[Reader-list] Are Cities Good For Creativity?

[Prem Chandavarkar]

If you go by the early writings on urbanism it would appear that cities are
good for creativity.  See the collection of essays edited by Richard Sennett
- "Classic Essays on the Culture of Cities" - particularly the writings of
Georg Simmel and Robert Park.  Both pick up on the point that cities are the
most cosmopolitan form of settlement, particularly cities from the
industrial revolution onwards which are based on high levels of labour
mobility and occupation patterns that are determined by economic rather than
hereditary critieria.  This makes it more difficult to force individuals to
conform to a pre-determined code of behaviour, which creates new
opportunities.  Simmel argued that this creates an opportunity for man to
turn away from society and turn inwards and introspect.  This creates a new
breed of monk whose role is to provide the innovative and creative thinking
that is then thrown back into the surrounding crowd and becomes the source
of social and cultural creativity.  Park saw in the city the breeding ground
for the avant garde, and went so far as to say that the role of the city is
"to foreground the moral range of deviant behaviour".

In some ways the internment camp also creates a version of Simmel's monk,
but due to different causes.  If the city creates the conditions through
non-conformance, the internment camps does so through enforced and prolonged
waiting.  There are many examples of this besides the one you mentioned, and
two of the most famous come from the extreme circumstances of World War Two
concentration camps - Viktor Frankl's book "Man's Search for Meaning" and
Jakow Trachtenberg's mathematical algorithms for speed calculations.

While one could agree with Simmel and Park, their observations are
contextual to a particular period of urbanism, and one could question
whether the same conditions prevail in this era of cyber-connected
globalisation.  For example Jean Baudrillard identifies a type of person he
calls the "schizo", whose psychological disturbance is not caused by
distance and alienation (as would commonly be assumed) but by an
overwhelming proximity to everything.  Unable to distance himself, he has no
sheltered space for reflection and is reduced to "pure screen - a switching
centre for networks of influence".  Or in this era of hyper branding, where
brands are put forward as symbols of transcendence, everything gets dragged
into the brand-sphere.  History cannot exist, nostalgia is re-packaged and
re-mixed and sold as retro.  Protest music is not possible - a band like
Nirvana has their imagery of rebellion branded and they sell millions of
albums (the remark has been made that Kurt Cobain would not have killed
himself if he had not sold so many records).  Or architects such as Frank
Gehry or Zaha Hadid, who at one stage in their careers deliberately
positioned themselves as iconoclastic rebels; but are now seen as heroic
figures whose services are sought by the mainstream establishment to
construct iconic buildings that enable a city or company to globally brand
itself.

So if I respond intuitively to your question on whether cities are good for
creativity, I would say that at one time 'definitely yes', but at this point
in time I am not at all sure.

PC

On 07/09/06, Rana Dasgupta <rana at ranadasgupta.com> wrote:
>
>
> http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/freethinkingworld/2006/09/are_cities_good_for_creativity.shtml
>
> I want to approach this question by thinking about a related, and in
> some ways opposite, one. "Are internment camps good for creativity?" In
> some respects, though not all, the internment camp can be seen as the
> opposite, the alter ego, of the city. We can think of Auschwitz and New
> York inhabiting opposite ends of the American moral-spatial spectrum in
> the second half of the twentieth century (which is partly why the events
> of 9/11 had such a profound resonance).
>
> Yesterday my neighbour came to my door to show me the diary of one of
> his relatives, a Sikh fom Punjab who had fought in the British army in
> the second world war, and who was captured and interned in a
> prisoner-of-war camp. The man was a talented artist and draughtsman, and
> had filled his notebook with drawings of camp scenes. Men sunbathing in
> front of barracks, playing hockey, putting on theatrical performances.
> He wrote accounts of the camp's economy (with "one English cigarette" as
> the basic unit of currency) and stuck in newspaper clippings of
> Mussolini's death etc. His fellow camp inmates, among them Eric Newby,
> wrote poems and comments in the book, and painted pictures of "Jit
> Singh, the Indian painter" at his canvass. These comments bore witness
> to a deep intimacy and appreciation between the American, British,
> Canadian, French - and Indian - men who found themselves together.
>
> This diary put me in mind of the internment camp on the Isle of Man
> during the same period. Many German and Italian nationals resident in
> the UK were interned there in 1940, and a large proportion of these were
> central European Jews who had arrived in England to flee Nazism.
>
> They lived in great fear, believing that Hitler might soon invade the UK
> and that this enclosure might be one of his first targets. But the camp
> was full of Jewish artists and intellectuals, and nothing could stop the
> inevitable. Within weeks of their internment, there were camp
> newspapers, weekly lectures on nuclear physics, and regular concerts.
>
> Three members of the future Amadeus Quartet, all from Vienna, met in the
> camp. The quartet was founded in London immediately after the war, and
> endured until the death of violist Peter Schidlof in 1987. The Viennese
> composer Hans Gál was interned there, and wrote several works there.
> Perhaps readers know of other internees.
>
> (See also the fascinating story -
>
> http://www.therestisnoise.com/2004/04/quartet_for_the_2.html
>
> - of Messiaen's Quartet for the End of Time, written in the Stalag VIIIA
> prisoner-of-war camp in Germany.)
>
> In many respects these camps were similar to cities. They inherited the
> civic cultures of places like Paris, Berlin and Vienna, and they brought
> together people from different backgrounds, with different skills and
> interests. But in other ways they were quite different. The notion of
> time was completely different, for the onward rush of urban time was
> taken away, and what was left was time as a still pool. Death was more
> proximate than in the cities (from which it had been exiled), and this
> gave a gravity, an earnestness, to conversation.
>
> Creativity is one of the qualities that most reassures us about our
> humanity. What do the outbursts of creativity in internment camps, and
> even death camps, mean for our thinking about cities? Do they display
> the fortitude of urban culture, which continues unabashed even in such
> terrible circumstances? Or do they remind us that creativity is somehow
> linked to those things that cities are most concerned to stamp out -
> death and inactivity - and that sometimes it may be in the most unlikely
> places that the most astonishing human creations arise?
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