Context
The city as a work of imagination, not an output.
Where the residency takes its name, and why the argument needs a decade of real ground.
A book published in 2006 made a claim about craft. The residency is what it looks like to test that claim in public, on ground that is already busy being itself.
The argument
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: that the decisive variables in a city are not the ones planning can 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 not delivered. It is made, unevenly, by people exercising judgement under pressure. The same intervention that works in one street fails two streets away, because the difference lay in who did it, when, and whether anyone believed them.
The book is therefore less a method than a standard. It asks whether the people shaping a place are working with imagination and craft, or administering it.
Why ten years
A practice claim can only be tested by practising.
An argument about craft cannot be settled in a keynote. It can only be tested on real ground, repeatedly, in places that differ enough to break any tidy conclusion carried over from the last one.
So the residency runs as a decade-long circuit rather than an event. A city-state rewriting its own playbook. A town being reanimated by people who never asked permission. A habitat being built from nothing. Each chapter answers the previous one badly enough to set the next brief.
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.
The title and the argument are Charles Landry's. The residency, its brief, its cohort, its curation, production and delivery, is authored independently.