The Creative City
The Creative City Certificate prepares students to engage effectively in revitalizing cities and communities by tapping their inherent potential for cultural innovation, placemaking, and social/economic entrepreneurship. Exploring best practices globally, students develop asset-based proposals for specific locales including implementation plans.
The Creative City Certificate adds value to other majors as well as work/life experience for students aspiring to assume leadership roles in improving quality of life, specifically by enhancing quality of place.
Cities are centers of human creativity and cultural innovation. They both attract and breed these. Such creativity and innovation are apparent in the vitality of the arts, as well as that of businesses (both large and small), research (basic and applied), and the everyday life unique to any given locale. These are the ingredients that make our places sustainable—economically, socially, and environmentally--by endowing a “sense of place” along with a “sense of community.”
The five-course sequence comprising the certificate will enable students to build upon their own strengths in order to help cities and communities creatively build upon their capacities.
Topics of study include:
- asset-based community building
- placemaking
- urban revitalization
- leadership skills
- economic development
- infrastructure enhancement
- cultural innovation
- entrepreneurship.
The Creative City Certificate recognizes the shift currently underway—featuring the New Economy, rise of the “creative class,” and networked regions and institutions—which privileges integrated holistic thinking, an emphasis on place specificity, and the centrality of human creativity to promoting urban and environmental health and well-being. Learning from best practices, students will develop asset-based proposals and implementation plans for improving specific locales.
The certificate would complement majors:
- Urban & Metropolitan Studies
- Sustainability
- Planning
- Parks & Recreation Management
- Nonprofit Leadership & Management
- Journalism
- Political Science
- History
- Sociology
- Geography
- Business
- Plus other areas of study.
This certificate would also serve professionals in the community working in the areas of urban governance, land-use law, public art, planning, parks & recreation, community development, philanthropy, and others. Flexible class times and locations make the certificate a viable option for those unable to attend classes during the day.
The Creative City Certificate is available to all admitted undergraduate students (regular or non-degree) at ASU. Non-degree students are required to apply to ASU (as a non-degree student) and once admitted, contact the School of Public Affairs to be admitted into the certificate program. Students may begin taking courses before they formally apply for the certificate; however, they should apply for admission as soon as possible.
