“But a city is more than a place in space, it’s a drama in time,” noted urban planner and author Charles Landry quotes Patrick Geddes to emphasise the importance of culture and creativity in shaping urban vistas.
And, he tells you that Kochi, with its rich heritage, “a non-renewable resource”; and cosmopolitanism has the potential to become a ‘creative city’.
“Ideally, Kochi can lure talents and creative heads. Bringing universities, in particular, into this fabric can enhance its aspiration to be a creative city. My idea is to transform a city as a campus like the city of Denver,” said Mr. Landry, author of The Creative City , talking on ‘Creative City and the Nomadic World’ at the Pavilion at Cabral Yard at a Let’s Talk programme organised by the Kochi Biennale Foundation.
Mr. Landry said creative places harnessed inventiveness and the growing ‘start-up culture’ here could probably show the way. Having developed a creativity index for the cities, he said a number of factors, from openness and accessibility to enabling infrastructure, proactive political leadership, creative bureaucracy, distinctiveness and vitality, liveability, inclusiveness, public spaces and the like rendered cities creative.
The city could be seen as a sensory system, he said, adding that Indian cities were marred by the invasiveness of advertising.
“Bringing up a child is complex. It is unpredictable. So my idea of city-making goes against the notion of simplicity, which is predictably followed by classical practices. Nowadays, city-making is based mainly on objective concerns rather than on personal experiences of place, of people, their emotional, psychological experience.”
He said there would be underlying anger among people due to divides at various levels.
A creative city, he reckoned, tried to establish an ecology, a culture that made people feel that this added value to what could take place.
Citing the instance of 30 European cities that are doing far better than other cities in the world, Mr. Landry proposed a ‘3.0 city’ concept where collaboration of ideas across borders was essential.
“If Kochi is to emulate this model, it must combine that village feel within a cosmopolitan arena, open to the world but stay local, develop a culture of pooling resources with a sense of preservation, embrace the collaborative imperative and bring different arts together rather than operate within separate boxes,” Mr. Landry said.
