable elsewhere.

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• FixMyStreet is a UK open source project that provides a bug-tracker for government services that is outside government control
• Users identify and report local issues and the system forwards them onto the responsible council for action and follow-up.

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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; characteristics 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/
• BarCamp, TransitCamp and Burning Man are “Open Creative Communities”.
• They are open, with no artificial barriers to entry;
• they are involved in the production of ideas and inventions and
• their members share practices, interests, values and geographic proximity

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Virtual community
meets physical place.
• Many online communities demonstrate a desire to come together in physical place.
• While technology makes it possible for us to work together in entirely new and powerful configurations,
• creative people want and need the human connection of face-to-face contact, where tacit knowledge can be exchanged.

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What
Connects
The
Creative
City?
PLACE?
PRACTICE?
VALUES?
• What connects the creative city?
• Is it the places we live and work, the creative practices we employ or the values that we share?
• For regional economic success, governments need to understand, join, support and empower these creative communities.

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City Repair Project, Portland
Text
How do we
create space
for play?
• Open creative communities need space for play, interaction and creative work.
• We need: • coworking spaces; • spaces to hold events; • mental space to explore new ideas; and
• entrepreneurial space to attempt risky new ventures.

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What do we want to do together?
Awareness
Meet
Learn
Enable
Practice
Share
Succeed
Tell
• I challenge this community to imagine itself engaged in the act of creative city-building.
• What do we want to do together?
• I believe that DemoCamp is important because it is fundamentally about story-telling.
• DemoCamp is as much about culture as it is about technology.

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Creative Manifesto for the Web Age?
Mark Kuznicki
http://remarkk.com
• We’ve had the Cluetrain Manifesto for 8 years now.
• Do we need a new creative manifesto for the web age?
• A Manifesto that helps government and companies better understand who we are and the world we want to create?
• I welcome you to join the conversation @ remarkk.com.