Global Port Cities: School of Liberal Arts at Tulane University

Harnessing Creativity and Collective Intelligence to Address Global Challenges

Principal Investigators

Brian T. Edwards, Dean & Professor, School of Liberal Arts, Tulane University (USA)
Driss Ksikes, Journalist, Playwright, and Director of Economia, HEM Research Center (Morocco)

Project Summary

This project is grounded in a series of meetings—including expositions, symposia, workshops, and community events—that engage clusters of actors in global port cities. Our premise is that there is a particular relationship between port cities and creativity that has been underexplored, and that there is a special potential for such cities to mobilize their creative economy for positive change.

The main goal of this project is to establish and mobilize a multinational network of actors across sectors—universities, arts organizations, urban planners, and community organizers—to share ideas, learn from one another, and discover meaningful solutions to common challenges. Across all the port cities in our network, we will generate ideas that address three main spheres for action: environmental challenges faced by coastal communities, economic inequality, and social and racial justice in complex urban settings. This emergent network will seek to tap into the creativity and creative economy of these global port cities to develop innovative ways to address local challenges while also potentially speaking to these issues for a global audience.

In its first stage, this project places New Orleans (USA), Tangier (Morocco), Dakar (Senegal), and Saigon/Ho Chi Minh City (Vietnam) in conversation, facilitating the exchange of knowledge and ideas between places that are not usually put in dialogue. We hope to expand the project to include partners in some of the following cities: Salvador (Brazil), Havana (Cuba), Beirut (Lebanon), Doha (Qatar), Naples (Italy), Barcelona (Spain), and Marseille (France) as the project enters its next phase. While these cities have diﬀerent historical trajectories and current social, political and cultural realities, they share certain positive attributes: rich histories and presents of multinationalism and multilingualism, an exceptional relationship to their national locations, and high levels of creativity. They also have challenges in common: threats by environmental factors, precarity and poverty related to ever-changing port economies, and struggles with crime and violence. These cities have flourished at various periods in their histories, but they have also undergone transformations induced by economic globalization and have tried with varying levels of success to adapt. They are selected for that which they have in common, their originality, and the presence of viable partners based in each city.

Already in our preliminary research and discussions with partners throughout this network we find evidence of remarkable creative solutions emerging from local settings, which suggests that a project that coordinates multiple cities will unleash great potential because of the power of

collective intelligence. Rather than impose top-down solutions, which have either limited uptake or contested legitimacy, the encounters we advance rely on listening to the residents of the port cities that are part of the project, including youth and marginalized populations, and attending to emerging dynamics—what one Moroccan partner calls “the stream beneath the stream”—in order to have positive and lasting impact.

Collaboration and conversation motivate the work throughout. A website is in development, co-curated by our partners across the network. We break down the typical boundaries between university and community to promote the emergence of new ideas and mobilize the energies found throughout port cities. Urgent challenges such as those we grapple with are the purview of all, as are the creative energies of stakeholders from all sectors.