The Creative City: An Innovative Digital LeadershipProgram for City Decision Makers

Christopher G. Kirwan1(✉), Dan Yao2, and Wanni Dong2

1 Henley Business School, Reading RG6 6UD, UKchristopher.g.kirwan@gmail.com

2 Tsinghua University, Beijing 100084, Chinayaod14@mails.tsinghua.edu.cn, dawn0311@gmail.com

Abstract. As cities have become more advanced through the emergence of newtechnologies and Smart Cities solutions, there is a greater necessity to unlock thetrue potential of cities based not only on the technological dimensions, but on amore holistic approach incorporating strategies embodying design thinking,resource optimization, system integration and stakeholder engagement, enhancedvia new technologies, fundamental to harnessing the creative potential of cities.This paper seeks to outline and define the key theoretical concepts and method‐ology of the Creative City Digital Leadership Program, a joint initiative betweenTsinghua University’s Service Design Institute, Henley Business School’s Infor‐matics Lab and Parsons Institute for Information Mapping established to providea new digital platform for training city leaders and managers seeking alternativeapproaches.

Keywords: Digital leadership · Smart cities · Urban ecosystems · Resourceoptimization · System integration · Stakeholder engagement · Design thinking ·City DNA · Urban branding · Urban interface · User experience

1 Introduction

With a rapid urbanization across the developing countries in Asia, Africa, the MiddleEast, and Latin America and a slower but continuing urban growth in the developedworld, 2.5 billion people worldwide are poised to become urban dwellers in the nextthree decades. As populations swell, some of these cities will grow as great centers ofwealth creation while others are likely to fail due to the lack of a clear vision and devel‐opment strategy [1]. The concentration of activity in cities has led to a fierce competitionto attract human capital and manage resources. In China alone, there are 300 citiesdesignated as pilot Smart Cities competing for government support, global resources,and technology innovation. Each of these cities is seeking a unique identity and inno‐vative strategy to attract new talent, improve quality of life and advance its position inthe national and international marketplace. In order to achieve these goals, a new breedof digitally savvy city leaders and managers will be required to understand the potentialof new technologies and how these can unlock the value proposition of Creative Cities.

© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2016P.-L.P. Rau (Ed.): CCD 2016, LNCS 9741, pp. 540–550, 2016.DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-40093-8_53

2 The Creative City

2.1 Overview

As cities are now competing more than ever for global recognition, there is a need tounlock the true potential of cities based on a more holistic approach incorporating strat‐egies embodying design thinking, resource optimization, system integration and stake‐holder engagement, enhanced via new technologies, fundamental to harnessing thecreative potential of cities. This issue is indeed one of the most challenging to define,as it is a combination of hard and soft assets that make up the creative composition ofcities. This paper seeks to provide a brief overview of the notion of Creative Cities andhow through the process of defining the potential of each city, leaders and managers cangain insight into the ways that Creative City methodology can be applied to their city;to have an ultimate impact on the growth, quality of life and sustainability and to betterunderstand how new technologies can achieve these goals.

2.2 The Unique Identity of Cities – Macro

Throughout the world, cities have been competing on many levels to attract trade, laborand other resources while at the same time defining their unique identities. The CreativeCity is based on many factors that must be incorporated to establish a unique positionbased on a combination of identity, positioning and resource allocation that each cityoffers within local and global markets. The Creative City concept is based on the prin‐ciple that in order for a city to reach its full potential, these elements must be identifiedand optimized. These multi-facets are represented in The Cities of Opportunity 2015Report published by PwC ranking cities based on multiple indices that provide a widespectrum of criteria to measure the success of cities. The report analyzes the trajectoryof 30 major cities, all capitals of finance, commerce, and culture through their currentperformance criteria and what makes these cities function better [2]. As defined in thePwC report, technology, intellectual capital and openness to the world through tele‐communication access are some of the key drivers of the growth and prosperity of cities.When defining the key drivers, technology quickly bridges to innovation and creativity.

Today cities around the world are being revitalized through many different strategies.For example, the regeneration of historical districts in Shanghai, government greendesign policies in Berlin, and the re-branding of Florence, Italy to call attention to itsexceptional cultural legacy, efforts in each case that were planned to capitalize on theunique consumer appeal of each destination. The Creative Cities concept can be usedto facilitate this renewal process by developing strategies that capture the inherent char‐acteristics of a city or region, employing various strategies to channel these assets intoa comprehensive, integrated approach to reflect the city as a desirable place to live, work,play and invest and to inform city leaders how to unlock the true potential of their city.As part of this movement, many cities have finally realized the importance of softresources and have invested in the creation and development of major business andcultural events in the form of expos, trade fairs, industry forums, film and fashion festi‐vals, with each city looking to be differentiated in the global market by these venues.

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Cities around the world like London, Beijing and New York have established majorcultural events that have indeed created highly significant global recognition andeconomic benefits.

2.3 Innovation Districts - Geographic

According to the Brookings paper “The Rise of Innovation Districts: A New Geographyof Innovation in America,” new districts are emerging, where “leading-edge anchorinstitutions and companies cluster and connect with start-ups, business incubators andaccelerators.” Featured as “physically compact, transit-accessible, and technically-wired,” these new urban zones as “innovative districts,” are supporting mixed-usedevelopment and have been considered to be a new model for economic growth.

At a time when stagnant growth, rising social inequality and increasing environ‐mental degradation are posing great challenges to the cities, the emergence of innovationdistricts can play a unique role in stimulating local economies by encouraging and facil‐itating co-invention and co-production across sectors and disciplines, in reducinginequality with its capacity to include more disadvantaged population in the growth, andin rehabilitating the environment through more efficient and friendly use of land [3].

Similar to industrial districts and suburban science parks, innovation districts arealso manifesting as well as changing the preferences of people and industry in currenttechnology driven activities, creating new models that connect the forging of economy,the management of place, and the building of network [3].

2.4 Building Capacity and Improved Decision-Making – Integrated Approachesto Policy and Leadership

An integrated assessment for urban sustainability and development, as Dawson andcolleagues point out, is “much more than an exercise in modeling and data analysis.”Rather, it must consider and connect both the hard and soft systems, focusing on theinteraction between and involvement of researchers and stakeholders. The integratedapproach distinguishes itself in its great emphasis on the “explicit and transparent”reflection and learning process in urban planning and management [4].

The first element of an integrated approach is to engage the end users in definingpolicy questions and drivers, in order to set a practical goal and scope of the assessment.In this way not only the relevance of research is justified in a policy context, but alsothe decision makers will be inspired to engage in the process as it progresses, which is“particularly important in an evolving policy landscape” [4]. Moreover, it is importantthat the integrated assessment participates in a wider “dialogue,” an interaction with theurban area, i.e., no matter being carefully designed or coincidently happened, theapproach can be a monitor and displayer of urban changes through its regular reviewsand updates.

In addition to direct economic costs and benefits which are easier to capture, it isalso vital to employ a more complex and sophisticated approach in the evaluation oflong-term urban sustainability delivering, since issues such as amenity, social benefits,political costs can hardly be measured in a tangible way. Therefore, “non-monetary

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approaches” must be considered and developed in mainstream decision-making andmethods such as multi-criteria analysis will help the decision makers understand theimpacts of different choices.

3 Theory and Methodology of Creative Cities - Digital Leadership

3.1 Purpose

The Creative City concept must define an innovative approach that optimizes the uniqueidentity and specific resources of each city. With the emergence of new Smart Citymodels currently being applied across major cities throughout the developed and devel‐oping world, there has been an increased need to train city leaders about the complexsystems and strategies related to the innovative management of cities. The Creative CityDigital Leadership Program is a new initiative to fill this void by enabling city leadersto be exposed to global best practices in the planning, design, implementation and oper‐ation of a new generation of digitally based tools to optimize the functions of cities. Theultimate purpose is to improve quality of life for its citizens, stimulate economic growthwhile preserving and protecting the natural environment.

However, innovation is an ambiguous word that can have many meanings and appli‐cations as seen through the multifarious interpretations of the recent explosion of thisterm applied to companies and cities. Innovation primarily derives from the technologysector and has been a means to unlock potential at different scales from people, compa‐nies, cities and nations. In some cases, Innovation has now been equated with the poten‐tial of global economies as the primary driver of change and future growth. In theknowledge economy, innovation is what underpins the creation and management of IPlinked to research and development of new technologies. In fact in some countries wheremanufacturing has been replaced by the knowledge economy, as in the case with theUK, innovation and the development of IP has become a critical part of the GDP andmay be one of the most defining factors in economic growth and sustainability.

The Creative City concept builds on the unique drivers of each city to explore,augment and perpetuate greater soft power in cities made possible by advancements innew technologies, digital systems, media, big data and behavioral analytics includingsmart cities and innovative approaches to city management. The Creative City meth‐odology explores the key factors that allow cities to stimulate and support innovative inorder to unlock their creative potential. These elements can be in the form of importantresearch, pilot projects and the establishment of applications that provide the exploratoryfunctions to unearth potential innovation at different scales from community-basedprojects to large-scale citywide development.

3.2 Methodology: Macro City DNA – Defining the Unique Strengths/Assets

Each city has its own unique DNA that combines geographic location, physical layout,socio-demographic composition, cultural and physical resources, including workforce,and industry sectors. Professor Michael Porter from Harvard University focuses on howto optimize these resources to achieve competitive advantages [5, 6]. Building on

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Porter’s model, each city needs to understand its unique DNA to achieve its maximumpotential. The CITY DNA model allows cites to develop a strategy based on the creativeand cultural assets in order to identify a core DNA. From this base, a theoretical andpractical methodology can be developed that proposes a combination of City Branding,Media Architecture and Cultural Programming to represent and express the unique DNAof each city (Fig. 1).

Fig. 1. Mapping the creative industries in China’s leading cities

The Creative City Leadership Program builds on these elements to develop a trainingprogram to help city leaders understand how to map and visualize a strategy that connectsphysical and virtual urban systems from unique stakeholders’ points of view based onthe CITY DNA perspective. To partially illustrate this process of differentiation, acomparative study was conducted by Kirwan/Fu Information Architecture class atTsinghua University to map the creative industries within leading cities in China withthe result of better understanding the competitive strengths of these cities.

3.3 Methodology: Design Thinking - Strategies for Broader Applications

Across multiple business lines, cities are now looking at new innovative models derivedfrom tech culture - body storming, hackathons, start-ups incubators - while simultane‐ously introducing interdisciplinary approaches and borrowing methodologies from outsidefields including design where companies such as IDEO, FROG and others have brought amore holistic approach to innovation. Design thinking plays a key role in establishing anopen source, iterative process that allows for ideas and collaboration to stimulate interdis‐ciplinary solutions. This is due to the inherent nature of the design process to identify gapsand propose comprehensive solutions. Unlike many other disciplines, design is able toadapt itself to each context and to form a language inherently connected or drawn from thatunique combination of factors. Therefore, design thinking requires an open-ended approachthat the design process is capable of facilitating. Creative City Digital Leadership Program

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draws from the key strategies of Design thinking to unearth the potential concepts that candefine the programming of cities (Fig. 2).

Fig. 2. Design thinking tree

3.4 Methodology: The Practice of Convergence (Interdisciplinary Approach)

The convergence of design thinking, advanced computation and business innovation isnow at the core of new educational models and has led to the emergence of hybridprofessional fields and careers such as Information Architecture, User Experience, DataVisualization and other new media related fields that have drawn from diverse areas ofknowledge and are now influencing the nature of how cities are rethinking their approach[7]. The Creative City Digital Leadership Program develops a comprehensive planningmethodology that draws from the key strategies across different disciplines includingeconomics, urban planning, sustainable design, ecology, sociology and behavioralsciences, computer programming, media and interactive design. This process examinesboth macro and micro aspects and develops urban strategies to provide a broaderconceptual understanding of how and why these applications serve to enhance the expe‐rience of cities [8].

3.5 Methodology: Collective Intelligence

The Creative City Digital Leadership Program utilizes theories and applications ofcollective intelligence to visualize and model patterns and trends of cities [9]. Datavisualizations of the ‘urban pulse’ provide insights into urban behavior and lifestyletrends to better understand how cities work, enabling city leaders to gain valuableinsights for the planning and design of their cities. A key aspect of the application ofcollective intelligence is to create urban-scale, multi-sector datasets to deliver compre‐hensive urban simulations [10]. By collecting data and visualizing information across

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multiple urban functions, it is possible to understand how the interdependencies of urbanfunctions, both physical and virtual, may be optimized through the planning and designof innovative interventions to achieve the creative potential of cities.

3.6 Four Levels of the Creative City Digital Leadership Program Development

Systems: Comparative analysis of urban systems and the relationship of physical anddigital/media layers.

Typologies: Codifying emerging typologies and patterns in urban systems by repre‐senting the hierarchy and components of the system.

Navigation and Interface: Visualizing user experience of the system and how usersdynamically interact within the system architecture including both physical digitalrealms.

Interventions: Developing a comprehensive plan that identifies gaps in existing urbansystems where there is a potential need for digital/smart solutions (Fig. 3).

Fig. 3. Creative city Digital Leadership Program matrix

4 The Creative City Innovation Alliance

Three institutes will form one new entity representing the new Creative Cities InnovationAlliance that will serve as a collective think-tank as well as the founding contributorsof the Creative Cities Digital Leadership Program:

Service Design Institute, Academy of Arts and Design, Tsinghua University. As anew integrated discipline, service design combines theory and methodologies frommultiple fields bridging academia, industry and government to provide real solutionsand applications to the complex problems facing the advancement of our society,

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environment and the global economy. In order to achieve China’s vision to progressfrom a nation of manufacturing to knowledge industry and to become a pioneer in designand technology innovation, the Chinese government has initiated national plans basedon the integration of the IT industry with traditional industries and university-industrycollaborative innovation programs across China and linking to the world. Design andthe fusion of culture and technology are the core impetuses for this industry reform. Therole of the Service Design Institute at Tsinghua University is to develop innovationmodels to promote and advance the new category of service design while stimulatingbusiness innovation in China. Based on an international platform, collaborative formatand shared research, the Service Design Institute focuses on the creation, education,promotion, and connection of a new Service Design framework. There are two newopportunities in China for Service Design in the context of Smart Cities: “New LifestyleDesign” and “Design for People” rethinking and redesigning the urban experience viainfrastructure, mobility, healthcare, retail, recreation, and to create new opportunitiesfor the private sector shaping the new lifestyle for today and future citizens.

Design Beijing Lab, Academy of Arts and Design, Tsinghua University. Within theService Design Institute, Design Beijing Lab utilizes design thinking to actively developprojects for the economic, social and environmental benefit of Beijing. The lab hasworked on many Smart City applications and has participated in Beijing Design Weekand Beijing Smart City Expo for the past 6 years bringing new ideas related to theinterface between humans, computer and cities. The lab functions as a platform forresearch, planning, design and experimentation for new media applications. Multi-disciplinary teams conduct analysis of urban activity in both the physical and the virtualrealms and the patterns of citizen interaction, providing valuable data for the identifi‐cation of key trends and opportunities for new urban lifestyle applications. As a result,cities, companies and individuals are enabled to better adapt and improve, creatingsolutions for the public future wellbeing and quality of life.

Henley Business School Informatics Research Center. Part of Henley BusinessSchool at the University of Reading, the Informatics Research Center (IRC) provides acenter for interdisciplinary and collaborative research in Informatics. Benefiting frominput of knowledge and expertise from various subject fields, including Biodiversity,Business Management, Economics, Information acquisition and assimilation, IntelligentPervasive Spaces, Computer Science, Cognitive Science and Systems Engineering,across a number of Schools and beyond, the IRC aims to construct digital infrastructuresfor innovations in domains of business and management, IT for strategic management,enterprise information systems, financial modeling and prognostics, bio-computing,construction management, intelligent buildings, pervasive intelligent spaces, and ITsupported collaborative work. The role of digital infrastructures construction is to boostICT capacities for both decision-makers and the city operation systems, facilitating theimplementation of creative city plans [11].

Digital Leadership Program – Henley Business School, University of Reading.While the development of digital technologies such as social media, mobility, analytics,cloud computing and the Internet of Things are creating innovation opportunities and

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competitive advantage for cities that embrace it, challenge is also posed to the efficientand effective operation of a much more complex urban systems, requiring a new gener‐ation of digital leaders who can critically think about the ways in which digital tech‐nologies can be utilized, to creatively manage the resources and to coordinate amongthe stakeholders. As a collaborative network platform set up by Henley Business School,the Digital Leadership Program aims to close the gap between supply and demand ofdigital leadership skills required in driving business and public sector innovations [12].Incorporating a series of research and knowledge transfer projects, the program isdesigned to explore the strategic role of leadership in the digital economy, to exchangeresearch findings, practices, policies and programs in digital leadership, and to enhanceleaders’ competencies in technology-enabled decision-making.

Parsons MFA in Design and Technology. Today’s designer faces two fundamentalchallenges: the expanding influence of design within society and the growing role oftechnology within design. The MFA in Design and Technology (MFA DT) providesstudents with a lively and dynamic environment in which to use design research, process,applied theory, and writing to address these challenges. Students push their experimen‐tation beyond the visual: Design is seen as a mechanism for developing strategies,knowledge organization, business structures, and social consciousness. Areas of studyinclude Interaction (mobile, games, Web, and installation), Physical Computing(programming code and chip-based applications such as toys, fashion, media in archi‐tecture, and performance technology), 2D and 3D Animation, Motion Graphics, andDigital Filmmaking.

Parsons Institute for Information Mapping. Parsons Institute for InformationMapping (PIIM) is a Research, Development and Professional facility within The NewSchool and located in New York City. PIIM’s mission is to advance the field of Knowl‐edge Visualization through academic and commercial pursuits. PIIM researchers andstaff disseminate their expertise in information categorization, knowledge representa‐tion, information taxonomy development, information logic and ranking/scoring,knowledge visualization, and Graphic User Interface (GUI) and User Experience Design(UXD) by developing powerful tools and methods for decision makers and analysts.PIIM’s work seeks to increase decision maker and analyst cognition of complex datasets via efficient experiences and visualizations. In both its own research and in itsengagements with government agencies, corporations and other organizations, PIIMpushes the boundaries of information, engineering and visual design to develop newways of thinking about information — and to build and deliver corresponding real worldsolutions [13].

5 The Creative City Research Projects

Creative Cities Innovation Alliance incubates academic research and projects thatsupport the development of cities as centers of innovation. An example of a past projectfrom Prof. Fu/Kirwan at Tsinghua University’s Design Beijing Lab includes InnoZone,part of Beijing Smart City Expo (Fig. 4).

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Fig. 4. InnoZone interface

InnoZone. Innozone data mines and visualizes patterns of innovation in the city - aninteractive visualization project aimed at users that want to enhance their understandingand ability to engage in cultural activities within the city based on their individual profileand personal interests. By sourcing all types of activities in Beijing via the Internet, bothmen and women and people at different stages of life can pursue self-realization and lifelong learning by identifying and participating in appropriate activities including lectures,exhibitions and salons based on geographic location and accessibility. In addition toserving individual users, the InnoZone system, built using Arduino, mines and compo‐sites data collected over time and maps this information on a central citywide visuali‐zation illustrating emerging patterns of cultural activity within Beijing. The project wasdebuted at during Beijing Design Week’s Smart City Expo.

6 Conclusion

The Creative City Innovation Alliance, with participants: Tsinghua University, HenleyBusiness School and Parsons/New School University, has been formed to create a globalpartnership with the goal of training city leaders in identifying the unique culturalresources of their cities and finding ways to unleash their potential as Centers of Inno‐vation. By establishing research bases in Beijing, London and New York, this alliancewill take advantage of being situated in the leading centers of growth, technologicaladvancement and mega-trends.

The Alliance plans to offer the Creative City Digital Leadership Program, an onlineplatform combining executive education training modules and a digital dashboard for

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city leaders supplemented with on-location workshops in Beijing, London/Reading andNew York utilizing the highly experienced personnel and unique resources at eachuniversity to assist participating city leaders in creating the necessary framework forInnovation Districts and to train them in using the latest digital technologies in the plan‐ning and management of their communities.

Acknowledgments. We are pleased to recognize contributions to this paper made by thefollowing colleagues: Academic Research and Collaboration – Prof. Zhiyong Fu, Academy ofArts and Design and co-founder of Design Beijing Lab, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China;Sven Travis, Faculty Parsons School of Design, New York, USA; Prof. Kecheng Liu, Dr. WeiziLi, Henley Business School, University of Reading, England; Dr. Biyu Wan, National Smart CityJoint Lab, Beijing, China. Design Beijing Lab, School of Art and Design Tsinghua UniversityStudent Projects: InnoZone – Yiming Wei, Xue Dong and Shukai Wang, Beijing, China. EditorialSupport – Ernest E. Kirwan, AIA, retired architect/planner and faculty member, Harvard GraduateSchool of Design, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA.

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