by Max Barry

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Region: The Democratic Republic

Creative cities developed in the Philippines, Koreas, and Japan.

Creative city 

Creativity and imagination in urban activities
The creative city when introduced was seen as aspirational; a clarion call to encourage open-mindedness and imagination implying a dramatic impact on organizational culture. Its philosophy is that there is always more creative potential in a place. It posits that conditions need to be created for people to think, plan and act with imagination in harnessing opportunities or addressing seemingly intractable urban problems.

This requires infrastructures beyond the hardware - buildings, roads or sewage. Creative infrastructure is a combination of the hard and the soft. The latter includes a city’s mindset, how it approaches opportunities and problems; its atmosphere and incentives and regulatory regime. To be a creative city the soft infrastructure includes  A highly skilled and flexible labor force; dynamic thinkers, creators , and implementers. In the creative city, it is not only artists and those involved in the creative economy who are creative, although they play an important role. Creativity can come from any source including anyone who addresses issues in an inventive way be it a social worker, a business person, a scientist or a public servant. Creativity is not only about having ideas, but also the capacity to implement them.

It advocates that a culture of creativity be embedded in how urban stakeholders operate. By encouraging and legitimizing the use of imagination within the public, private and community spheres, the ideas bank of possibilities and potential solutions to any urban problem will be broadened. This requires infrastructures beyond the hardware - buildings, roads or sewage. Creative infrastructure is a combination of the hard and the soft. The latter includes the mindset of a city’s citizens, how they approach opportunities and problems; and the city’s atmosphere and incentives and regulatory regime. To be a creative city the soft infrastructure includes: a highly skilled and flexible labour force; dynamic thinkers, creators and implementers. Creativity is not only about having ideas, but also the capacity to implement them.

The creative city identifies, nurtures, attracts and sustains talent so it is able to mobilize ideas, talents and creative organizations. The built environment – the stage and the setting - is crucial for establishing the milieu. A creative milieu is a place that contains the necessary requirements in terms of hard and soft infrastructure to generate a flow of ideas and inventions. A milieu can be a building, a street, an area or neighbourhood, a city or a region.

The popularity of creativity came about because of the increased recognition that the world, along with its economic, social and cultural structures was changing dramatically. This was driven in part by information technology revolution. Coping with these changes required a re-assessment of cities’ resources and potential and a process of necessary re-invention on all fronts.

Cultural resources are embodied in peoples' creativity, skills and talents. They are not only things like buildings, but also symbols, activities and the repertoire of local products in crafts, manufacturing and services. Urban cultural resources include the historical, industrial and artistic heritage of assets including architecture, urban landscapes or landmarks. They also include local and indigenous traditions of public life, festivals, rituals or stories as well as hobbies and enthusiasms. Language, food and cooking, leisure activities, fashion are all part of a city’s cultural resources, as are subcultures and intellectual traditions that can be used to express the specialness of a location. They include the range and quality of skills in the performing and visual arts and the creative industries. An appreciation of culture should shape the technicalities of urban planning and development rather than being seen as a marginal add-on to be considered after housing, transport and land-use have been dealt with. This focus draws attention to the distinctive, unique and special in any place.

The installment of new innovations include an improved lightweight home portable windmills, enhanced structural machine portable plastic roads, complex agricultural canal irrigation systems, underground water storage tanks with a multilayer of filtration systems, enhanced air filtration systems, dedicated no cars zone public markets and business centers, and fencing systems designed to prevent an infestation of unwanted dangerous insects and pests, such as mosquitoes. The prioritization of such implementations will be established in capital cities in all member states and then into other major cities down to rural towns. 

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