Aseem is an urban activist, scholar and practitioner who has worked in Canada, Brazil, France, Greece, Haiti, India, Morocco, the United Kingdom, and the United States. He is also the Founding Director of TRULAB: a Laboratory for Designing Urban Transformation. When Aseem moved to Cardiff he spent a day walking around the city with the Creative Cardiff team, getting to know our creative hubs and coworking spaces.
He writes:
As we celebrate Creative Cardiff’s fifth birthday [“Happy Birthday, Creative Cardiff!”], we also celebrate the network’s many collaborations and innovations, while reflecting on its future contributions to the Cardiff city region. Cities are among humanity’s greatest creations, and the public realm is arguably the most significant aspect of cities. The public realm is what makes a city so rich, so complex, and so full of potential. The public realm is the realm of the other, par excellence. The public realm consists of spatial networks constituted by places of encounter and interactions of different bodies, cultures and ideas.
The vast potential of the public realm lies in its capacity to act as a catalyst for interactively and collaboratively generating hope—by deepening understanding and building solidarity, creating dreams and pursuing transformative actions. While the public realm is spatially grounded at multiple scales in specific geographic contexts, it is also constantly evolving because the urbanism of a city is constantly in flux.
The most potent aspect of the public realm lies in its capacity to design publics. Publics never simply exist; they are always created. Publics are created out of groups of people who are made and remade by the actions of other people. For example, when there is a common concern or desire (e.g. that emerges out of a crisis such as urban inequality, lack of affordable housing, or inadequate infrastructure), there is a call to creative and strategic action and then groups of people respond to that call, a public is summoned into being.
Creative Cardiff has contributed significantly to the public realm and the future of the city through its collaborative innovations in projects such as Coworking Collective, Festivals Research Group, Immersive South Wales and its partnership with Community Gateway.
Most of all, through such efforts, Creative Cardiff has summoned a public into being around the many facets of creativity—both formal and informal—which can become springboards for further exploration and transformation.
