Creativity in Spaces of Possibilities for Sustainable Urban Development: An Empirical Study of Four Cultural Initiatives in Hanover, Germany

Abstract

Creativity is a central feature of educational processes that aim for an artistic communication of sustainability challenges in the city. The study reported in this article empirically explores the deployment of social creativity in cultural initiatives struggling with issues of (un)sustainable urban development in their city (Hanover, Germany). On the one hand, individual characteristics of creativity are explored. On the other hand, forms of collective creativity are of interest, as well as the synthesis of individual and collective creativity under the concept of social creativity.

Keywords:

• Collective creativity
• individual creativity
• social creativity
• spaces of possibility
• sustainable urban development

Acknowledgments

I want to thank my colleagues within the “City as Space of Possibility” Research Project, namely: Volker Kirchberg, Antoniya Hauerwaas, Ute Stoltenberg, Ursula Weisenfeld, Annette Grigoleit, Patricia Wedler, Verena Holz, Julia Barthel, and several students assistants who visited a few events and meetings of KdW and provided me with their impressions and field notes. Over the duration of the empirical research, I was regularly supported by a part-time student assistant (namely Tim Bauer in the first year of the project, and then Elisabeth Böhnlein in the following two years), who contributed to fieldwork, filming, transcriptions, coding of the material and interpretation of the coded material. Another student assistant, Anna Oldiges, also contributed to the coding efforts in the final months.

Notes

1 More insights from the research project, including several other qualities of “Spaces of Possibilities” besides creativity, will be published in English language in 2022 (Kagan, in press). See also Kagan et al. (2018).

2 In 2018, KdW started a new project, the “Neighborhood Lab for Climate Culture in Linden” (“NachbarschaftsLabor für KlimaKultur in Linden”), obtaining for the first time federal funding from the German Federal Ministry of the Environment. This newest chapter in the development of KdW lies beyond the scope of our empirical research and is thus not further discussed in this article.

3 See the acknowledgements section at the end of this article.

4 The question of how exactly this creativity may correspond to what Reckwitz (1995) characterized as a “profane creativity”, and how far it may nevertheless perpetuate the “creativity dispositive” (Reckwitz, 1995.), would merit further analysis beyond the specific focus on this article.

Additional information

Funding

The empirical research grounding this article was carried out within the framework of the “City as Space of Possibility” (“Stadt als Möglichkeitsraum”) Research Project at Leuphana University Lüneburg (2015–2018), which was supported by the “Niedersächsisches Vorab” advanced funding program from the Ministry of Science and Culture of the State of Lower Saxony (Germany).