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A creative city is a better place to live, work and play. It is a city that appreciates the advantage of investing in entrepreneurship and innovation. The main aim of Creative Cities – an international project that the British Council launched in the spring of 2008 – is to give young, influential people the tools to transform their cities into better places.
The project is arranged with partners within various private and public organisations and with European cities that understand that innovation is the basis of sustainable development in the modern world. It will find one to ten cities in the UK, Poland, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Slovakia, Slovenia, Ukraine, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Russia that have the potential to become creative cities. Throughout their involvement, cities will be able to establish a competitive advantage for themselves and attract creative talent to contribute to their future economic growth.
Among the project’s planned activities are the Future City Game, Urban Ideas Bakery and online competitions.
- Future City Game
This is a game that is played during a two-day event by the city inhabitants coming from different backgrounds and representing different disciplines and outlooks. The aim of the game is to generate the best idea on how to improve the quality of life in cities – either in a specific area within a city, the city as a whole, or in response to the common challenges facing cities around the world.
Local stakeholders such as municipal authorities, community groups, cultural, educational and urban regeneration agencies choose the theme, location and participants for each game to ensure that it is tailored to the local context. Teams playing the game identify the common challenges facing the city - environmental, social, economic and cultural.
Game players use the specially developed Future City game-kit based on a unique and innovative methodology developed by the British Council, CLES (Centre of Local Economic Strategies), URBIS - an exhibition centre on city life and by other partner-organizations. Players design ideas which they then test and refine with the help of practitioners and community members.
Fifty seven games are planned across the participating countries for the period of June 2008 – March 2009.Future City Game – which will be played in several cities across Europe; it has already been successfully used for city planning in Norway and Columbia
- Urban Ideas Bakery
Urban Ideas Bakery is a temporary office which will be set up in a city centre of selected cities where about eight specialists will work for one to two weeks on specific problems put forward by the city authorities in consultation with the Future City Game teams and the wider audience-base of the city’s inhabitants. It will deliver new yet practical solutions in sustainable transport, health, crime prevention, community building, recreational spaces, pollution and integration.
Participants will work on the problems using a solution generation process created by the British Council and partners (Participle). The Urban Ideas Bakery will be of significant professional and personal development value to the participants - the innovative approach to generating Creative Cities solutions can be also applied to other challenges they might face in the future.
- Online competitions
Several online competitions will be organised to involve wider audiences in the Creative Cities project.
One online competition has already been successfully run: people from all countries participating in the Creative Cities project uploaded photos or videos showcasing favourite places in their cities and demonstrated what they think makes their city creative: (www.creativecompetition.britishcouncil.org)
Other competitions will be organised in the future.
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