Charles Landry is an urban thinker from Europe who coined the term “creative city” in the late 1980s as a way to describe various economic and social changes happening at the time. Landry’s work calls for the need to create conditions for people to think, plan and act with imagination in harnessing opportunities or addressing seemingly intractable urban problems. His pioneering writings and consulting have innovated the way we think about individual potential and the role of urban centers. This interview took place during Day One of the Creative Places+Spaces conference in Toronto, Canada.

TakingITGlobal: “Do you see youth as key players in the creation of livable cities and communities?”

Charles Landry: “Yes, I do, though I try to step away from our tendency to ‘fragment’ and ‘categorize’ different actors. Of course, if you are going to try and create a place, you clearly need to make a connection between different interests- and, superficially, there are differences, you know, between a young person and an old person. But I think that if we looked closer, we would realize that this may not be the case at all, that these ‘different people’ may be agreeing on a lot of things, but because they haven’t had a chance to interact, they can’t tell that there is a potential for them to come together and collaborate. Now, on a different level, I think planners and city officials sometimes do take into account youth by saying ‘oh we are building a university and it will be the new hub and heart of the city’, but a disconnection remains even in this kind of thinking. Of course it shouldn’t be the case that I would think ‘I want to meet a young person today to learn something from them.’ If we are truly going to learn and connect, I think this process should be much more coincidental, a serendipitous bumping into each other, like this conference might be. It’s irrelevant that you’re younger than me- we’re interested in the same topic, and I think we need to create a context in which we can meet to approach a subject, a problem, or a challenge and focus on precisely that. It’s by focusing on what we having in common that our differences are lessened and we can work together, cross boundaries if you will. You are yourself, and I am myself, but in an interdisciplinary arena we’re not thinking that, we’re thinking ‘what’s the topic?’ And if the topic is ‘livable communities’, then who I am becomes less relevant, because we will be focusing on what we are going to do to create livable communities. And in engaging in that conversation we exchange opinions, we share experiences.”

TIG: I think the kind of open-mindedness and desire to challenge traditional roles you describe is timely and necessary, though I do notice that we are missing a common language. Some of the key words that we keep hearing in these types of conversations- words like openness, interactivity, collaboration- they already resonate deeply with youth, yet we do not see enough young people participating in these conversations. How can we let them know that others believe in their potential and passion? How can we bring them into the spaces and places where these conversations are happening?

“That’s a good point, and I am not going to hide the fact that there is still unbelievable blindness in a lot of these places. Just recently, I was at a conference on Creativity & Innovation in Europe where I was helping facilitate a one-day session on innovation in cities. But when I looked around, I realized that all of the participants were middle-aged white men. There wasn’t even a woman. Now, I am not saying this is always the case- there is certainly more diversity at CP+S, for example- but if we take creativity and do an analysis of what we mean by it, in general, it’s likely to be techno-creativity that dominates the dialogue. So yes, there are areas with unbelievable blindspots. I don’t think I am telling you things you don’t already know, but I would agree with you that there is work to be done to make the conversation more inclusive. The European Union, for example, is working to address this, they are interested in the notion of an intercultural city, so that could be an avenue through which we can bring together different actors and start a conversation that is at once inclusive and diverse.”

TIG: In your opinion, what are some of the most innovative and sustainable cities, and what can global young leaders learn from them?

“There are a couple of examples I am really passionate about. Freiburg, in Germany, has more solar panels in its city of 200 000 residents than the whole of the UK, so to me it is an example of how vision can drive change. 25 years ago, a few visionary citizens got together, formulated a set of principles like the desire to bring people together- rich, poor, ‘old’, ‘young’- with the aim of moving towards carbon neutrality. Freiburg is a great example of a growing city that wanted to guide its growth, and to do that, actors of all kind came together and collaborated to do precisely that. Today, they claim they were able to achieve their vision because they had principles to guide them in the first place.

A second example is Stockholm, or any other Nordic city in Europe where there is a particular focus on inclusion, sustainability and a shared committment to universal living standards. In these countries, the welfare system is seen less as a way to intervene into ‘problem areas’ and more as an enhancing feature of social life… and not just for a few, but for everyone. I think there are a great deal of lessons we could learn from their approach.”