The unique creativity of great cities, caught in their brief golden ages, should be a topic worth examining. Particularly so, because the so-called real world of industrialists and economists and politicians is now obsessed by the topic of innovation. It is, they incessantly tell us, the key to economic survival: in a dynamic capitalist system, every day more frenetic and invaded by global forces, the nation or the city that fails to innovate is destined to join the ranks of the economic has-beens, its old industries condemned to hopeless competition with the new plants and the cheap labour of the newly industrializing world. And, we are reminded, industry need not even mean industry any more: as the new countries take over manufacturing and do it more cheaply and more efficiently than the old ones, so the old ones will and must shift out of manufacturing and goods-handling into the service sector and the processing of information.

Indeed, in this process of constant change, the most advanced nations may eventually enter, may indeed already be entering, that blissful state imagined in 1930 by John Maynard Keynes: a condition where we no longer need care about the basic economic problem of survival that has plagued the human race since its beginning, but are able at last to do only the things we find agreeable and pleasurable. Keynes unforgettably wrote:


Thus for the first time since his creation man will be faced with his real, his permanent problem ﷓ how to use his freedom from pressing economic cares, how to occupy the leisure, which science and compound interest have won for him, to live wisely and agreeably and well (1) .



But, Keynes warned, none of us can look forward to this new and permanent golden age with any equanimity. For, he pointed out, we have been trained too long to work, not to enjoy. It would be a huge problem for the ordinary person, with no special talents, to occupy him or herself without work; if one needed evidence, one could merely look at the melancholy record of the rich minority anywhere. We would need, as so few of us can, to:


... take least thought for the morrow. We shall once more value ends above means and prefer the good to the useful. We shall honour those who can teach us to pluck the hour and the day virtuously and well, the delightful people who are capable of taking direct enjoyment in things, the lilies of the field who toil not, neither do they spin (2) .



But with this interesting corollary, that even Keynes could never have guessed at: these agreeable activities may themselves become sources of income and of economic growth, may generate new industries of a kind never known to earlier simpler eras. Rich, affluent, cultivated nations and cities can sell their virtue, beauty, philosophy, their art and their theatre to the rest of the world. From a manufacturing economy we pass to an informational economy, and from an informational economy to a cultural economy. During the 1980s and 1990s, cities across Europe - Montpellier, Nimes, Grenoble, Rennes, Hamburg, Cologne, Glasgow, Birmingham, Barcelona and Bologna - have become more and more preoccupied by the notion that cultural industries (a term no longer thought anomalous or offensive) may provide the basis for economic regeneration, filling the gap left by vanished factories and warehouses, and creating a new urban image that would make them more attractive to mobile capital and mobile professional workers (3).

So it matters very much that we try to understand how creativity comes about. It is much more than an academic question. Letting luckless researchers loose in factories will not answer it; a long look back at history might do so.

From:
Sir Peter Hall
Cities in Civilization: Culture, Innovation, and Urban Order.
London, Weidenfeld & Nocolson, 1998


Notes

1. Keynes J. M. Economic possibilities for our Grandchildren. In: Collected Writings, 9. London: Macmillan 1972, p. 328.
2. Keynes 1972, p. 331.
3. Bianchini F. Remaking European Cities: the role of cultural Policies. In: Bianchini, Parkinson M. (eds) Cultural Policy and Urban Regeneration: the West European Experience, Manchester: University Press, 1993, 2, p. 15-16; Landry C. and Bianchini f. The Creative City London: Demos, 1995, p. 28-56.