The Idea
What is the role of the creator in the life of a city?
One question, held open across places and years. The cohort, the ground and the week are all built to keep asking it well.
The framing
In tension
to intention.
Every place is held between what it already is and what it imagines for itself.
In tension: the contradictions, inherited constraints and competing forces a place carries. Intention: the design, direction and future it is reaching for. Citymaking is the practice that lives in the gap between the two.
The architecture beneath the idea
Habitats vs urbanisms.
A productive friction, not an opposition. The cohort is built around it.
Habitats
Real, custodial, lived places.
Held by founders, foundations, multi-generational stewards, artistic organisations embedded in a town, and, in the host case, by the public-sector apparatus itself. Each one is already in tension: land, water, capital, attention, time.
Urbanisms
Theories of the future city.
Wellbeing measurement, cultural-regeneration practice, smart-city orthodoxy, longevity infrastructure, the state imaginary. The intention layer, frameworks for what a place could be, and how to read whether it is becoming that.
The Creators sit across the gap, practitioners holding lived places, and lenses carrying theories of the future city, so the two can read each other in real time.
The design principle
Surfing the edge of chaos.
The residency is deliberately under-determined. It began in 2026 and renews each year on different ground; what it finds in one chapter sets the brief for the next. Flow, uncertainty and emergence are designed in.
Over-programme it and it becomes a conference, a set of appearances with a known outcome. Under-programme it and nothing compounds. The practice sits on the edge between the two, close enough to order to hold a cohort together, close enough to chaos for something unplanned to happen.
The answer is not written down anywhere. It is worked out, each year, on ground that is already busy being itself.