Sucking it up for creativity

So if panel discussions don’t increase a city’s creativity (and they don’t), what does?

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?