11 03 Interview Lighthinking meets Paolo Granata (University of Toronto) who explains the value of creativity as a developmental factor for cities. ( The Culture of Cities , 1938). So, the city is not just an experimental laboratory or social cohesion. This is the place where human experience is formed, a space that can “transform power into form, energy into culture, dead matter into the living symbols of art, biological reproduction into social creativity.”) ( The City in History , 1961). A few years later, another great thinker of the twentieth century, the Canadian Marshall McLuhan, one of the key spokespersons for the so called Toronto School, would define urban space as the distinctive place for educational experience in modern society, a space for learning, cultural involvement and essential to the individual’s development. In McLuhan’s view, imagining the City as a Classroom (1977) is an invitation to capture the complexity of existing relations between technology and culture, understanding the way in which urban space is modelled Around a century ago, from a metropolis struggling with the tribulations of modern urbanisation, the minds of the Chicago School - Charles Cooley, Robert Park and Roderick McKenzie, among others - came up with the idea for a completely new city. Not just a simple territory of social and economic aggregation, but a place where ideas became reality, a space for conceptual design: the city as a vast human laboratory. During those years, the intellectual Lewis Mumford from New York identified in the idea of cities, the tangible traits of man’s slow, steady action on his own environment, aimed at making the latter compliant with safety requirements, stability and prosperity. The words of the great American town planner still ring clear today like a manifesto for the conceptual design of urban space: “Mind takes form in the city; and in turn, urban forms condition the mind” PaoloGranata Lighting the urban ecosystem: creativity as a conceptual design Universityof Toronto and recreated time after time with the technologies of knowledge. McLuhan explained that the media, on a par with technological innovations, is not a neutral tool. It represents an environment unto itself, the habitat inside which human existence is played around with. In the same way, the city is an expression of the ability that humans have to transform and shape their own environment and an extension of the human ecosystem. The individual and urban space form a unique system where the relationship of interdependence and reciprocity that exists between the two is nothing more than a demonstration of their co- existence, mutual influence of one over the other and vice versa. Man has always moulded his surroundings and is equally moulded by them. This interaction, or interdependence between culture and technology achieves its most intense