The invisible hand of city-making:
Charles Landry
The cultural dimension is the invisible hand of city-making, the core through which ultimately all of
our decision-making flows. If a city’s culture is open-minded, potential grows. If it's closed-
minded, it shrinks or nothing happens. But culture is mostly not a central plank of the operating
system for the classic company or city.
A central feature for an urban culture in a globalizing world is the balance between their
distinctiveness and the extent to which cities are merely a showcase for global brands. A thought
experiment reminds us of the power of corporations: there are 35,000 McDonald’s, on average 15
metres wide, that is 525 kilometres; 42,000 Subways totalling 630 kilometres; or KFC, with
19,000 branches and 285 kilometres. With the other top brands, including Burger King, Starbucks
and Taco Bell you could nearly line up a chain across the USA from New York to Los Angeles.
This speculation reminds us of the dreary sameness and blandness of things. But then consider
Venice, an astonishing place, a global powerhouse for many centuries long past. Yet to keep itself,
in a world of austerity, it has to let itself become an advert behind which its maintenance and
repair takes place – think of the Bridge of Sighs and Sisley, or San Mark’s and the giant Trussardi
or Rolex ads.
Then there is the copying phenomenon. There is the real Venice, then a copy as a casino in Las
Vegas, and then a copy of that copy in Macau, where the Venice Grand Canal meanders across the
third of the giant casino and where the gondola ride passes by shops like Zara, H&M and its more
fancy cousins from Bulgari to Prada. And finally there is a copy of a copy of a copy of Venice in its
own railway station.
Think too of names like ‘Soho’ – south of Houston Street in New York or as most believe, the
sound of a hunting cry in London. Soho implies ‘being cool,’ a ‘hipster environment,’ or a ‘creative
place,’ So you see the Soho coffee bar chain or the many Sohos from night clubs to travel agents
across the globe. So they must be ‘cool’. Then there is the supreme Soho of Sohos; the Soho
Galaxy by Zaha Hadid in Beijing. In the competitive battle between cities we can detect some
trends through time. The first is cities seeking to define themselves as ‘a city of culture’,
highlighting their special distinctiveness and vibrancy. The aim is to grab attention and get people
to visit and, ideally, to stay.
On that platform many then projected themselves as ‘cities of knowledge’ focusing on their
learning and research resources and the spillover effects on the local economy, so seeking to
generate a platform through which the city can harness its collective imagination. The last element
in the triad is to say my place is ‘a city of opportunity’, open and helpful to the start-up culture.
Together these threads form a story anchored in vibrancy, diversity and connections.
Another simple, perhaps simplistic, way of trying to define this longer trajectory is to see how
cities have moved from a 1.0 version to a 2.0 one and now are seeking to evolve into a 3.0 type of
a city. The qualities and characteristics of each are different and since every city has a history, we
could call that “City 0.0.”
The ‘soft’ in citymaking focuses on the sensory experience
“City 1.0” is essentially hardware-driven, along the lines, as they say in Australia, of 'Roads, rates
and rubbish'. That view of how a city works, as a machine rather than an organism, fosters top-
down thinking, hierarchical systems of management and a mindset that comes from the factory
age, as if the city is simply a machine to be put together. There is a 1.0 version of planning, which
is less consultative, 1.0 version of the economy, largely focused on larger factories, and a 1.0
verion of culture focusing more attention on cultural containers rather than content.
This hardware thinking lacks a sense of looking at cities emotionally, given that cities are primarily
an emotional experience. So, by contrast Cities 2.0 are different and they focus on 'soft urbanism'.
Here the soft and hard is legitimised simultaneously. The soft implies people and their activities
and the many invisible things that make cities work, from connections and active networking to
the special bonds that come from that.
The ‘soft’ in city-making focuses on the senses, and the sensory experience, which might change
how we see and experience cities. It might lead city makers to provide different ways of meeting,
talking, living or navigating the city. In these “softer” cities, the planning becomes more
consultative.
Buildings change as well. They are less functional and bland. At times developments are too over
stylized, often constructed by starchitects trying to make a mark on the urban landscape rather
than thinking about the needs of users. The culture 2.0 aspect of the city takes on the virtues of
1.0, but focuses more on creative economy activities. Here two trends mesh - creating science
parks, often quite sanitized, well away from the city’s heart, often with an IT focus, as well as
major retro-fitting exercises to reuse older industrial buildings. For instance, more people now
work in the Cable Factory, the ex-Nokia building in Helsinki, than when it made cables. What
resonates is that in these buildings, you feel you are making, shaping and creating them. The
patina of the ages is reflected in them. Here too work settings are completely different spaces,
often shared, that are focused on co-working rather than traditional corporate structures. More like
a living room than an office.
In moving to the 3.0 city, this connects to the 'here, there' phenomenon, seamlessly connected
24/7: ‘I’m here, I’m there. I’m doing two things at the same time’. It’s a world where everybody
can have an idea. It's a world where you dramatically retrofit things to make the city more
walkable and public space rises dramatically in importance.
Think here of the famous Chicago Millennium Square development – the cars, once on top, are still
there but hidden underground. This takes commitment given the relative costs of surface versus
underground parking. Planning is integrated and more holistic. In its cultural version people are
more makers of their culture. This City 3.0 needs a different city. It needs to look different, feel
different, and its operating dynamics need to be different from how the bureaucracy works to how
people are involved in decision-making.
In these transformations courage is key and this all comes together in a series of priorities:
highlighting the shared commons, the invisible assets that are increasingly commodified; seeing
the city through the eyes of others; being inclusive and trying to break the rich/poor divide as we
understand co-dependency; intergenerational equity and communication; eco-awareness and
holistic accounting; healthy urban planning, a planning that, by definition, tries to make you
healthy rather than ill; the notion of creative citymaking which seeks to create the conditions in a
changing world, which allow people to think, plan and act with imagination. All of this only works
in a reinvented democracy, which refits the rule system for the philosophies, priorities and needs
of the 21st century.
