Every city has interesting creative projects, but the issue for Charles Landry is do they positively affect the whole society? Are they changing the city’s DNA?
Macau CLOSER: How did you come up with the concept of ‘creative city’?
Charles Landry: In the late 1980’s there were dramatic transformations in the economy everywhere, including in Britain. I was thinking at that time ‘what are the new resources?’ I thought we needed to create the conditions where people could think, plan and act with imagination. The first areas we looked at were segments like design, music, fashion, etc. because in the mainstream industries we were declined.
What were some of the major challenges you faced?
Although it started from the creative economy sector, at that time called the cultural industries, we said ‘if only one bit is creative but the rest isn’t, this doesn’t work’. To have a creative city, the bureaucracy needs to rethink itself. You can’t, in a system which has an old economy – industrial, hierarchical – develop a new economy which is much more lateral, horizontal, freelance-based, portfolio-based. Therefore, I widened the concept of the creative to include all the elements. What I basically said was ‘what you need is a culture of creativity’. I posed the question: are we talking about creative economy or creativity in the economy? Are we talking about creative culture or a culture of creativity? These are very different.
Now that the movement has become a global one, is that even more of a challenge?
The danger now is it becomes empty, because everybody is using the words when they’re not even being creative. The main problem about this concept is that people might want a bit of creativity here and there, but the main engine of cities is still old-fashioned. In China, for example, they love the creative city but they see it as soft power, which is not like having a creative society.
What are some of the driving forces behind the creative sector nowadays?
In Europe now, everybody knows the creative sector is quite large and it is part of the new economy; the key players know that. A new movement is happening, which is the whole open source and open data movement. It’s something parallel and there’s a real explosion of innovation, which cuts across all the social media, the cloud, open data, the creative economy – that is the emerging world.
Can you give us some good examples of creative cities in Asia?
Bandung in Indonesia is very interesting; also Georgetown in Malaysia, and Kanazawa in Japan is very creative. In every city you look at, there are interesting creative projects. The question is: is it affecting the totality? People in Hong Kong and Macau want the good stuff out of this, but they don’t want the difficult stuff, because a lot of this is challenging. The cities I’ve mentioned are relatively small and that’s not surprising, because to change a city like Shanghai is really difficult.
How can those changes happen?
You need to be a center of excellence for something. Macau is apparently a world center for leisure and entertainment, but are the leaders interested in the question of ‘what is the future of entertainment’? Macau needs to attach to global networks, to be a bit more known. Perhaps you need to identify 1000 ambassadors who know that there is more to Macau. I would connect Macau with some sort of global thing, for example, the Creative Cities Network of UNESCO, and try to hold some of these high-powered meetings. Given that your creative industries budget is 20 million euros a year, which is far more than any budget of any city in Europe, you could really make an impact on this.
So, in that sense is money good for creativity?
Creativity provides people the conditions to think, plan and act with imagination. That’s what I define as creativity: to capacitate people, so they can express themselves, to create connections in an open environment. All that seems relatively difficult here. Where money comes in is that, given we want all these younger people to be a part of this process, rents and spaces are too expensive. You need less expensive spaces.
How would you access the creativity pulse in a city like Macau?
There are four elements: first, identifying a nurturing potential; second, enabling and supporting; third, harnessing and exploiting; and fourth, the lived experience that encourages you to become more interested and curious – it’s a sort of cycle. A place that has a diverse background like Macau, has a fantastic platform to be different and distinctive.
