The Crown Plaza hotel chain is installing real, living, grass lawns as flooring in some of its conference rooms  across the United Kingdom with the intent of freeing up the imaginations of business people who sit – or maybe even walk barefoot — on the turf.

Want to bet who’ll end up getting creative? My guess is the hotel laundry staff , about grass-stain removal.

I’m all for the results they want to encourage, but I think some of their key assumptions need questioning. One of them stopped me like a red light in the story’s second paragraph: “The accepted definition of creativity is production of something original and useful, and that’s what’s reflected in the tests.”  

By whom is this definition accepted, exactly?  Presumably, by E. Paul Torrance, who designed the creativity tests administered to thousands children since 1958 and the psychologists and pedagogues who took part in them. I think calling creativity an act of production begs the question of whether or not ideas are “products,” but the more important problem here stems from the word “useful.”

Are imaginings and ideas and their Earthly manifestations creative only if they’re useful?  Is Michelangelo’s Pieta useful? Maybe it’s of psychological benefit to Christian believers or religious propagandists or anyone who derives comfort or stimulation from art. It’d make one heckuva doorstop. What about Christo’s wrapped islands or the Who’s Quadrophenia? Are they useful? And if not, does that mean they aren’t creative? 

I don’t think creativity can be determined by its practical value, unless by ”useful” you mean anything that answers an urge of its creator or makes an impression in the mind of  an observer.

I suspect that, in an admirable effort help people see that creativity encompasses more than the arts, Torrance et al have erred in the opposite direction: They’ve essentially excluded the arts and any other form of “useless” imagination from their definition and their testing. The widely used Torrance tests mostly set “tasks” and “problems” for children to solve and then measure the number and diversity of a child’s ideas about how to accomplish those tasks. Only one test, the “imaginative stories” task,  seems to invite pure invention and fantasy. The results measure “creative accomplishment.”

And there’s the hitch: Creative accomplishment and creativity are not the same thing. That’s why creativity testing that emphasizes functional improvement to toys or the design of rocketry or any other practical problem-solving can’t accurately assess a child’s creative potential. His or her productive potential, maybe, which is perhaps why Bronson and Merryman tout the Torrance tests’ value in predicting who will become a person of high professional standing and/or output.

But a person’s tally of books written or patents held isn’t necessarily a measure of how creative that person is — just how motivated they are to succeed professionally and how lucky they are in getting published or beating some other inventor to the U.S. Patent Office. What makes a person creative is neither the logical patterns of reasoning that lead to solutions for problems, nor the entrepreneurial drive to get those solutions (or him/herself) in front of the public or on the market.  Creativity is a process of cognition that we all have and use, some more comfortably and freely than others — an original way of synthesizing knowledge, ideas, perceptions and experiences  into some new idea or impression or understanding that few or none have ever had before.  It can remain an idea or be translated into a physical thing, but it’s still creative. It can have practical use or not, but it’s still creative. It can cure cancer, change the way we construct our homes or simply be beautiful. Or disturbing. Or whatever its creator made it.

But it’s still creative.

Which is what our children certainly will not be if all they get is training in creative problem-solving systems. They’ll just turn into slightly less conventional worker bees of the kind American schools have been designed to produce since the Industrial Revolution. And that’s because creativity isn’t just about solving problems and meeting deadlines, and doesn’t thrive if you impose some outside thought-system on it. Creativity is a universal ability among humans, but how it’s put to use is personal and individual. It can’t be assembly-lined without destroying the very spontaneity and originality that make it valuable. 

So, of course, teach children focus and self-discipline. Give kids tools and materials, from sticks of charcoal to silicon chips, and teach them how those things can be used. Turn every classroom into an interactive lab, where children can use their growing skills to explore and test. But most of all, give them time in which to think and daydream and then get out of their way. With opportunity, resources and enthusiastic encouragement, each will come up with his or her own special, mysterious way of  creating something where nothing was before.

And while they’re thinking and messing, let’s teach all the adults to appreciate creativity, all the organizations and corporations to allow it and reward it,  and all of us to practice it every day. Kids are naturally creative … until systematized adults and societies stamp it out of them.

But the truth is that Pekar, who died early Monday morning, July 12, at his Cleveland Heights, Ohio, home, was a highly unusual person whose life — working-class-ordinary though it appeared – became extraordinary because he made it so. And he made it so simply by imagining it as a comic-book story.

Like most intially simple creative inspirations, Pekar’s American Splendor series and the personal experiences, feelings and thoughts that it recounted required a lot of grinding work and suffering of various degrees to turn it into a success. In other words, Pekar had to live, sometimes precariously, and artistically translate his outwardly dull existence as a file clerk in a grimy, rundown American Rust Belt city into a tale all of us humans could recognize in some way as our own.  

That was a pretty skillful bit of artistry and entrepreneurship for a man of slightly odd appearance, crabbed and difficult nature, peculiar domestic habits, and a profound, scholarly passion for jazz that gave him a professional sideline as a free-lance music critic. Nothing about Pekar suggested the typical or the expected. He fit no stereotype at all: From salt-of-the-earth lunch-pail laborer to romantically impoverished artiste, he was miscast in every standard role.

I interviewed him once for a 2004 Plain Dealer story about the New York musical, Brooklyn – a play written by creative former street person Mark Schoenfeld and partner Barri McPherson about other creative street people – whose history Pekar and artists Gary and Laura Dumm had been commissioned by the New York Times to relate in American Splendor style  to illustrate a newspaper article about the show. Pekar lived with his wife, Joyce Brabner, and their adopted daughter Danielle in a small house that, like him, looked somewhat drab and unkempt on the outside, but  was really something else inside.

In fact, it looked as if a cyclone had blown through it: Every surface — floor, furniture, counters, mantel — was inundated, buried, under layers of paper, used dishes, cat food, clothes, utensils … just endless stuff comprising a mess so deep and so entire that the Cat in the Hat could not have  removed it even with his multi-handed clean-up vehicle. Pekar had considerately excavated one of the drifts to clear a small wooden chair of debris and I sat in it, a tiny inhabited island in a sea of refuse, and asked him questions about his work and life.

Not ordinary. And Pekar himself — a short, shabby, balding man with huge brown eyes that relentlessly fixed like a pair of dark searchlights on whatever met his gaze – was a gnome of rare intensity, somehow embodying cynical, bitter disappointment, irascibility and a shy, rather sweet kind of pride that surfaced in the moments when he spoke of his own work and the jazz he loved.  

He was 70 when he died. His work was renowned — had been adapted to the stage twice and also to the screen in the film American Splendor starring Paul Giamatti as Pekar — and so was he, as all the Letterman appearances and news coverage attest. He was also just Harvey, a local curmudgeon whose calls to The Plain Dealer’s arts department always produced wry smiles. 

What more proof do we need that creativity can make the remarkable out of the quotidien?

All of it — the whole Augean stable — gone. Nothing but trees, meadows, rivers and lakes left behind. It’d be tempting never to build anything at all again where the vile mess used to lie. 

But urban renewal isn’t like lawn replacement. Killing off cities in order to heal them has the unfortunate side effect of destroying people’s homes, neighborhoods and workplaces, which they need no matter how unspeakably awful those places are. (So, historical preservationists, you can put your beta blockers down now.)  

Alas, urban renewal also isn’t usually like landscaping or any other kind of well-planned design.  It happens in odd patches as bits of money become available for isolated efforts that are usually the pet projects of influential people hoping to gain even more power and money or to secure their civic legacy. Few urban communities would want or be able to afford the comprehensive plan — not to mention the political repercussions of totalitarian-level eminent domain - that French emperor Napoleon III commissioned from Baron Haussmann for the redesigning of Paris.   

Yet the fact remains that most cities have grown up with hardly any long-term, big-picture planning at all.  And in spite of that and their varying amounts of human and infrastructural misery, some of them are great places that you’d love to visit or live in.  

What makes the difference? What do the world’s greatest, most enticing and creative cities have in common? Here are a few things:

Physical beauty, including: an arrestingly gorgeous natural setting; flower gardens and parks; striking architecture, often with some intriguing native or period style influencing a lot of it (pagoda roofs, barrel tiles, half-timbering, Gothic arches, Victorian gingerbread…);  at least one unique, amazing structure that has become the city icon: the Eiffel Tower,  the Golden Gate Bridge, the Chrysler Building, the Forbidden City, the Christ the Redeemer statue; and vivid, colorful and/or highly imaginative art everywhere, whether fine or folk

Fascinating history: Great cities have great stories to tell about how they were founded, settled and fought over; how and why they grew; and what colorful people played notable roles; and these stories are told through the unique look, structures, cultures, and activities of these cities, as well as through their languages, beliefs and common knowledge    

Activity:  Economic, of course, as a well-employed city is usually a better-cared-for and happier city, but also interesting occupational activity (shoe design, rickshaw pulling, stone carving, ship-building…) and, especially, outdoor activity: bustling shops and cafes; street vendors and performers; crowds of people going to work, school, religious services and cultural events, playing in the parks; attending festivals and political events. In other words, nonstop evidence of thousands or millions living visibly busy, rich and varied lives

Atmosphere and strong local identity: All the above help create these two things, which are linked but not the same. A great city is like a well-adjusted person — unafraid to be itself, whatever that self is. And though some communities, like some humans, will naturally appeal more to the rest of world than others because of luck in looks or wealth or lifestyle, so no community will rise to the top if lacks confidence in its own instincts and value.

The wishy-washy, the imitative, the fearful are going nowhere. And if your city is one of those – if leveling it sounds easier than living in it anymore – then it’s probably not the kind of place in which normal, small-scale creativity will work much change.

No, your city needs radical creativity. Monumental creativity. Something huge, showy and preferably not at all useful that will shock and delight the world and make it want to come see for itself. Your city’s really creative people – the ones with both ideas and guts –  need to choose  a huge, amazing project and get it done through sheer force of will. 

Turn all the bridges into giant, glowing, winged dragon sculptures? Train climbing roses up every bare wall and fence in town? Connect all the tall buildings with Christmas-lighted working zip lines? Convert a central downtown space to a huge outdoor concert/movie stage with performances 24/7?  Take all the broken concrete and glass and build a fabulous mosaic light-tower at the edge of your lake or river?

With what radical act of creativity would you like to transform your city?

The usual suspects have had lots of chances to weigh in on this topic over the last, oh, 10 years or more, and they’ve mostly cited concepts such as lowering barriers, developing new skill sets, encouraging  collaborative brainstorming and shared projects, advancing the arts and artists, aggressively attracting and/or growing high technology companies, investing in mixed-use real estate projects, and a lot of other “pieces” formulated “around” creativity and its henchforces of education and economic development.

Those white-paper approaches have produced certain civic benefits in a lot of places, but a boiling overflow of creativity isn’t one of them, at least not where I live.  My metro area is no showplace of imagination- it’s desperately poor and ailing, a shocking stage-three hospice case  of shabby, empty buildings, cratered streets,  unemployed adults, endangered children, political ineptitude and venality, apathy and inertia, a culture of bland cowardice, and widening rings of smug and bunkered suburbanites. 

That’s in spite of all the individuals trying hard to change it.  So there must be something else cities need in order to be centers of creativity.

I think it’s guts, pure and simple. Collective guts of all kinds: the community courage to believe there is a better way; the rare and constant commitment to trying something different; the refusal to let bad circumstances, red tape and/or narrow-minded people  kill the inspiration and the effort; and maybe most important of all, the sheer bravery of making the effort to think.  

Imaginative thinking takes work, especially in groups. It means not allowing yourself to choose the easy out, the known model. It means being fully alive and alert instead of opting to pleasantly stupefy yourself with the same old comfortable crap that keeps masking the problem the way another bag of barbecue chips makes you feel fed when you’re actually dying of a vitamin deficiency.

So if we’re going to make our cities creative, I think we’d better develop our inner six-packs. What do you think?

A panel of experts opined, dissected, compared and contrasted. The moderator probed. The audience queried and deduced. And everybody analyzed. 

The final score? Statistics cited: 7. Problems rehashed: 26.  Models examined:  832. Original ideas: zip. As panel results go, not surprising , but still profoundly frustrating for anyone who had dared to hope that a big roomful of city arts, education, design and urban-planning whizzes would  produce the kind of radically inventive brainstorming that everyone in attendance seemed to believe troubled cities need.

If such a hopeful person had stared at the crowd a bit more shrewdly, he/she might have realized that the summiteers were nearly all heads or staff members of traditional institutions such as universities and schools, government  bodies and nonprofit arts organizations: in other words, bureaucracies. What do bureaucracies famously do best? Rely on safe precedent. Construct microscopically detailed, obstructive rules and processes that generally cause at least as many problems as they solve. Exhaust people of  vision and initiative by miring them in tar pits of technicalities and other senseless requirements. Thwart creativity.

Yet leaders of bureaucracies are the ones who routinely get called up for committees and task forces and and civic discussions dedicated to effective problem-solving. And what do they do when they get there? Talk in buzz phrases such as “human-capital development” and “right-sizing” and “paradigm change” about what the problems are and what models have been successful in other places. 

Is there really anybody left who doesn’t know what the problems are? Some hibernating moles who haven’t heard the circular litany of joblessness, poverty, horrific schools, crime, empty/decaying buildings and homes, lead poisoning, brownfields,  strapped governments, failing or fleeing corporations, brain drain, joblessness … ? Anyone in the Rust Belt who hasn’t heard that Austin/Seattle/Providence/Philly/Chicago/anywhere but here has a creative solution that our pathetic burgs need to borrow and replicate?

Does it make us creative to borrow someone else’s idea?

To be fair: As panels go, this summit’s was well intentioned and rather better than usual. It featured  Terry Schwarz of Kent State University’s Cleveland Urban Design Collaborative and Mayor Donald Plusquellic of Akron — two of  Northeast Ohio’ s  more adventurous and witty civic activists — as well as Carol Coletta of CEOS for Cities and the National Public Radio show Smart City, and Ronald Berkman, the new president of Cleveland State University. Edward Hill, CSU’s lively and peripatetic dean of the Levin College of Urban Affairs,  moderated the event, which was presented by the CSU Center for Arts and Innovation and ideastream.

“Around” the summit topic — as bureaucrats currently love to say — of what it means to be a creative city, a few tangy quips were made. During a lengthy debate about the possible inherent snobbishness of Richard Florida’s “creative class”  phrase and whether it implies that those not belonging to it are perforce part of an “uncreative” class, Plusquellic joked, “We do have an ‘uncreative class.’ They listen to Rush Limbaugh.” Schwarz compared the current “authenticity” fad (the conviction that unique old buildings, independent shops and restaurants, homegrown talents and a city’s own heritage are de facto better and more desirable than chain enterprises, cookie-cutter office parks, etc.)  to middle school, where everybody absurdly obsesses about being cool. She also delivered the best line of the whole event in an exchange with the notoriously out-of-the-box Plusquellic, serenely noting, “I believe in recklessness as an aspect of public policy.”

But in spite those two, the Creative Voices Summit resulted mostly in the kinds of self-defeating contradictions with which Cleveland has become synonymous. The impulse to encourage toleration of new ideas and enlist the creativity of the entire community ran up against the  conventional wisdom about playing to the area’s strengths, a policy that has so far encouraged Northeast Ohio leaders to put all their financial eggs in the basket of  bio- and Internet technology, much as they did with the basket of steel 100 years ago. The recognition that improved education is a must for creativity and economic success got tangled up with the notion that other cities have succeeded creatively in spite of terrible school systems. The idea that creativity works best when it isn’t forced to be product-driven disappeared in a wave of enthusiasm about timely commercialization.

So even though the panel learnedly and entertainingly re-revealed all the problems that Rust Belters know they need to creatively address, not  a single imaginative solution – not one original, takeable step — was suggested by anybody. Well, maybe this will count: Instead of holding panel discussions, why not convene local artists, scientists, engineers and philosophers  in a room, give them a specific problem to solve and 24 hours in which to do it? For the cost of some box lunches and a bottomless coffee urn, you’d probably get some real — and really creative – solutions.

Read http://www.gcbl.org/blog/richey-piiparinen/cleveland-do-we-have-future-if-we-never-leave-our-past.  Then let’s overthrow failure.

For centuries, people have equated extreme creativity and artistry with madness – or at least weirdness – in ways that have allowed societies to stigmatize and marginalize those whose powerful imaginations gave them conceptual ability and vision very different from others’.

So I have to wonder if this research will reinforce that prejudice or eventually show us that the difference between mental illness and the capacity for great creativity is one of some slight but detectable physiological quirk, like being born with synesthesia because the nerves of your color-perception and mathematical-understanding regions of the brain happened to cross. 

And could doctors undo it? Would the “sufferers” want them to?

That’s become the big question here in Geniocity.com’s home city: Not just whether or not we’re capable of thinking big, but whether or not we’re capable of actually taking the risks necessary to bring about change.

That’s an issue shared by other places around the globe where people who glorify the long-dead past have turned their minds and spirits into museums of outmoded thinking. But it seems especially bad in Beaver Cleaverland, where an apathetic and insecure/defensive population has led to an entrenched, clubby, self-protecting, unimaginative and largely ineffective leadership, turning the city and its sphere of influence into a perpetual 1957.

In spite of all the energetic  individuals working hard to reinvent the place, Cleveland is timid. Stodgy. We won’t try anything unless everyone else has already tried it first and proved it’s safe, which means that by the time we get around to adopting something “new,”that thing is often already as passe as … 1957. That goes not only for big civic change, but also for small changes of all kinds in schools, businesses and neighborhoods.

And still, those energetic individuals don’t give up. Kay Shames is one of them. She’s head of the Center for Arts and Innovation at Cleveland State University, which is co-hosting an actual Cleveland creativity summit 9:30-11:30 a.m. Monday, June 7, downtown at the Idea Center, 1375 Euclid Ave.

Called the 2010 Creative Voices Summit, the gathering is free and open to the public, which will be invited to participate in the discussion moderated by Edward Hill, dean of CSU’s Maxine Goodman Levin College of Urban Affairs, and including a panel made up of Ronald M. Berkman, CSU president; Carol Colletta, president of CEOs for Cities and host of National Public Radio’s Smart Cities program; Terry Schwarz, interim director of Kent State University’s Cleveland Urban Design Collaborative; and Joseph P. Riley Jr., mayor of Charleston, S.C.   

Shames says she’s “hopeful” that the summit will result in real debate about real emerging ideas. “We’re not using a sort of Richard Florida build-it-and-they-will-come creativity” as the summit’s basis, she says. Instead, the event will emphasize education and the arts as agents of the city’s future and explore basic issues such as whether or not Cleveland is really plugged into the creative frontier, what we should invest in, what should we build in order to grow and diversify. 

Those are good questions. Let’s hope, along with Shames, that the answers we get from our creative leaders and ourselves aren’t warmed-over ideas from other cities or versions of the same old Cleveland reliance on foundations, political-machine operatives, a handful of big-biz types and a few wealthy families to do our “thinking” and “daring” for us.