Let's Gather, Discuss & Shape the Narrative!
Creativity, turned out to be more uniting concept than we initially thought. It had its root in decision science, artificial intelligence, cognitive psychology and business management. The fireside chat series aim to ignite discussions on creativity in strategic urban planning by bringing together scholars from diverse fields, social cognitive psychology, business management, philosophy, computer science, art, and design. The series aims to provide a platform for urban planners and other disciplines to exchange ideas and explore theoretical concepts of creativity, practical models for its application, and technical approaches to supporting it.
The study of creativity has always served a purpose. In the 1950s, it was about selecting gifted minds for military decision-making. In the 1960s and 1970s, it championed individual expression, feeding the hope of dismantling rigid, traditional education. By the 2000s, it became an engine of economic growth, driving the creative economy. And today, its purpose is existential. In a world seemingly overtaken by machines, the study of creativity today defends what is uniquely human: the ability to navigate complexity, imagine possibilities, and solve problems in ways no machine can replicate. It is not just a study of ideas or their economic value but of what makes us irreplaceable.
Now that the focus has returned to what makes us complex and irreplaceable, creativity is once again being explored through its roots in psychology and decision science, rather than the political and economic lenses that have long dominated its study. This is where strategic urban planning, often absent from discussions on creativity, has much to offer. Strategic urban planning is both the art and science of imagining futures, navigating complexity, and crafting solutions that are innovative yet practical. Since the 1950s, the field has built a vast reservoir of knowledge on how plans are conceived and evaluated, how practical constraints are managed, and how individual decision-makers operate within larger institutional, social, and cultural contexts.
These sessions build on insights from the Supporting Creative Minds in Urban Planning (SEMINAL) project and their structure and themes are very broadly shaped by the ‘Domain Individual Field Interaction’ (DIFI) model of creativity, developed by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi in 1988. This model offers a high-level, systemic view of creativity, a lens through which the varied studies on the subject can be connected.
It rests on two enduring insights about creativity. First, creativity is inherently field-specific. What drives innovation in one domain may hold little relevance in another. Second, creativity is never a solitary act; it emerges from a dynamic interplay between the creator and the environment in which the creative act occurs. The individual draws from the knowledge of the domain, transforms it, and, if society deems the change valuable, it is absorbed into the domain, providing a new starting point for the next generation of innovators.