About
Where the residency sits.
The Citymaking Circle convenes the people responsible for places. The Art of Citymaking is where that conviction meets real ground.
A ten-year residency held by the Circle, and the book the name comes from.
How it is convened
The Citymaking Circle
The Citymaking Circle is the membership body that convenes and sustains the work. It brings the cohort together, underwrites the chapters, and keeps the practice going between them.
The Art of Citymaking is its ten-year residency, where the question of the creator's role in the life of a city is worked on ground that is actually being made. The Citymaking Circle sustains the residency, and the residency is where its members meet real ground and real practice.
Where the name comes from
Citymaking is a craft, and crafts are judged by their makers.
The Art of Citymaking, published by Charles Landry in 2006, makes an awkward claim: the decisive variables in a city are the ones planning struggles to measure. Atmosphere, memory, trust, courage, the willingness of an institution to take a risk it cannot justify on a spreadsheet. These decide whether a place becomes what it hoped to be.
It follows that a city is made, unevenly, by people exercising judgement under pressure. The same intervention works in one street and fails two streets away, because the difference lies in who did it, when, and with what care.
Why ten years
A claim about craft is settled by practising it.
An argument about craft holds up only when it is tested on real ground, repeatedly, in places different enough to break any tidy conclusion carried over from the last one.
So the residency runs as a decade of chapters. A city-state rewriting its own playbook. A habitat being grown from bare land. A town reanimated by people who set their own permission. Each chapter answers the previous one just badly enough to set the next question.
Ten years is roughly the horizon over which a citymaking decision becomes legible. It is the shortest honest unit of time for the question the residency asks.
Curated and produced by weareMIXD