introduction
based research, temporary installations and artist driven actions, which address issues and situations that are not necessarily part of any planned process or agenda. They are, however, just as relevant in many cases, and there remains a credibility gap between the city as a political entity and the city as a cultural and living entity, which it would make sense to shorten and if possible to eradicate. Metropolis places itself here, in the belief that cities are on-going creative and open processes. The first section Theories and Strategies contains 22 essays and interviews with selected speakers from the two Metropolis Labs in 2012 and 2014. These essays are grouped under four headings, the first of which is cultural planning. Lia Ghilardi starts her article on the background of cultural planning with a quote from Italo Calvino. “The Invisible City, however, does not tell its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand, written in the corners of the streets, the gratings of the windows, the banisters of the steps, the antennae of the lightning rods, the poles of the flags, every segment marked in turn with scratches, indentations, scrolls”.
She continues, “This quote from Calvino’s “Invisible Cities” has
always fascinated me because I feel it conveys poetically, and yet effectively, the intimate bond between social processes and the spatial form of cities. Cities are a product of time, and time, in turn, is shaped by the people who live there. It is this continuous cultural forming and re-forming of place that is fascinating.”
This very much sets the tone for the anthology. Franco Bianchini speaks of the necessity to rebalance our cities, to accept that we are in an era of activism, and that we must accept that independent actions can be the starting point for public processes. Bianchini, one of the prime movers in the cultural planning philosophy along with Charles Landry and others, underlines the crisis of the European city and the huge pressures which cities are faced with, heightened by the potential migration scenarios. He calls for a renewed perspective and the need to
be far more innovative and radical in supporting alternative notions of place and identity. ”We could learn from the processes of cultural production, which tend to be critical, questioning, challenging and welcoming ‘conflicts and contradictions’ as creative resources. We could learn from processes of artistic work, which tend to be critically aware of history, local distinctiveness and of traditions of creativity and cultural expression. I believe that an important part of artistic/cultural practice is the understanding of urban mindscapes and imaginaries, and that this has to do with the politics of symbolic contestation.”
Dorte Skot-Hansen calls for a more integrated way of policy making, where there is a new ground between cultural policy and cultural planning and advocates a common approach, which reflects the stronger ties. Peter Bishop, former head of Design for The City of London, leads a series of articles under the heading of Radical Reflection, which offer a number of perspectives of the city as a cultural condition. His new book Temporary Cities advocates a far greater understanding and openness of temporary phenomena in cities. “It would be misleading to isolate any single factor as explaining the growth in temporary urbanism. When planners and policy makers start to experiment as well, this could represent a powerful mechanism to re-tune our cities for whatever lies ahead.”
Kerstin Bergendal introduces us to the Park Lek initiative, which has become a key reference as to how artists can work with a community over a period of years to generate a true sense of communal identity, which can be used actively to form the basis of a citizen driven regeneration. Jesper Kofoed also advocates a more bottom-up process in our city visioning in his article Communities for better cities, and Jes Vagnby, the architect of Roskilde Festival’s temporary city, puts forward his Democracity philosophy as a realistic methodology of working extremely concrete and locally with changing the city. Hella Hernberg follows this theme with her Everyman’s City
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