There was a Creative Voices Summit held yesterday that focused on how creativity can be used to mend the broken bits of our cities. Moderator Ned Hill—Dean of Levin College of Urban Affairs—opened with a question on the definability of creativity. And while there were a few attempts initially bandied about as a means to slap truth on what creativity entails, it didn’t take long for the panel to switch from what creativity is to what it is not. And what it is not is: rigid, inflexible, certain, and prone to be codified and copied.

Two anecdotes, here, will serve to drill home this point, both of which drew laughter or “uh-huhs” from the audience. First, Don Plusquellic—mayor of Akron—told of a civic duty problem one administration was having relating to the removal of garbage. More exactly, an impoverished section of the town had old, narrow streets, disallowing trash pick-up which only exacerbated the inequality of living conditions. An unorthodox solution was then proposed: to have the residents bring their garbage to the town square in exchange for bags of fresh foods. Though the idea would eventually go on to work wonders—both efficiency-wise as well the fostering of well-being—an administrator for the mayor initially expressed grave doubts. “But how do we know that the garbage is theirs?” said the administrator. And so with that, Mayor Plusquellic put beautifully the bureaucrat’s time-honored tradition of punishing novelty for the comfort of the known, regardless if this “known” is known to be broken.

Locally, Terry Schwartz—interim director of the Cleveland Urban Design Collaborative—echoed this closed-system “goings on”, and how it is a particular death knell to the opportunities within a shrinking city. Specifically, Schwartz spoke of a woman who got be known as the “fish lady” on the East Side. Unemployed, the lady began making killer fish sandwiches, with people stepping up to a porch that’d eventually become a kind of storefront. “But instead of the City stopping in and working with her on the basics of food safety,” Schwartz would go on, “they closed her down.” Here, then, was a case where an avenue of enterprise led to local food access, before becoming yet another disconnect in a city filled with dangling ends.

And while it is no small task for a city to manage such unmanageables as uncertainty and flexibility, it is what’s needed. As this—according to CEO’s for Cities Director Carol Coletta—is what creative cities are really all about--or that ability to approach problems from a lens of the fresh. Originality, then, is one key factor in how a city manages its problems according Coletta, but she cautions it is not easy. “Very few cities seem to have the confidence to capitalize on their distinctiveness,” she’d say, indicating perhaps that there is a measure of acceptance involved in how creative a city can get. This makes sense. Because those gripped in the grasp of foreboding—or those focused only on what’s around the corner, or who’s here to take what we got—well, it is an anxiety that simply blocks a free-flow of ideas from getting to the top.

But we’d better get used to it—this uncertain state, at least that’s how CSU President Ron Berkman sees it. No doubt a newcomer to the rather mayonnaise of malaise that still tends to coat this city (It is changing. I mean it. But we’re not there yet.), Berkman expressed a rather non-Cleveland-centric view as to the generality of uncertainty in the nation today. Speaking to a world without boundaries, the President stated that: “it is a global platform now, and the securities of the past are no more”.

In fact the next generation of great cities, according to Berkman, will be those who do flexibility the best, and the way to do this is to begin to accept that there will be uncertainty in the plans we now make. And while this may not soothe the control freaks, we do leave ourselves options which (in itself) can be golden, if only because a city that continually comes to a fork in the road will be better than the one that has led itself to a path that has been walled off.

But really, can a city truly make a process out of embracing flexibility, thus allowing the flow of a collective “a-ha”? Well, we are human after all, and we do like to know whether our plan will work. And so there will be temptation to quantify even this process of embracing uncertainty. And as if on cue, the evidence of such temptation was given by an audience member who—in wanting to know how we become ambiguous—asked: “But can you institutionalize flexibility?” Of course no, you can’t. But who would want to. In fact it’s possible to see the upsides of ambiguity, as it is that which allows one the creative liberty to look at the clouds to see whatever animal you want. And so what can perhaps be “institutionalized”, then, is this beauty in uncertainty which, in turn, can finally allow the means of looking at our living urban system as less of a machine than as a canvas on which our creative solutions can be splattered.