Michele's Creative City

Mars - Your notion of the interconnectedness of the creative and non-creative
conceptions is something that, I agree, seems to only be catching on in the
mainstream and policy circles now.

The Creative City

I think of the Creative City in somewhat interconnected, somewhat competing
ways.

For instance, if I base my understanding on my own interpretation of how
creative and non intersect, I come up with the Creative City as a new plan for
negotiating meanings: cultural meanings, artistic meanings, economic meanings,
political meanings, identity meanings, philosophical meaning and
socio-psychological meanings. Essentially, we all engage in dynamics of power
and negotiation every day of our lives. Up to now, as you say, we have left it
up to artists to be the main interpreters of the world around and inside of us.
Then various members of our society take those interpretations and re-interpret
them to somehow fit their sphere of experience, be it economic, political,
social and so forth...

So we have non-artists interpreting the work of artists into things that are
meaningful and useful to them: like the way a song becomes an anthem, becomes a
movement, becomes a political revolution; or he way a painting becomes a vision
for the world, becomes a way of seeing things, becomes a mantra, becomes a way
of doing business...

The Creative City for me has been, up to now, a movement about a way of
organizing city life to more readily incorporate artistic interpretations into
real-world manifestations that serve what we normally conceive of as
non-artistic ends. Despite the movement being focused heavily on Richard
Florida's own vision or interpretation, the rest of us can use this momentum to
insert our own artistic, or non-artistic interpretations and applications onto
the world scene. We start with our city as the hub of our own daily experience,
and sometimes our visions gain a life beyond our cities.

As Taunya so eloquently notes, the important thing to note is that some
interpretations get more lift than others, and so we should be both cognizant
of this power differential, and hopeful that everyone will eventually be able
to contribute to equalizing it, expanding it, and enriching it further.

Michele Anderson