Tickets: €3, pay on the door. Attend this event and Public space: collective common or virtual reality? for €5.

It is claimed that we are living in an ‘Age of Creativity’. Researcher Richard Florida has identified the rise of a creative class, ‘whose economic function is to create new ideas, new technology and/or creative content’. As one of the buzzwords du jour, the ‘creative’ tag is applied to the endeavours of architects and designers, but also the work of scientists, university professors and even those in the healthcare, business and finance and legal sectors. With policymakers keen to associate the economy, industry, education and skills with creativity, it’s perhaps no surprise to see the rise of what Charles Landry calls the Creative City.

The celebration of creativity, however, is accompanied by confusion over what makes us creative, and even what creativity is. In the past, experts often tied creative leaps to key moments in the development of society – for example, the realisation by Baroque masters of the sensuous qualities of music, mood and emotion that accompanied the Enlightenment revolution of intellectual thinking. Today, many argue for a wider, more timeless and perhaps more democratic understanding of creativity. Everyone, they say, has the capacity to be creative.

Another view of creativity goes back to the Italian physician Cesare Lombroso’s 1891 work The Man of Genius, which attempted to link creativity with neurosis, psychosis and other mental illnesses. Today, neuroscientists scan the brains of illustrious scientists and artists to ask why ‘so many of the world’s most creative minds’ are ‘among the most afflicted’. But to what extent can the science of the brain explain creativity? If creativity is inherited, does this rule out Edison’s notion that genius is one per cent inspiration and 99 per cent perspiration?

If scientists look to our neurons for answers, then architects and urban designers often argue that the key influence on creativity is our environment. From eighteenth-century coffeehouses to the ‘creative clusters’ of the modern workplace, the most creative spaces, they say, are those that throw us together, creating interaction and chance meetings. But doesn’t that contradict the idea of the secluded genius who needs isolation and solitude in order to create? Can design cultivate creativity? Do we know how to encourage creativity or even what it is? Is it one of those abstract concepts that can mean everything and nothing all at once, even as it is widely debated?