Charles Landry

Charles Landry was born in 1948 and brought up and educated in Britain, Germany and Italy. Landry was born in London to German parents who had escaped from the Nazis. His father Harald was a philosopher and Nietzsche specialist and his mother an artist. He was educated at the Nymphenburger Gymnasium in Munich, Keele University in Staffordshire and Johns Hopkins in Bologna where he was assistant to Lord Robert Skidelsky. His dissertation was on problems of post-industrial society.[1]

Landry was assistant to Lord Kennet, a former Labour government minister, on the Europe Plus Thirty an EEC study on forecasting (1973-1974) commissioned by Lord Ralf Dahrendorf.[8] With colleagues he started Publications Distribution Co-Op in 1975, a company focused on distributing alternative literature and media for the then burgeoning system of non-mainstream publishers and bookshops.[9] In parallel he was a specialist bookseller focusing on radical publications.[10]

In 1978 he founded Comedia, a think tank, publisher and consultancy. Comedia undertook much of the early work highlighting the importance of cultural resources as well as a methodological framework and evidence for what is now known as the creative economy, formerly cultural industries. Its publishing programme provided some of the intellectual backdrop to the emergence of cultural studies, involving authors such as Dave Morley, Ken Worpole, Geoff Mulgan.[7] The provocative What a way to run a Railroad: An Analysis of Radical Failure (1985) assessed how the high failure rate of radical projects could be understood.[11] Subsequently, Landry was criticized as being ‘a left wing Thatcherite’.[12] Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, a changing group of people developed projects concerned with urban life, culture and creativity and the future of cities including also Franco Bianchini, Phil Wood, Sir Peter Hall, Jude Bloomfield and Naseem Khan. After producing more than 100 books Comedia publishing was sold to Routledge in 1988. Initially Comedia's publishing wing was most well known for research and projects on the future of cities. Later Comedia's research became better known with long term projects including The Creative City,[13] Culture at the Crossroads,[14] The Art of Regeneration,[15] Richness of Cities,[16] and Creativity at the Heart of Culture.[17][7]

Charles Landry's focus shifted in 1986 towards the concept of "the creative city", a term he coined in response to the dramatic economic and social changes happening at that time. He argues that in such changing circumstances creativity at every level is required to address and adapt appropriately. He posits that conditions need to be created for people to think, plan and act with imagination in harnessing opportunities or addressing seemingly intractable urban problems. This means a city needs to embed a culture of creativity in the way it operates and to infuse how all of its organisations operate. Initially there was a focus on the contribution of the arts and the creative industries in driving innovation in cities and helping to make them distinctive. Increasingly he has focused on civic creativity and emphasised how the organizational culture needs to change to unleash the potential, resources and assets of a city. Traditional hierarchical structures restrict ideas generation and rethinking.[13] This has been elaborated in his work on the Creative Bureaucracy.[18] He contrasts the urban engineering approach to cities with creative city making. In the former there is a focus on the physical infrastructure or the hardware of the city, in the latter equal attention is paid to both hardware and software issues. Software is the human dynamics of a place, its connections and relationships as well as atmosphere.[19] The publication of the John Howkins' book The Creative Economy (2001) and Richard Florida's The Rise of the Creative Class (2002) gave the creativity cities movement added popularity.[20]

In his follow up book, The Art of City Making (2006) he discusses "the sensory landscape of cities" and how creativity needs to change its focus and be linked to an ethical foundation.[21] This he calls being creative "for the world" so cities give something back to the wider community. He argues that the popularity of the term "creativity" is in danger of hollowing out the concept and making it meaningless. A main focus of creativity should be on addressing global issues and behavioural issues such as climate change or the balance between rich and poor. In addition a role of creativity is to help make cities more distinctive given the danger of homogeneity and global branding.[22]

Work with his colleague Phil Wood has focused on the idea of The Intercultural City (2008).[23] This looks at how diversity in cities can become an advantage and whether diversity can lead to innovation and wealth creation. Interculturalism goes beyond equal opportunities and respect for existing cultural differences, to the pluralist transformation of public space, institutions and civic culture.[24] His overall aim has been to shift the intellectual architecture for city making. A series of short books have extended this concern, such as The Sensory Landscape of Cities,[25] Culture & Commerce,[26] The Fragile City,[27] Cities of Ambition,[28] The Digitized City,[29] Psychology & the City.[30] The Civic City in a Nomadic World[31] (2017) focuses on where we belong when everything is on the move and how we create places of encounter and empathy.[32]

In 2008 he developed The Creative Cities Index with Jonathan Hyams in collaboration with Bilbao.[33] This assesses cities in terms of their comprehensive creativity economically, socially and culturally along four clusters: their capacity to nurture potential, the regulatory and incentives regime, the ability to harness and exploit creativity and the lived experience of place.[34] The danger of the creativity agenda is that it too narrowly conceived and becomes hollowed out. His latest work emphasizes the need for civic creativity which is imaginative problem-solving applied to public good objectives.[35]

• The Civic City in a Nomadic World (2017)[36]
• The Creative Bureaucracy & its radical common sense with Margie Caust (2017)[37]
• Psychology and the City (2017) with Chris Murray[30]
• The Digitized City (2016)[38]
• Cities of Ambition (2015)[39]
• The Fragile City & the Risk Nexus (2014) with Tom Burke[40]
• Culture & Commerce (2013)[41]
• The Creative City Index (2013) with Jonathan Hyams[42]
• The Sensory Landscape of Cities (2012)[43]
• The Origins & Futures of the Creative City (2012)[44]
• The Intercultural City: Planning for Diversity Advantage (2007) with Phil Wood[45]
• The Art of City Making (2006)[46]
• The Creative City: A toolkit for urban innovators (2000)[47]
• The Creative City in Britain & Germany (1996) with Franco Bianchini & Ralph Ebert[48]
• The Other Invisible Hand with Geoff Mulgan (1995)[49]
• Libraries in a world of cultural change (1995) with Liz Greenhalgh & Ken Worpole[50]
• The Creative City with Franco Bianchini (1994)[51]
• Borrowed time? :the future of public libraries in the UK (1993)[52]
• What a way to run a railroad: An analysis of radical failure (1985) with Dave Morley, Russell Southwood, Patrick Wright[53]
• Here is the Other News: Challenges to the Local Commercial Press (1980) with Crispin Aubrey and Dave Morley[54]
• Where is the Other News: The Newstrade & the Radical Press (1980)[55]
• The Other Secret Service: Press distributors & press censorship (1980) with Liz Cooper and Dave Berry[56]