The Creative Land. Heritage and Creativity in the Neo-Anthropocene

Urban creativity is a hard challenge, because it doesn’t need rules or models, but adaptive protocols applicable in different local contexts, able to mount resources, capacity building and creative environments. It challenges us to find local features that could provide good practices to be turned into methodologies or components to forge new urban and human regeneration tools, based on the cultural armature and citizens engagement. We live in a Creative Land composed by generative cities, a wide palimpsest of innovation labs, as experimented by several worldwide networks supporting what’s variously termed social enterprise, community interest companies, impact economy, organizations that aim to create positive social impact through enterprise. The Creative Land could be seen as a spatial network of social catalysts, and creative cities are living organisms. Culture is more than the tangible part of sustainable development through the heritage or the intangible part through the creativity, but it’s the collective intelligence that puts in connection tangible heritage and intangible identities, cultural infrastructures and creative economies, historical sites’ conservation and urban innovation. So, an effective creative urban agenda asks for practical actions, all grounded in local contexts and formulated and implemented through a collaborative approach, and a panel of initiatives that could act as the beta testers of the new creative-driven paradigm of sustainable development.