Design Thinking as Principles for the Structure of Creative Cities

Abstract

Birds build nests, and bees build hives, and bowerbirds build bowers. Humans build villages, suburbs, urban metropolises, space stations, and virtual, online worlds we cannot actually live in but often spend more time in. We are not just the “wise” species—we are homo designare. We are the species that designs our world. We have a unique capability for design thinking, an open-ended capacity that enables us to create novel objects, environments, or situations by combining and recombining, and sometimes inventing, base elements into novel constellations. In this chapter, I present design principles for creative cities derived from a cognitive perspective on design thinking. To do so, I will build up a cognitive model of design thinking. I will then use this cognitive model to propose principles that we should apply to the design of creative cities.