"Smart City" is an award-winning, weekly radio program hosted and produced by Carol Coletta. Carol interviews with the world's smartest thinkers on urban life and opportunities for cities. The result is to take an in-depth look at urban life, the people, places, ideas and trends shaping cities it showcases. It is required listening for planners, elected officials, downtown developers, and researchers in worldwide. An interview with John Thackara who shares his expertise on creativity and cities.

CC: You gave a lecture to the "Creativity And The City Conference" held in Amsterdam. I wish I had been there to hear it and to see the sparks fly after you gave it. You titled your lecture, "The Post Spectacular City". In this lecture you skewer the so called "Creative Class" for the, in your words, "catatonic spaces that despoil our physical and perceptual landscape". In fact you charge that the legacy of the creative class is meaningless, narcissistic cities. You obviously don't think much of the creative class. Why?

JT: The problem dates back to the extraordinary success of Richard Florida who wrote a book called The Rise of the Creative Class. It did two things that have skewed, I think, the way people think about their cities. First he provided lots of data about the existence of people called "creatives" and how much money they bring in the forms of jobs or new business to a place. His data gave authority and respectability to the idea that the presence of creative people is, per se, good for cities. But the second thing that happened was that, all over the world, planners - who are not really groovy people - saw in Florida's book an excuse to mix more with groovy people. I've been in cities throughout Europe and in Asia where people hold Richard Florida's book in their hands as if it's a kind of guidebook to making a place special. What bugs me is that they tend to perceive "creatives" as a breed apart - the kind of people who go to smart restaurants and wear Prada shoes. The word "creative" gets interpreted as form of consumerism rather than a condition of being genuinely creative and different.

CC: You run a network, a worldwide network of visionary designers, thinkers and grass root innovators, as you call them. They are surely creative people. You don't seem to consider them as part of this movement described in Richard Florida's work.

JT: To be brutally honest I probably am, as are you, a member of the creative class. We appear in the lists of professionals in Richard's book when he measures how many of us there are. What I find objectionable is the implication that only members of the creative class do creative things. My fundamental problem is that when the concept is used to plan cities you end up with a ghetto filled with creative people in one bit of town. Some planners and developers I've met think that because there are "creatives" in a particular area, property values will go up, chic restaurants will come in and so on. But for me, the most exciting cities are where unexpected things happen in unexpected places on the edge of town in unglamorous locations and that's how cities in the past have become interesting places. The danger is that the creative class idea will achieve the opposite of what people set out to do.

CC: Which do think are the most exciting cities today, John?

JT: I am stimulated by all sorts of strange places. I'll give you a couple of examples - one big, one small. The city of Calcutta in India is a remarkable city because it's one of the most intensively walked cities in the world despite being rather large, 15-16 million. What's special about it is that it has managed to work despite most people agreeing that it's a planner's nightmare. For me, Calcutta is the kind of place that no planner holding a creative class manual would ever easily create. The other places I find interesting and just stimulating are small unglamorous towns all over Europe. I was in an obscure small place called Nexo on an island called Bonholm near Poland, which is one of the many hundreds of fishing ports in Europe. The fish have gone, but the people have a deeply rooted culture of fishing and they're trying to figure out now, "What do we do with our lives?". Here is a place where people are up against it and have no choice but to be creative just to survive. So, the people in this small place are coming up with lots of very interesting ideas.

CC: But would you want to live in Calcutta?

JT: I could live in Calcutta. I would probably find a quiet area with less of the level of racket and noise you find on the main drags.

CC. Do you really think that communication networks will enable us to live an active life and build stronger relationships? Tell me what you see as the possibilities.

JT: I think the more I look at the inflated promises made for technology, the more I come to the conclusion that the simple, unmediated, person-to-person experiences are what we find most valuable - indeed which are most valuable. I think we should have rather modest ambitions for technology. We're not going to be obsessed by tech in the next decade in the same way that we were in the past. Tech will become like water or electricity. It does things for us. It provides a means to communicate. It provides a stimulus for us to meet. But we won't think very much about it.

CC: But you think about it in a rather new way. You talk about technology or networked communications as allowing, giving one access to people and you even proposed a new definition of the creative city.

JT: I think a creative city is one in which the innovation is done by regular citizens of all walks of life in ways that we designers and experts don't always anticipate. A creative city is one when you are surprised by the way people get things done in their daily lives. In Bombay, they have this rather famous system for distributing lunch whereby runners take steel pots of food from the house to the working family members somewhere else in the city. It's an incredible distribution system of pots of freshly made food without any computers or mobile phones or anything high-tech at all. It's a hand-made logistics marvel in a city where people felt it important to have that connection of somebody making the food for the partner. It's a social obligation, so people find a way to do it.

CC: You talk about India. Your "Doors East" event in Bangalore suggests that India is becoming a centre of design. It seems that there's a certain conceit in the American idea that we'll only send to India those jobs that are at the bottom of the value chain. Tell me what's really happening in Bangalore in particular in terms of design and the kind of thinking that you and your network are doing.

JT: It would be a tough thing to summarize any of these situations because there are lots of things going on that are hard for visitors to understand. Just to give you one example of something which is a direct U.S. connection, General Electric has a campus in Bangalore with 3,000 researchers on it, doing very high level applied chemistry in polymers, plastics and new materials, it employs post-graduates, PhD's and scientists principally from Indian universities. I was told there are groups of scientists on this campus who manage to develop polymers in 1/5th of the time and at a much lower cost simply because of their innate cultural innovativeness of getting things done.

The majority of the population in many Asian cities lives in shanty towns that play a crucial role in keeping cities and their economy running. Indian users of technology-based devices cannot rely on formal networks of distribution, support, and maintenance: these are often incomplete, unimaginative or unrealistically priced. They therefore turn to the temporary fixes, or "jugaads", carried out by Indian street technicians. An army of pavement-based engineers keeps engines, television tubes, compressors and other devices working. The irony is this: many bureaucrats (and property profiteers) in Asia want to get rid of these so-called suitcase entrepreneurs; but in the North, proponents of 'creative cities' are desperate to foster a comparable level of small-scale industries and street-level productivity. The dilemma of trying to make a place created by design is that you end up doing the opposite.

This is why we are now encountering the strange dilemma that un-designed urban areas are now understood to be sites of social innovation. Laurent Gutierrez and Valerie Portefaix, who are MapOffice in Hong Kong, have published a stunning new book, HK Lab 2, which contains photography, maps, and writing about the Special Administrative Region and China's Pearl River Delta. When not working in the informal economy, a floating population of more than 15 million migrant workers sleeps in dormitories so small that there is no room to accumulate consumer goods. As a result, new patterns of living, consuming, and play have emerged; these challenge traditional notions.
In Europe, interest is also growing in so-called "free zones" as breeding grounds for creativity. A report from Urban Unlimited also called The Shadow City compares free zones in Rotterdam and Brussels with other examples in Berlin, Helsinki, Vienna and Naples. The report promotes the idea that some areas be left deliberately unplanned - protected, even, from the predations of politicians, social reformers, and developers. Now there's a thought: saving cities from design in the name of creativity.

CC: How does the design conversation in Bangalore differ from the conversation about design in Amsterdam or even the U.S.?

JT: What's interesting about it is that you have people who combine lifestyles that are 2,000 years old together with the very latest technology and network thinking. That's exciting.

CC: In your lecture, you say that most businesses operate in a highly localized geography. You emphasize that local conditions and trading patterns, networks, skills and culture, are critical success factors. Do you think that will continue to be the case in our networked world?

JT: This is a fascinating question. It was in a book called Telecosm by George Gilder, that I first read about something called "The Law of Locality". It transpires that when people are deciding how much capacity to put in a telephone or a communication network they assume, based on historical patterns, that the 70%-80% of all traffic is local in the sense it's between one or more people within a 50 km area. This does not mean that globalization or global communication flows are going to stop - but we need to keep a sense of geographical and cultural perspective. Locality is a bit like the jet stream in the weather: you have weather that is global, with big currents of air or water and climate change happening at a macro level. That is how I think of the big financial flows of the global economy. And don't forget, 97% of the global economy is speculation.

But the great majority, I think 95%, of companies by number, if not by value, operate in a small area with a limited number of clients and don't even grow very much. We're taught to believe that all healthy businesses are growing, spreading around the world, and changing all the time - but that simply doesn't reflect the reality of normal life in many places.

CC: The conference "New Design Cities" in Montreal asks a couple of questions. What is a design metropolis? How does a city become one? How to answer those questions?

JT: I'm going to change the question! I'm not at all sure that if I were a city, I would want to be a design metropolis! That idea suggests an arid monoculture that only contains designers, architects, artists and PR consultants. I'd hate to live in or even visit such a place. Or you might end up with the problems of somewhere like Venice, a 700 year old design city being killed by tourists. If you make your city a fantastically well-designed one with beautiful objects and beautiful restaurants and beautiful people everywhere it's either going to be boring or overrun by coach loads of people coming to look at the design. I don't argue that cities should be badly designed and unpleasant to visit - but I do think we have to be careful of turning them all into perfect little places.

CC: If you were mayor of a city or civic leader and you aspired to have a creative city, in the way you describe it, what would be on your 'to do' list?

JT: I would ask designers to help me organize workshops about alternative futures for my town. Or maybe just have lunch on a regular basis with my fellow citizens. At this lunch, I would say, "What do we find valuable about our town that is different to the other towns that we know?" I'd focus on one simple question, "What is special about our place?" People tell you things you didn't realize were there, or didn't necessarily appreciate.
For example, I recently invited a group of cultural innovators to Bredda, a medium sized Dutch town, to discuss the topic: what would it mean to design for fast and slow speeds in a High Speed Train environment? High Speed Train travel is an advanced form of mobility, but we needed to think how might we add social and cultural value to the places we reach by High Speed Trains which are spreading all over Europe.

Our workshop touched on such topics as "High Speed Movement" and "Slow Encounter", "Mapping Local Knowledge", or "Living Memory". The idea was to develop a series of concrete proposals, which could be commissioned at a later stage. But what brought it to life was the participation of local people on an equal basis with the design experts.
Breda is not unique in its aspirations. A number of cities in high-speed Europe share similar ambitions. Each one wants to be the centre of a network; to be culture-based; to have a knowledge economy. It seemed that creative people don't want to live in a ghetto, and they hate being told what to do. If you try to plan creativity, it usually refuses to happen. Creativity does not just exist among a specialized creative class, or in special activities. Creativity is better thought of as an aspect of the ordinary activities of daily life, from preparing food, to navigating around the city.

Another example are fishing towns. They've been fishing for 150 years. That's all they know - except it's not all they know. Once you start talking, it emerges that what they know about is the sea. They know about boats. They know about building boats. They know about weather. They know about all sorts of stuff that doesn't necessarily include catching fish. Theses communities have a fantastic amount of knowledge and interesting stories to tell. What's beginning to happen is that these towns that thought they were finished are realizing that because they are by the sea, because they have this knowledge, and culture, they actually have a rather interesting future.

I'd also ask myself: is my city as diverse as it could be? Mixed societies seem to innovate more than homogeneous ones. Some friends of mine at "Comedia" in the UK have launched an eighteen-month project across cities in several countries called The Intercultural City to find out how interactions between cultures might be formed into new products, services, and styles - and how these then spread. The idea is to provide policy makers in city development with evidence and a toolkit of techniques with which to encourage greater intercultural innovation.
In Europe, interest is growing in so-called 'free zones' as breeding grounds for creativity.

IN THE BUBBLE

We're filling up the world with technology and devices, but we've lost sight of an important question: What is this stuff for? What value does it add to our lives? These are the issues explored in: "In the Bubble: Designing in a Complex World", a new book by John Thackara. Described as a "design guru, critic and business provocateur" by Fast Company, Thackara is also author of "Design after Modernism", "Lost in Space: A Traveler's Tale", "Winners! How Successful Companies Innovate by Design", and other books.
"In the Bubble" is about a world based less on stuff, and more on people.Thackara describes a transformation that is taking place now - not in a remote science fiction future; it's not about, as he puts it, "the schlock of the new" but about radical innovation already emerging in daily life.

John Thackara, In the Bubble: Designing in a Complex World , The MIT Press, 31 May 2005, £19.95, 288 pp.

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