WHY DO WE NEED CREATIVE SPACES

The city of the 21st century is a place where people are alone together. If society continues this way down the ego-alley, what implications does this have for the future of the human kind? Cities in the 21st century remain the place where global structure is experienced and where social change becomes tangible. A city has the capacity to turn from the incubator of individualization, social ignorance and isolation towards the greenhouse of change.

In order to form an inclusive society, a society of understanding and engagement, where people express them selves, respect them selves and form an interactive community, social space needs to be provided.   So where can this space be found?

It is crucial for the health of a society to encourage

responsiveness to current happenings and

engagement in creating a more inclusive, safe and

happy society.

Social spaces since the early 70s get more and more attention in the creation of the future city as “social space ‘incorporate’ social actions - the actions of subjects both individual and collective.

A city can be summarized as a historically rooted spatial organization of people's experience, where the global social structure is experienced by people on a local level. Within the physical boundaries of a city, change in society becomes visible. Yet, what becomes invisible is the personal boundaries amongst people. Since the rise of our ‘Networked Society’ and power mechanisms created by globalisation - social engagement got lost along the way. Back in time, the medieval market places of the early cities where home to trust and mutual commitment between its citizens, and the foundation of a healthy and prosperous city. Where concrete goods changed hands between visible buyers and sellers, who [followed] the same moral norms - security, justness, and stability, were most important. Those intimate relations that the citizens established with one another where lasting, even over generations and provided security and wellbeing for the people. However, contemporary systems and the overflow of goods and things clogged the usability of those commons in the city of today.

The rise of capitalism however affected this ideal of mutual obligations and commitment in which human relat ions were securely wrapped and gave rise to the trend of ‘communal ignorance’, instead. The growing globalizing and capitalistic structures as well as its implied impacts on society, creates a steadily increasing withdrawal of the individual from its role as a part of an interactive community and the alienation of their fellow citizens.

Cities used to be a safe haven for their citizens built to keep predators barred. Today they have become floating places, where strangers come and go. They turned into nothing more than a human settlement in which the meeting of strangers is an event without future. The focus on the production of surplus that is nowadays in the centre of most interactions causes deep insecurities within peoples lives. Increasingly visible inequalities in which the rich become richer and the poor become poorer shape the picture of a world in which it becomes gradually difficult for communities and nations to provide collective security.

While the city and their local environment often does not serve as the place for identification anymore, people start defining themselves by their cultural identity, and this is the reason behind so many separate and isolated ethnic identities, breeding a culture of difference, and separatism on many level. It creates a city surrounded by strangers, breeding yet more suspicion, fear and insecurity. The city became a place of difference rather than an integrated place for everybody to find unity.

HOW CAN A CITY GIVE PEOPLE SPACE

FOR THEIR CULTURAL AND PERSONAL

IDENTITIES, WHILE AT THE SAME TIME

CREATE A COMMON IDENTITY, WITHOUT

LOOSING ITS GLOBAL CONNECTION, AND

BEING PART OF A FLUID ENVIRONMENT

IN WHICH PEOPLE COME AND GO?