An Acropolis for the Creative City

For me, cities are the ultimate creative gesture. Largely in part, most cities are not developed to take this opportunity. Architectural history has in the main part been in service to deities and autocracies. This has been consistently expressed through to contemporary times, where it is now mainly in service of capitalism (Tafuri, 1976). Large developers have tended to treat the city as a consumer item, focussing on how people would consume the city, evidently opposed to the experience and how it affects the user (Tuck, n.d.).Within our field, how do we resist the shortcomings of capitalism? How might one conceive a monument to the creative city? This research proposes bringing creative practice to the forefront of urbanism as one potential alternative to the ‘consumer city’. By drawing creative practice to the core of urbanism, there is a chance to positively mould a city’s design values and public spaces. The city’s architecture, design values and built environment can be transformed productively and progressively. This research proposes polycentrism in Porirua as a means to explore Art Based Urbanism within the local context. This is explored through design-led research, exploring the potential of my creative processes and personal tendencies as a means of contemplating these issues. By reflecting on my creative process, I start to find a particular architecture within my innate tendencies. This architecture developed as a product of my cyclic movement between moments of expression through architectural language finding experiments, and pragmatism through infrastructure/circulation planning and mapping. This research demonstrates one potential alternative to the issue of the city being considered a ‘consumer item’. I have designed a monument to creative practices, a modern acropolis to reflect the creative spirit of society and bring it to the centre of the city.