The Memphis Manifesto

The Memphis Manifesto

This came out of a conference in 2003 (in Memphis!) and is featured in Richard Florida’s “The rise of the creative class”. Clearly not written by people who do reserve, it still makes an interesting point.

Building a Community of Ideas

Creativity is fundamental to being human and is a critical resource to individual, community, and economics life. Creative communities are vibrant, humanising places, nurturing personal growth, sparkling cultural and technological break-throughs, producing jobs and wealth, and accepting a variety of life styles and culture.

Creativity resides in everyone everywhere, so building a community of ideas means empowering all people with the ability to express and use the genius of their own creativity and bring it to bear as responsible citizens.

This manifesto is our call to action.

Principles:

1) Cultivate and reward creativity. Everyone is part of the value chain of creativity. Creativity can happen at any time, anywhere, and it’s happening in your community right now. Pay attention.

2) Invest in the creative ecosystem. The creative ecosystem can include arts and culture, nightlife, the music scene, restaurants, artists and designers, innovators, entrepreneurs, affordable spaces, lively neighbourhoods, spirituality, education, density, public spaces, and third places.

3) Embrace diversity. It gives birth to creativity, innovation, and positive economic impact. People of different backgrounds and experiences contribute a diversity of ideas, expressions, talents and perspectives that enrich communities. This is how ideas flourish and build vital communities.

4) Nurture the creatives. Support the connectors. Collaborate to compete in a new way and get everyone in the game.

5) Value risk-taking. Convert a “no” climate into a “yes” climate. Invest in opportunity-making, not just problem-solving. Tap into the creative talent, technology, and energy for your community. Challenge conventional wisdom.

6) Be authentic. Identify the value you add and focus on those assets where you can be unique. Dare to be different, not simply the look-alike of another community. Resist mono-culture and homogeneity. Every community can be the right community.

7) Invest in and build on quality of place. While inherited features such as climate, natural resources, and population are important, other critical features such as arts and culture, open and green spaces, vibrant down-towns, and centres of learning can be built and strengthened. This will make communities more competitive then ever because it will create more opportunities than ever for ideas to have an impact.

8) Remove barriers to creativity, such as mediocrity, intolerance, disconnectedness, sprawl, poverty, bad schools, exclusivity, and social and environmental degradation.

9) Take responsibility for change in your community. Improvise. Make things happen. Development is a “do it yourself” enterprise.

10) Ensure that every person, especially children, has the right to creativity. The highest quality of lifelong education is critical to developing and retaining creative individuals as a resource for communities.

We accept the responsibility to be the stewards of creativity in our communities. We understand the ideas and principles in this document may be adapted to reflect our community’s unique needs and assets.

DUCKETT | 01432 370 572 | contact us

DUCKETT

t: 01432 370 572

contact us