Urban Landscape and an ecology of creativity

The paper “Urban Landscape and an ecology of creativity” by Silvia Serreli explores some experiences of transformation of contemporary urban space which refer to two extremes: on the one hand, the dominant centres of the global economy, the nodes that group together the higher functions of leadership, management and production; on the other, places with “few connections”, bypassed places, which do not constitute periphery, but external arenas, regions excluded from the current worldsystem. In particular the first experience concerns the centralities that have large-scale effects and are localised within the city or in extraurban territory; creative islands belong to these forms of agglomeration in the form of entrepreneurial epicentres (integrated service-technology production systems), high-culture epicentres, popular leisure epicentres, culture and leisure waterfront epicentres. These forms of agglomeration, which present advantages and critical points, nurture intercity competition to become part of the system of localising preferences of the new profiles of the post-modern societies, the creative classes. The second experience explores situations “in transition” where forms of resistance to transformation persist, positions of marginality, external territories. Through the transformations of the landscapes of Greece, from the rural domain towards new forms and styles of life linked in particular to tourism, an interpretative scheme is proposed which escapes from the consolidated conceptualisations of space. For this the paper resorts to certain studies in the field of geography where the dominant processes arespecified using the terms enworldment, unworldment, deworldment and transworldment. In the third experience hybrid landscapes are dealt with, which are strongly rooted in the place, on the one hand, and constantly exposed to transformations. Geographical proximity and socio-cultural proximity are the two conceptual categories to which reference is made to decode the new spatial modalities of the city, the elements that attract the creative class. The evolution of the new generation of cultural entrepreneurship – also called Culturepreneurs – is an interesting example in the large European cities for interpreting new spatial strategies and of social microformations. The city, within its apparent disorder, offers the ideal places for developing new platforms for social interaction. An example of great urban importance are the experimental laboratories where the Culturepreneurs propose, supply and invent new urban narrations after selecting distinct locations and specific places of the city. Their creative and innovative activities and art practices combine local capacities with creative knowledge and new ideas. These situations may have a decisive role as incubators and attractors for the formation of new, creative knowledge milieus, in which relations are established at a local level between the global networks and the novel creative place-making methods and have great importance in the redefinition of relations between city and inhabitants.