- Making Spaces for the Creative Economy: some challenges to overcome    click here to open paper content53 kb
by    Rodrigues Alves, Manoel | mra@sc.usp.br   click here to send an email to the auther(s) of this paper
Short Outline
Contemporary spaces promote new ambiguities and landscapes. Spaces for the creative economy must deal with a different sense of urbanity. Urban spaces of the creative economy must be representative of new territorialities.
Abstract
█ 41O ISOCARP CONGRESS 2005
MAKING SPACES FOR THE CREATIVE ECONOMY
Bilbao, Spain: October 17-20, 2005
■ ABSTRACT
PAPER: ‘MAKING SPACES FOR THE CREATIVE ECONOMY: SOME CHALLENGES TO OVERCOME’
Research Based Paper. Session 2:
Organisation of Space and Creation of Cityscape to reflect the Creative Economy

AUTHOR: Manoel Rodrigues Alves (mra@sc.usp.br)
EESC-USP: Departamento de Arquitetura e Urbanismo
Avenida Trabalhador São-carlense, 400 – CEP 13560-970
São Carlos / SP - BRASIL

MAKING SPACES FOR THE CREATIVE ECONOMY: SOME CHALLENGES TO OVERCOME

Contemporary urban space promotes new ambiguities. Not only does it bring together what is ordinary and diverse, but it also creates new urban landscapes: material, political, economical and ethnical. Landscapes that not necessarily articulate with each other, on the contrary, they may promote social and spatial segregation in a privatized and fragmentary space.

In this scenario, to investigate different aproaches to promote new urban landscapes that reflect the creative economy is only possible if we also consider that the contemporary urban space results from a different sense of urbanity that transforms the public / private relationship. These landscapes, transferring civical activities to private space, promote new spatialities and sociabilities in a so-called ‘new public spaces’.

Any investigation about ‘making spaces for the creative economy’, in an urbanistic sense, must come to terms with this and other issues of urban spatiality. The challenge to identify the main characteristics of urban space, new aspects of the configuration of the spatiality of the contemporary city, must also be aware of some possible ‘urban pitfalls’. For instance: that paradigms of urban morphology, in a time when individual experience is built up on displacement and detachment, when urban space loses its social meaning, may lead to an a-critical and de-territorialized architecture; that to consider the impact of information technologies on urban territorialities is quite different than arguing for an ephemeral architecture of scenographical urban spaces.

This paper develops a conceptual framework aiming at providing hints for contemporary urban landscape. As such, argues that spaces of the creative economy must be representative of the contemporary social plurality; new territorialities of a multi-referential and heterotopic society. Cities are a cultural artifact to be experienced, not a reflection of consumerism and commercialization, a fake object of consumption.
Keywords
contemporary urban landscape, public spaces, social plurality, new spatialities
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