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As part of its culture creative program, Bahrain National Museum hosts a lecture “Heritage & Creativity: Great Partners in Urban Development”, by the international expert, Charles Landry, on 3 October 2018.

According to Charles Landry, safeguarding heritage is considered by some to be a cost, even though a vast array of evidence suggests the opposite. It is generally accepted that, in the long term, it tends to provide significant benefits in economic and social terms, and also in psychological terms too, insofar as it enriches a sense of belonging and identity. Erasing the past, by destabilizing memory, fractures communities. Creativity can help people, organizations and cities to unlock talent and develop their potentialities. It can unearth hidden resources and drive innovation.

Getting heritage and creativity to work together involves developing a common language and a mutual understanding of what each has to offer. We know, for instance, that refurbished and reused old buildings, industrial or otherwise, often become innovative urban start-up hubs - and that these can become social nerve centers, expressing a city’s vibrancy.
Charles Landry thinks that people might complain how complex urban transformation is and how it might be possible to describe this in understandable terms. Therefore he will talk about his discovery of a very simple and useful way to characterize the different phases of urban development in the post-war period. Every shift in the means of economic wealth creation creates a new social order, a new type of city, new ways of learning and things to learn and new settings in which learning takes places. It requires different cultural capabilities.

Charles Landry is an international authority on the use of imagination and creativity in urban change. In 1978 he founded Comedia, a highly respected globally oriented advisor that assesses deep trends, creative potential, culture and urban change. He invented the concept of the Creative City in the late 1980’s which has become a global movement and changed the way cities thought about their capabilities and resources. Charles Landry helps cities identify and make the most of their potential by triggering their inventiveness and thinking and by opening up new conversations about their future. His aim is to help cities become more resilient, self-sustaining and to punch above their weight. He is currently a fellow at the Robert Bosch Academy in Berlin.