What happens when you pair two designers over a slice of pizza with the back of a pizza box as their blank slate?

The Boston design community gets a new museum to promote local design.

But it won’t look like any other museum.

The nomadic Design Museum Boston will occupy…

How can a city reinvent itself when a big anchor company relocates away from its birth-place?

Eindhoven in the Netherlands is exploring just that question. Work is underway to develop a ‘creative city’ with the aim of bringing new life to the neighborhood.

When The Netherlands’ largest redevelopment…

Building on the work of the Mayors’ Institute on City Design to transform communities by preparing mayors to be the chief urban designers of their cities, the National Endowment for the Arts has announced a new initiative to assist mayors in their design efforts.

The NEA Mayors' Institute on City…

Cityspinning, an organization developing a platform to seed new ways of using public and unused spaces with a series of interventions in Bangalore and Delhi, is exploring how mobile cultural spaces might help make a city “less alienating and fragmented”.

The results of a competition, in which…

Memphis College of Art President Jeff Nesin responded to Joe Cortright's view that the arts product and marketing need a major overhaul, given the fact that arts participation is declining.

"Why marketing or product?  Maybe there's a shift, perhaps technological, perhaps cultural, probably both, that we need to acknowledge.  I…

Joe Cortright commented on the recent blog post on the new study showing the decline of participation in the arts: 

"If you think about college-educated older people being a key market for arts, it is shocking to see these kinds of declines.  That…

This San Diego collective is an example of a group of artists who have come together “to connect creative people and create a new art culture”, developing their own DIY collective.

Yeller is working to connect up local artists with each other, generate new markets for their…

What is bad news for the arts can also be bad news for cities.

Arts Participation 2008: Highlights from a National Survey features top findings from the 2008 Survey of Public Participation in the Arts, conducted by the NEA in partnership with the U.S. Census Bureau.  And the findings are…

It seems for some this current period of transition through the economic turmoil is changing what it means to be global.

A new vision is emerging for expanding agencies with global ambitions in advertising circles, which challenges the traditional approach to having an office in every major city to…

Next time you’re in London, forget stopping to smell the roses.  Stop by for a tinker on the piano, street-side. 

In a bid to foster public spirit and trust, 31 pianos are being placed around the city at prominent sites such as Tate Britain, the British Library and…

The President has his man to run the National Endowment for the Arts.  The New York Times reports that  Rocco Landesman, the colorful theatrical producer and race-track aficionado who brought hits like “Big River,” “Angels in America” and “The Producers” to Broadway, has…

Why fund arts and culture? That is question tackled by Michele and Robert Root-Bernstein in this compelling argument, where they challenge us to imagine the results of not having these “luxuries”.

Have a look at the wealth of examples that emerge when they see “what…

Two interesting approaches to leveraging the knowledge, creativity and abilities of people previously un-tapped I came across this week:

“Targeting the more than 2 billion literate mobile phone subscribers in the developing world, txteagle aims to help alleviate high unemployment levels in many rural areas of countries…

Here’s one example of a program exploring how to foster a system of opportunities for learning to build the creative capital of our future generations.

Thriving Minds emphasizes the importance of developing opportunities for children to be creative as a key to improving the lives of children,…

In a time where reinvention is the name of the game, the roles of producers and consumers, citizens and decision-makers are being blurred, and new technologies are making new relationships possible, this initiative is bringing all these things to the art world.

ArtPrize aims to “reboot the…

As I arrived in San Diego for our CEOs for Cities meeting, I received this from our very much missed colleague Joe Cortright who is in Florence.

Hope you are doing well at the national meeting in San Diego.  If I were anywhere but here, I'd have definitely…

We will be LiveBlogging from San Diego Wednesday through Friday at the CEOs for Cities Strategy Summit.  I'll be with ULI San Diego members tomorrow night, and I look forward to blogging what's on their minds.  Then we'll gather for the Creative Cities meeting Wednesday afternoon for our final phase…

This story is a must-read.  Detroit's cheap housing is attracting (at least three) artists and dreamers who are then attracting friends.  "But the city offers a much greater attraction for artists than $100 houses. Detroit right now is just this vast, enormous canvas where anything imaginable can be accomplished."

Detroit is a wonderfully complex city.  Yesterday, I had the opportunity to meet with a group of Detroit civic leaders (members of the CEOs for Cities City Cluster) who are working to bring 15,000 college-educated young adults to Detroit by 2015.  And they are focused on making Detroit an appealing…

Here is a great example of under-utilized talent being put to work in new ways.  In this initiative that taps young people’s intuitive grasp of technology, students aged 12 - 16 take on a mentoring role as cell phone ‘coaches’.

“The program’s goal is to improve their…

"Creative energy is the only inexhaustible resource we have."  - Pier Giorgio di Cicco, poet laureate for the City of Toronto.

The conversations at the Chicago Humanities Festival are always a pleasure.  Last weekend, I heard Saskia Sassen (she of Global City fame), her husband and author Richard Sennett (power couple extraordinaire), Ricky Burdett of Urban Age and Philip Enquist, SOM partner in charge of Urban Design…

Good column today in the NYT on Innovation is relevant to our upcoming meeting of the CEOs for Cities Creative City Network.  Some thoughts:

++ Five core values are needed to entrench innovation in the corporate mind-set:  questioning, risk-taking, openness, patience and trust.  All five must be used together. 

Some quick lines from today's conversations...

"Creativity is the only inextinguishable resource we have."

There are 3 principles of the creative ecology from John Howkins: 

1.  Everyone is creative.
2.  Creativity needs freedom.
3.  Freedom needs markets.

Creativity does not equal the arts. Creativity is not the same as innovation.

With creative cities strategies increasingly gaining the attention of city leaders around the world, the Creative Cities Summit being hosted in Detroit October 12 – 15 will engage leaders with ideas on how to “rethink and redesign our cities for this age of innovation, knowledge and creativity”. 

By…

Yesterday, I visited with Aly Khalifa and his partner Beth (and dog Angus) in their DesignBox offices in Raleigh, NC.  Aly is my new Starfish guru, the man who with colleagues created the open source potluck festival, SparkCon.  Aly explained the concept behind DesignBox.

For more…

Here’s another example of some of the ideas we’ve been exploring with city leaders through our Remix and Creative Cities work.  This exemplifies ideas of connecting and tapping diverse knowledge as a starting point for individuals to contribute to community or public challenges. 

The Bank of…

Diverse groups translate their knowledge into innovation better than homogenous groups.  This makes it vital that cities find ways to enhance, map and tap into the diverse knowledge available to them to better their creative performance.

Identifying, encouraging, and accessing varied knowledge domains and talent pools as a way…