A "sustainable creative city", fostering the individual and collective creativity of communities to create "spaces of possibility" for urban resilience, is different from the unsustainability of a “neoliberal creative city” as fostering individual creativity for economic market gains. The key characteristics of urban resilience require the flourishing of spaces where imagination, experimentation and challenging experiences open up futures-oriented questions and perspectives. My research focus lies especially on the different roles and forms of agencies that a diversity of artists and creatives bring into the creation and development of such spaces. My attention is also placed on the relations of these creative agents to urban social movements and to urban policy developments.
From 2014 onwards, I have thus started engaging into a comparative exploration of the roles of artists in such urban spaces of possibility, exploring cities as “anthropo-scenes” - i.e. cities, in the planetary context of the Anthropocene, both as naturecultural scenes and as stages where diverse agents engage (on different levels) with the 4 or 5 dimensions of the search process of sustainability. I will discuss some of my research questions in relation to emerging insights from empirical explorations in Hamburg, Hannover, New York City, Oslo and Singapore in the first half of 2014.