Abstract Summary
‘Doing things differently’ seems to be on top of the planning field’s agenda. There is a prevailing belief that tackling the complexities of urban issues requires new ways of dealing with and thinking about the problems; creative ones. Innovation management frameworks, design thinking, co-creation, digital twins and living labs, all promised new processes and solutions. But do we know what counts as creative in urban planning? What qualities are we looking for in an idea, process or tool to call it creative? Other than the brief theoretical engagement with creativity as a concept inspired by the works on the creative economy in the early 2000s, the concept has received little scrutiny in the works of urban planning theorists and practitioners. With, at times, desperation to bring about creative solutions, the current practices in planning focus on the adoption and modification of the creativity theories and frameworks developed in other fields and ‘getting on’ with the available tools and frameworks. What if creativity is not as repeatable, engineerable, or accessible as we think it is? How would our practices in urban planning change if we believe that parts of the creative process remain magical, inaccessible to everyone, not expressible, and messy? In this special session, we aim to cast doubt on some of urban planning’s basic understanding of creativity as a concept and ways to operationalize it. We will, in this hybrid (or online) panel discussion, bring together scholars from a wide range of backgrounds (strategic design, social cognitive psychology, art, digital planning and decision science), with opposing views on creativity, to discuss some of the paradoxes inherent in urban planning’s pursuit of creative solutions. The session will particularly highlight notions of creativity beyond the ones derived from the creative economy frameworks, conditions of our collective intelligence and judgements of creative outcomes, and the role of digital tools in enhancing creative thinking in planning. The panel: - - Prof. Andrew Hudson-Smith & Dr. Leah Lovett-(Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis, University College of London) - Online - Dr. Johannes Flacke - (Design and Interactive Space for Co-Creation lab-University of Twente) – Online/in-person - Dr. Bahador Bahrami - (Crowd Cognition Lab - Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich) - Online - Prof. Oliver Alexy - (School of Management – Technical University of Munich) – Online/in-person Chair: Dr. Moozhan Shakeri – Online/in-person The session is intended for practitioners and academics interested in strategic innovation in cities as it will touch upon the theoretical basis and consequences of our innovation practices in cities.
