Creative Cities Summit

Last week, I had the opportunity to attend the Creative Cities Summit in Detroit.  This was one of the most thought-provoking conferences I ever attended.  I was only able to attend on Tuesday, but I wanted to share thoughts from some of the great intellectuals on our planet.

Pier Di Cicco - Toronto's Poet Laureate

•  Failure is the rubric for success

•  The grandest schemes start with the desire to give of yourself to someone else

Tom Wujek - Fellow, Autodesk (makers of AutoCAD)

•  Every 11 months, the amount of information we are exposed to doubles. We can become blind to rapid change

•  "Continuous Partial Attention" - Many of us are waiting for something else to grab our attention, never really focusing

•  Innovation defined - capacity to create something new, useful, and inventive. It should foster insight, serve a need, and be creative

•  What are barriers to innovation? long development times, lack of team coordination, culture of risk aversion

•  If you want an idea to succeed, put in on one large piece of paper and illustrate with pictures, graphs, etc.: provide for a 3- 5 minute perception time

•  State of FLOW - creativity happens when there is a state of flow. Activities that break your flow hinder creativity

•  Typical innovation process creates silos that are separate and rigid. We need more prototypes and quick feedback as we model change

•  Visual thinking by creating mental frames - We each have a mental frame about a topic at hand - we can make great process if we visualize these mental frames and share them with a group

Doug Farr - The Farr Group

•  Our biggest challenge is establishing a worthy shared vision of where we want to go

•  Average new dwelling grew 60% in size from 1970 to 2005, more than eating up the savings in energy efficiency from better construction

•  We need to dismantle carbon subsidies

•  Driving is the new smoking. We need to make it socially undesirable - like smoking is already: "That SUV makes you look fat"

Richard Florida - Author and Professor, University of Toronto

• We are experiencing a fundamental economic transformation that happens every 200-300 years

•  The concept of a "knowledge economy" is limited

•  "Creative economy" is the new model

•  Physical labor fueled the industrial revolution. The ability to capture natural resources and apply physical labor on a grand scale is gone

•  The new economy is fueled by the creative class: doctors and scientists, lawyers, technicians, artists, inventors, musicians, educators, planners and architects, etc.

•  This is the most massive economic shift in history

•  Three key sectors in our society: creative, services, and manufacturing: More than 50% of wages comes from the creative sector

•  1st principle: everyone is creative

•  Our cities have transformed from being a "melting pot" to a "mosaic". Cultures are being preserved, not blended into one "American" culture (as in the past)

•  2008 - more than 50% of world's population is in urban centers for the

• We are organizing ourselves into larger cities. 80% of Canadians live on 2% of the land

•  There are 40 mega-regions in the world

•  Human happiness is based on three key things: 1) relationships, 2) work, and 3) where you live

•  Communities must deliver safe streets, economic and social opportunity, leadership (not top down, but built from the bottom up), and environmental resources

•  Beware of squelchers - Leaders who dictate and whine

Dean Kamen - Inventor of Segway

•  Quite often, people have to grow up with new ideas to accept them

•  If you are early (ahead of your time), you have to be an evangelist for

• Humans first settled in high density clusters because they wanted to be together. It had nothing to do with real estate costs.

Charles Landry - Comedia UK, Author

•  You must first be curious, then imaginative

•  The cities we love we cannot build anymore

•  Great places are contradictory - safe vs. edgy

•  In great places, there is an opportunity for conversation - conviviality

•  Great places exude possibilities of giving back

•  Change requires the "management of fragility"

•  Be best, not in, but for the world

•  15 years ago, 80% chose their location based on job/company. 64% now

• You must think at the edge of your competence, but be guided by ethics

•  Fail competently so you can learn from it

•  We must be strategically principled and tactically flexible

More can be found at http://creativecitiessummit.com/c/dialogue/

Some serious food for thought.

Regards,

Rod Arroyo

President, clearzoning and Vice President, Birchler Arroyo Associates, Inc.