Looking back at the blogs for the past week or so, there seems to be a thread running through all of them and that is creativity.

Creativity and creating creative cities are very much buzz ideas developing in the early years of the 21^st century. With organisations such as Toronto's Artscape addressing how to create the conditions for creativity to thrive within a city and companies such as Pixar and Google addressing creating conditions for creativity within their workforce, there is no escaping the fact that this is an important movement.

Being an historian by trade, this got me thinking about the importance of creative thinking in the past and the revolutions this has created, why they occurred and how that compares to our situation here. Unsurprisingly, there are common themes running through all of them.

The most obvious period of new and creative thought is the Renaissance - a supposed emergence from the "Dark Ages" into a new age of art and culture. This flurry of creativity was stimulated in part by the patronage of powerful Italian families, ruling the city states and partly through the rediscovery and reintroduction of many classical and religious texts, due to increased trade and the reconquering of many lands which had been held by the Moors. The archetype of a Renaissance Man is one who knows all things about everything, epitomised in Leonard Da Vinci. He is now primarily known as an artist, but was interested in anatomy and even credited with designing the first tank and aeroplane.

After the Renaissance, at the beginning of the eighteenth century, the Enlightenment revolutionised thought across Europe. Here, in reaction to the dominance of the Church, reason and empiricism were emphasised. This led to the development of rigorous subjective scientific enquiry, a method which was also applied to the study of history and art. This in turn, led to the Industrial Revolution and the reaction which followed in the shape of the Romantic movement in the nineteenth century. The Romantic movement explored the natural world and contemplated the ephemeral, in contrast to the hard, subjective thinking of the Enlightenment and the squalid grimness of urban industrialisation.

The common link throughout these changes is the reaction against what went before and the creative thinking which challenged and changed whole societies. Equally, the conditions needed to be place in order to facilitate the change, whether it was the patronage of an Italian lord to the freedom to speak out. So what are we reacting against today? How are we changing the way we approach our life, both at work and at home? And how are we going to create the conditions to support a revolution in our thinking and facilitate the change which is occurring? If they can do it, why can't we?

PS I apologise for the historical generalisations - I didn't think you'd want to read an essay!