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Address to the 2005 Innoversity Summit ConferenceSeptember 29th, Toronto, Ontario I am pleased to be speaking to culture lovers, broadcasters, diversity lovers, and Innoversity lovers. I am Italian- American- Canadian (turn the hyphens around any way you want). I’d like to speak my enthusiasm for the creative city, in a town that gave me the chance to be myself, a long time ago, and still does. In the seventies, we lobbied for internationalism. It became multiculturalism. It developed beyond our wildest dreams and became--"diversity"; a word we may need to over-haul to describe the ideological parade of the global city. I say ideological, because I'm not sure we can talk of "cultures" anymore. I don’t say this lightly. I'm proud of my heritage; I don't think people know where they're going unless they know where they're from. But the places they're from, in a globalized world, are beginning to look the same. And what does it mean to talk of cultures when ideas "migrate" to us, faster than we can get into a car or a plane? Ideas-- tossed in the wind like seeds of grain, spread by satellite and image; ideas that revise us faster than we can make sense of ourselves. Maybe we don't migrate. Maybe we are countries to which ideas immigrate, forcing us to hybrid images of ourselves before we have had time to negotiate who we are. Identity is a problem we bring to diversity. We delight in diversity; it's the crown jewel of the global, but it asks us how well we live with each other, and if our differences will destroy us. Much as we like the stimulus of the multi-cultural, we must realize that human beings like to live among large numbers of people who believe in the same things. You can't ghetto beliefs. Beliefs want to move beyond ghettos. They want to be contagious. It's part of the fun of having beliefs. It's a requirement of belief. And when you fence beliefs in, you have riots, bombings and mental unhealth. We need to share widespread beliefs. We need communality, more than we need community. Or we will disintegrate into unique solitudes. Without commonalities we risk not trusting each other in civic life. And Trust is everything in the creative city. How do you generate a climate of trust? Well first you put some faith in the universals, and take a break from negotiating cultures. Pay attention to an alphabet of empathy and basic feelings beyond the words of policy and cultural mapping. And look for words that honour the complexity of the human heart by respecting its simplicity. We might even use words like "innoversity" that suggest deeper involvement; we might replace words like "interaction" with words like "involvement". Semantics is not trivial here. The civic heart is inspired, by the words that give it incarnation. For the eros of care depends on words that move the human heart past negotiations. Abstractions are the brandings of governance. People are not "social capital"; they are people. "Inclusivity" means, "need me as I need you". Equity means "I won’t hurt you because I wouldn't want to be hurt myself.” Too unsophisticated? We must get back to the plain language, the primal requests that provoke our ideas. The creative city must name itself by the terms in which it can fall in love with itself. And we are the authors of those words. Trust is also established by embracing the unexpected, dangerous as that might seem. The world is acquiring a “bunker mentality”. It would rather be safe, than encounter. It doesn't engage the random. Engaging the random means sacrificing the known to the unknown. That's a great risk when two people meet. And when they take that risk together, they recognize it, respect it, and that becomes the spine of civic grace. And you won't have creativity without civic grace. What is the role of media in the creative city? Let me suggest to you that there are no mainstream cultures anymore. Media is the mainstream culture. The media does not mediate; it manufactures the world we know, which is different from the world we experience. The mission of media might be that of re-introducing us to the experience of the world. Shall we make a claim for a critical approach to the media? There is too much of it and not enough time to filter it. The only critical approach for the urban citizen is to retain and practice a sense of what is authentic. And what is authentic is our compassion, our zest for creativity, our instinct for delight, our sensitivity to a style of individuality in ourselves and the next person. The style of individuality is always a style of loving, spelled out in sacrifice and celebration in a shared forum of wonder. The job of media is to dignify and stimulate basic human experience. Media can be an art form, or exploitative. It can reduce our language to the scripted, or it can give us new metaphors. Telecommunications can make the world less lonely, or horribly lonely for those who spend more time with the virtual than with people. Media can thread diversity, or aggravate it. Media can restore deep culture, or paralyze it. It can restore us to the human, or turn us into facsimiles of ourselves. Its true purpose is to bring citizens to the romance of ideals, to bring cities to higher versions of themselves. We must be clear-- the global citizen seeks nothing less than a romance with life, empowered by the witness of beauty. And media can be that witness. Beauty takes place everyday in the corridors of the city. Media can spotlight it, or fuzz it. It can glamourize a city, or dispirit it. It can mirror the soul of the city as it tries to emerge, or render it self-conscious with limitations. Media can formalize ideals-- create a mythology. Or it can forge an ugly narrative. The future of the global city depends on the benevolence and intelligence of those in communications. But the job of the creative city does not rest with the media alone. Creativity ventures into hospitality, not into urban deserts of anxiety and protocol. Risk will not happen in a city where the citizens are more concerned with security than with adventure. Heaven knows we need to feel safe. But safety is the opposite of risk-taking. An industry that maintains anxiety does nothing for the soul of a city. A city can make an industry of anxiety by the trumpeting of dangers, alarms, and the claims for further boundary laws and regulations. If it does nothing to foster spontaneity, the creative won't happen. Spontaneity is in the freedom to play, the freedom to experiment; the freedom of shared delight and shared marvels and in the reflexive generosities that people are capable of. Policing, regulation and by-law consciousness will not set the stage for improvised good will. Regulation is good until it becomes a mechanism that replaces the nature of life. And life is spontaneous and creative. It will not be fenced in. It requires an appetite, not a menu. A city that is stiff and big on protocol will not have creative citizens, diverse or otherwise. This is a global problem, not just a Toronto problem. There are global strategists that see policing and regulation as the answer to the urban; more community guards, cameras, monitoring and surveillance. This is the corporate answer to diversity. The “corporate” is about how to avoid friction, not about what holds us together. What the city can do is to ensure that the ethic of governance encourages a code of common humanity. It designs streets and buildings that inspire encounter. It lets go of unreasonable circumspections in its services and enforcements. It introduces a literacy of grace among its citizens, by replacing an ethic of boundary and protocol with an ethic of welcome and response. The style of municipal action itself must imitate the dynamic of creativity, benevolent intelligence with a regard for allowance and response. If we want a city to be creative, we must inspire citizens to relax into each other. And in that trust, we can learn to be creative. Let me conclude by saying; The project of creativity depends entirely on the commonality that citizens feel, and not their differences. Diversity is never strength until we feel bonded by something credibly beautiful. We respond to the beautiful in each other; not ideas, not interesting customs, not the exotica of cuisines, not the fascination of languages. The foreign remains just foreign, until the recognition of the universally beautiful cuts in. What is universally beautiful is the sheer code of humanity that transcends cultures and life-styles. Who will contest the password of a simple smile, or a laugh, or the form of play shared by children of varying origins in a schoolyard? Are these alphabets of civility too rustic, or banal for us-- the beleaguered adults of disenfranchised nations, wounded cults, with emotional deficits that need empowerment? We need to restore a literacy of grace; the simple commerce of empathy and a vocabulary of joy. And we won't negotiate ourselves into it. Each culture, each ideology, each life-style has the capacity to resort to the code of simply looking at another citizen, and not looking away. It is the code of the lingering glance, of the ability to offer response instead of censure-- the act of civic faith that summons a smile, and even sacrifice. For not until each citizen feels that another citizen is a resource of sacrifice can a city pledge itself to creativity. Pier Giorgio Di Cicco
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