Cities And Creativity From The Renaissance To The Present

Download or read book Cities and Creativity from the Renaissance to the Present written by Ilja Van Damme and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-09-18 with total page 433 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume critically challenges the current creative city debate from a historical perspective. In the last two decades, urban studies has been engulfed by a creative city narrative in which concepts like the creative economy, the creative class or creative industries proclaim the status of the city as the primary site of human creativity and innovation. So far, however, nobody has challenged the core premise underlying this narrative, asking why we automatically have to look at cities as being the agents of change and innovation. What processes have been at work historically before the predominance of cities in nurturing creativity and innovation was established? In order to tackle this question, the editors of this volume have collected case studies ranging from Renaissance Firenze and sixteenth-century Antwerp to early modern Naples, Amsterdam, Bologna, Paris, to industrializing Sheffield and nineteenth-and twentieth century cities covering Scandinavian port towns, Venice, and London, up to the French techno-industrial city Grenoble. Jointly, these case studies show that a creative city is not an objective or ontological reality, but rather a complex and heterogenic "assemblage," in which material, infrastructural and spatial elements become historically entangled with power-laden discourses, narratives and imaginaries about the city and urban actor groups.

Download or read book Journal of Cultural Management and Cultural Policy/Zeitschrift für Kulturmanagement und Kulturpolitik written by Constance DeVereaux and published by transcript Verlag. This book was released on 2020-07-31 with total page 235 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Journal of Cultural Management and Cultural Policy offers international perspectives on a wide range of issues in cultural management and cultural policy research and practice. Revisiting the conceptual and theoretical foundations that have informed discourses, research, and cultural policy development on creative cities to date, this issue offers perspectives on creativity off the beaten path. The contributions provide critical reflections on different notions and narratives of creativity, examine the potential and downsides of creativity as a development tool, and integrate perspectives from cities and regions that are often overlooked in the Anglo-Saxon-dominated creativity discourse. Researchers and policymakers who are new to the field of creative cities will gain useful insights into theories and methods on creative city discourse, and those who are already knowledgeable in the field will be provided with fresh ideas and voices that pose the potential to reframe and rethink the role of creativity in theory and practice.

Download or read book Advanced Introduction to the Creative City written by Charles Landry and published by Edward Elgar Publishing. This book was released on 2019 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Written by the leading authority Charles Landry, inventor of the concept of the creative city, this timely book offers an insightful and engaging introduction to the field. Exploring the development of the concept, it discusses the characteristics of cities, the qualities of creativity, the creative and regeneration repertoires and the gentrification dilemma. Other key topics of this definitive work include ambition and creativity, cities and psychology, digitization and the creative bureaucracy.

Download or read book Creativity from Suburban Nowheres written by Ilja Van Damme and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2023-07-26 with total page 310 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Looking at suburbs as places of creativity gives rise to novel and thought-provoking narratives that typically run counter to the idea that suburbs are sites of "ordinary," "mundane," and "everyday" practices. Far from being geographies of "nowhere" – dull, materialistic, and monotone – suburbs are unpacked as being heterogeneous and historically layered places of living, work, and creation. Situating creativity in place and time, Creativity from Suburban Nowheres displaces mainstream understandings of creativity and widespread stereotypes commonly associated with the suburbs. Contributors explore the particular forms of creativity that suburbs elicit both in the process of their making, materialization, and community construction, and in the myriad ways in which suburbs are inhabited and experienced. They highlight accounts of suburbs as places that give people the space and latitude to shape individual and collective identities through creative practices at odds with mainstream culture, and often remote from the classic agglomeration "assets" associated with inner cities. Anchored in historical and geographical research, this volume highlights how and in what forms creativity should be understood in the suburbs, why and when creativity can be found, and how the notion of suburban creativity overthrows ingrained and dominant normative viewpoints. Rather than seeing creativity arise despite its suburban location, Creativity from Suburban Nowheres illuminates the emancipatory potential of suburbs for creativity.

Download or read book Knowledge and the Early Modern City written by Bert De Munck and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-08-20 with total page 391 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Knowledge and the Early Modern City uses case studies from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries to examine the relationships between knowledge and the city and how these changed in a period when the nature and conception of both was drastically transformed. Both knowledge formation and the European city were increasingly caught up in broader institutional structures and regional and global networks of trade and exchange during the early modern period. Moreover, new ideas about the relationship between nature and the transcendent, as well as technological transformations, impacted upon both considerably. This book addresses the entanglement between knowledge production and the early modern urban environment while incorporating approaches to the city and knowledge in which both are seen as emerging from hybrid networks in which human and non-human elements continually interact and acquire meaning. It highlights how new forms of knowledge and new conceptions of the urban co-emerged in highly contingent practices, shedding a new light on present-day ideas about the impact of cities on knowledge production and innovation. Providing the ideal starting point for those seeking to understand the role of urban institutions, actors and spaces in the production of knowledge and the development of the so-called ‘modern’ knowledge society, this is the perfect resource for students and scholars of early modern history and knowledge.

Download or read book The Creativity Complex written by Timon Beyes and published by transcript Verlag. This book was released on 2018-11-30 with total page 259 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Wherever we turn, we find creative practices and creative spaces, creative organizations and creative subjects. At work or in public places, in media representations and in advertisements, on social platforms, in schools and universities: There is a demand to be new and special, conspicuous and singular. How did this creativity complex and its imperative to be creative come about? Which terms and concepts enable us to understand its multiple and partly contradictory forms and processes? Where are its limits? Gathering and interweaving 40 short and incisive essays, this companion maps, investigates and illuminates the contemporary creativity complex.

Download or read book Politics of Urban Knowledge written by Bert De Munck and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-03-23 with total page 207 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book uses 'politics of urban knowledge' as a lens to understand how professionals, administrations, scholars, and social movements have surveyed, evaluated and theorized the city, identified problems, and shaped and legitimized practical interventions in planning and administration. Urbanization has been accompanied, and partly shaped by, the formation of the city as a distinct domain of knowledge. This volume uses 'politics of urban knowledge' as a lens to develop a new perspective on urban history and urban planning history. Through case studies of mainly 19th and 20th century examples, the book demonstrates that urban knowledge is not simply a neutral means to represent cities as pre-existing entities, but rather the outcome of historically contingent processes and practices of urban actors addressing urban issues and the power relations in which they are embedded. It shows how urban knowledge-making has reshaped the categories, rationales, and techniques through which urban spaces were produced, governed and contested, and how the knowledge concerned became performative of newly emerging urban orders. The volume will be of interest to scholars and students in the field of urban history and urban studies, as well as the history of technology, science and knowledge and of science studies.