Charles Landry

Charles Landry
Charles Landry in July 2011
Born	1948 United Kingdom
Occupation	Writer, urban planner
Language	English
Nationality	British
Subject	Urban planning
Literary movement	Comedia
Notable works	The Creative City: A Toolkit for Urban Innovators
Website
www.charleslandry.com

Charles Landry is best known for having written the book The Creative City: A Toolkit for Urban Innovators. The creative city has now become a global movement to rethink the planning, development and management of cities. Previously he founded the think tank Comedia in 1978, which pioneered the connection between culture, creativity and city transformation.

Charles Landry was born in 1948 and brought up and educated in Britain, Germany and Italy. Prof. Charles Landry is a Master of International Urban Creativity with The Beijing DeTao Masters Academy (DTMA), a high-level, multi-disciplined, application-oriented higher education institution in Shanghai, China.

Charles Landry coined the term the creative city in the late 1980s in response to the dramatic economic and social changes happening at that time. He argues that in such changing circumstances creativity at every level is required to address and adapt appropriately. He posits that conditions need to be created for people to think, plan and act with imagination in harnessing opportunities or addressing seemingly intractable urban problems. This means a city needs to embed a culture of creativity in the way it operates and to infuse how all of its organizations operate. Initially there was a focus on the contribution of the arts and the creative industries in driving innovation in cities and helping to make them distinctive. Increasingly he has emphasized how the organizational culture needs to change to unleash the potential, resources and assets of a city. Traditional hierarchical structures restrict ideas generation and rethinking.

He contrasts the urban engineering approach to cities with creative city making. In the former there is a focus on the physical infrastructure or the hardware of the city, in the latter equal attention is paid to both hardware and software issues. Software is the human dynamics of a place, its connections and relationships as well as atmosphere.

In his follow up book, The Art of City Making, he discusses "the sensory landscape of cities" and how creativity needs to change its focus and be linked to an ethical foundation. This he calls being creative "for the world" so cities give something back to the wider community. He argues that the popularity of the term creativity is in danger of hollowing out the concept and making it meaningless. A main focus of creativity should be on addressing global issues and behavioural issues such as climate change or the balance between rich and poor. In addition a role of creativity is to help make cities more distinctive given the danger of homogeneity and global branding.