Imagination Required For Successful City Building

A conference currently taking place in Montreal is exploring the idea that the city exists as much in the imagination as it does in time and space. For a young country like Canada which has only recently begun to develop a metropolitan culture, this is a somewhat foreign concept. However, there is now a growing recognition of the linkage between culture and a city's self-identity and economic prosperity. The problem, say some experts, is that modern urban planning places too much emphasis on the tangible and the quantifiable, leaving too little room for the human imagination in the act of creating cities.