Creativity and the city – a wor(l)d building undertaking

Keywords: creativity, knowledge, language, socio-spatial development, urban
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Sunday
Session Start / End Time: 2/27/2022 09:40 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/27/2022 11:00 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 60

Abstract

The question of creativity is an essential geographical question that has for a greater part of human history been framed around the discourse of the representation of a geographical vision both as a subject of visual and literary representation, scientific inquiry, as well as making. The ability to capture the world and scale it to a form of textual or visual perception and create something new, requires mediating the sensible and the intelligible, as well as comprehending how different modalities of encoding the knowledge and language shape that space and vice versa. Central to this task is the possibility of communication and transmission of knowledge.

By focusing on the question of creativity, this paper explores how different perceptions of creativity and creation have impacted the ways we understand and represent work and world, what this means in socio-spatial relations, and understanding of what a city is. Drawing on socio-spatial and poetic considerations as well as on contemporary narratives of traditional crafts, this paper will juxtapose the perspective of the cartographic reasoning and that of the craftsmen with the aim to contribute to understanding of how socio-spatial relations are constituted, and in what way this understanding enables the recognition of specific features of the figured urban space, its identity, and processes within it. By exploring this understanding, this paper wishes to complement the existing views on city-making and how language can encode diversity into our environment and knowing the world.