By Charles Landry

• Written by the internationally-renowned expert on city futures and author of The Creative City, this book explains how we can understand and reassess urban potential, harnessing a city’s resources and cultural creativity to promote its development.
• Presents guidelines, policy approaches and clear recommendations, with international case studies.

City-making is an art, not a formula. The skills required to re-enchant the city are far wider than the conventional ones like architecture, engineering and land-use planning. There is no simplistic, ten-point plan, but strong principles can help send good city-making on its way. The vision for 21st century cities must be to be the most imaginative cities for the world rather than in the world. This one change of word – from ‘in’ to ‘for’ – gives city-making an ethical foundation and value base. It helps cities become places of solidarity where the relations between the individual, the group, outsiders to the city and the planet are in better alignment.

Following the widespread success of The Creative City, this new book, aided by international case studies, explains how to reassess urban potential so that cities can strengthen their identity and adapt to the changing global terms of trade and mass migration. It explores the deeper fault-lines, paradoxes and strategic dilemmas that make creating the ‘good city’ so difficult.

Contents

Overture • The Sensory Landscape of Cities • Unhinged and Unbalanced • Repertoires and Resistance • The Complicated and the Complex • The City as a Living Work of Art • Creative Cities for the World • Endpiece • Index

Bibliographic Details

Paperback £19.99 ISBN: 1844072452
Hardback £70.00 ISBN: 1844072460
Publication Date: October 2006
462 pages; 215x135mm; figures, photographs, index