The Interactive City: Outdoor Installations as Social Experiments

In particular, I wanted to give a little love to those who are working to instill more “loveability” into my hometown of Savannah. In general, I wanted to comment on the use of outdoor interactive events as a type of social experiment, driving the denizens toward collaborative intelligence and social entrepreneurship.

As noted here and here (See, more local love!), social and economic entrepreneur Chris Miller recently created a giant chess board in downtown’s Forsyth Park, circuitously inviting innocent bystanders to engage one another in head to head competition. (Or, as Gen Y might call it, social interaction, albeit without the internet involved.) As Chris noted on one blog site:

I want this to challenge Savannah leadership to find ways and support those social entrepreneurs that by their energy and actions, make Savannah better and more a more “lovable” city in a hundred little ways.

I also want this to challenge Savannah residents to find ways to direct their energy and focus their passions in a hundred little ways that make Savannah better.

At a time when our social, political & business leadership structures have difficulty delivering the level “lovability” improvements we need to keep pace with our other city peers, remember this one small example, that leverages the passion of single person in a way that positively impacts thousands of others.

In a direct reference to Charles Landry’s July 8th talk in Savannah on “The Art of City Making,” Miller’s call for an environment of “lovability” (Landry also speaks of the need for city’s to develop “sensory systems” and cities as “organisms” rather than mechanisms, a complement to Gelder’s “Place 2.0), harken to the key concepts of social entrepreneurship (people working with grand ideas to create human betterment and aspirational living.) With this thought in mind, can interactive installations such as the public chess board bring about dynamic change in city policies, economics, and demographic impact, or do these issues require a much more organizational and governmental intervention?

As noted in a recent Publishers Weekly review of the book Loneliness: Human Nature and the Need for Social Connection by John Cacioppo and William Patrick:

Eleanor Rigby might have been in Worse shape than the Beatles imagined: not only lonely but angry, depressed and in ill health. University of Chicago research psychologist Cacioppo shows in studies that loneliness can be harmful to our overall well-being. Loneliness, he says, impairs the ability to feel trust and affection, and people who lack emotional intimacy are less able to exercise good judgment in socially ambiguous situations… Cacioppo and Patrick (editor of the Journal of Life Sciences) want primarily to apply evolutionary psychology to explain how our brains have become hard-wired to have regular contact with others to aid survival.

This source is a little off the beaten path, but it makes a strong point concerning the individual (and collective) need for “place” to include productive and positive social connectivity and collabration. Cities that are designed and function without the “lovability” of Miller and Landry become less livable as well, expressing the dyfunction of mistrust, lack of affection, emotionlessness, and ultimately an environment of destructive isolation and inability to survive. This may be strong, but I’m sure that several cities come to mind under this description, right?

I found this excerpt in Canadian Geographic as well that notes an outdoor art installation project by Canadian artist Pierre Richard:

Wandering the streets of his neighbourhood in Aylmer, Que., one summer day, Pierre Richard stopped to watch some children drawing on the sidewalk with chalk. Later, he was flicking through channels on television and happened upon a documentary about San Francisco street artists. “It just clicked,” he says. Richard, a painter, created an outdoor art project he called “Fleurs de macadam” (flowers on the pavement), inspired by a song of the same name by Québecois chanteur Jean-Pierre Ferland. Over the past decade, the event has grown to include thousands of children from across western Quebec, as well as a few professional artists, who come together for one day each June to paint the pavement with their imaginations. What began as a small community project has evolved into a full-fledged festival of art and song. “My dream is to get the whole province of Quebec to participate,” says Richard. “And why not the whole country, really?”

Sounds a bit like the wonderful job that the Savnnah College of Art and Design has done on the annual Sidewalk Art Festival in Forsyth Park, but my point is more toward the community participation and connectivity that outdoor collaborative installations bring to a city-scape.

Charles Landry expounds on this idea in an article entitled Age and the City: Creativity in the City :

“The aim of creative city making is to think of your city as a living work of art, where citizens can involve and engage themselves in the creation of a transformed place. This will require different creativities: The creativity of the engineer, the social worker, the planner, the business person, the events organizer, the architect, the housing specialist, IT specialists, psychologists, historians, anthropologists, natural scientists, environmentalists, artists of all kinds and importantly ordinary people living their lives as citizens. This is comprehensive creativeness. It involves differing forms - not only the thrusting creativity of discovering a new technical invention, but also the soft creativity of making interaction in the city flow.

And in case you don’t think this matters to technological, environmental, and economic growth – both locally and globally:

UNESCO’s Creative Cities Network is developing a fundamental concept of ‘Creative Economy’ and ‘Creative Industries’ which the UK Government Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS)define as ‘those industries which have their origin in individual creativity skill and talent and which, have a potential for wealth and job creation through the generation and exploitation of intellectual property’… Cities are increasingly playing a vital role in harnessing creativity for economic and social development:

Cities harbor the entire range of cultural actors throughout the creative industry chain, from the creative act to production and distribution.

As breeding grounds for creative clusters, cities have great potential to harness creativity, and connecting cities can mobilize this potential for global impact.

Cities are small enough to affect local cultural industries but also large enough to serve as gateways to international markets.

The concept of the city as a center for human development and creative, diversified collaboration depends on the level of social connectivity of the various ideas and individuals in that particular place. Will a single giant chess board set up in a public park bring about a sense of dynamic change or an actualization of innovative opportunities for social development? The real question should be, “What else can this public installation inspire to further collaborative interaction and creative community spaces?”

Note: Kudos to The Creative Coast Alliance who supports events such as these, working towards the development of “brain-based” business creation and attraction in Savannah, Georgia. Special thanks for granting me permission to use the picture from the chess board installation. (Thank you, Leigh Lawless!) I know, no chess board is in that particular picture, but I’m standing to the far right (looking cool – or not!), and I don’t get in many pictures on this virtual space. Ok, since there actually is an awesome chess board in the park…

Top Image: The Creative Coast Alliance

Bottom Image: Frank Spencer

References:

Legatos, Jasmin, Canadian Geographic, January/February 2007, Volume 127, Issue 1, pp. 92-93.