Charles Landry

Charles Landry, born in 1948, founded the consultancy Comedia in 1978 and has since advised hundreds of cities around the world. In 1995, with Franco Bianchini, he published the essay The Creative City, and in 2000 the book of the same title subtitled a toolkit for urban innovators, which named one of the most widespread ideas in urban policy of the last two decades.

His thesis is that post-industrial cities compete no longer for factories but for the capacity to imagine: culture, talent, tolerance and the quality of public spaces are the capital that attracts people and businesses, and a creative city is one that gets its people, including its administration, to think differently. Landry insists on the creative bureaucracy, the idea that city hall must be as innovative as the artists it promotes, and on the city as a collective work of art, the theme of The Art of City Making (2006).

The creative city was adopted by governments from Glasgow to Bilbao and Seoul, and its popularised version by Richard Florida, the creative class, received the critiques Landry partly shares: that creativity becomes marketing, that it makes neighbourhoods more expensive and that it replaces social policy with festivals. The Civic City in a Nomadic World (2017) answers with the idea of a civic city that gives roots to an ever more mobile population.