- Shared Creativity – A Driving Force of Urban Development    437 kb by    Cvetinovic, Marija | marija.cvetinovic@epfl.ch    Short Outline This paper aims to investigate design thinking strategies that are applied to solve growing urban conflicts in developing countries as an unavoidable side-effect of urbanisation throughout the world. Abstract This paper aims to investigate design thinking strategies in transforming an unavoidable large-scale side effect of current urbanization and to make such an effect an overall positive aim by engaging an average citizen to deal with urban conflicts, express their creativity and diversity and initiate an impetus of development. The rapid globalization in the 20th century has considerably changed the morphology of cities in developing countries. Based on the assumption that western urban planning paradigm proves inefficient in developing environments, these cities tend to lose their substance as an urban phenomenon through the ill-decoded application of western models. Moreover, modern urban thought could be stuck in this rut, inducing negative background effects on the strategy and management of urban planning. A possible solution lies in involving the entire community into these processes, on grounds which exclude a specific “plan”, as its statutory basis, and begin to investigate less formal methods (creativity, knowledge, skills and originality) on which developing environments could be constituted. This new pattern of “participatory urban design” presents a community-driven, flexible method of small steps with the aim of finding compromises and consensuses between urban actors, all of whom are mobilized to willingly integrate their customs and needs in order to creatively track their cultural identity and to contribute to a common base of knowledge on urban patterns and processes, so as to initiate “positive feedback” in city’s self-creation as an organic, and not mechanical, surface. This is achieved through an open and dynamic system, which integrates different scales and partial urban actions in creation of urban spaces, events and experiences. This method constitutes a challenge in the redefinition of the scientific approach to urban conflicts through a creative, dynamic and iterative process of design thinking within developing environments. Its technique involving holistic thinking, flexibility in developing strategies and human-centered and user-friendly concepts, blurs the boundaries between different disciplines and stakeholders, rendering a wide range of potential solutions, and finally generates a new vision of cities that better suits developing environments. Keywords participatory urban design” method, design thinking, creativity, developing countries Case Study presented on the ISOCARP Congress 2012: Fast Forward: Planning in a (hyper) dynamic urban context   Click to open the full paper as pdf document   Click to send an email to the author(s) of this paper