I happened to take part in the first commercial video-conference link between London and New York. We looked each other in the eye, talked and laughed and felt we were at the beginning of a new era. We could be anywhere, preferably on a beach, and have instant video communication with anyone wherever they were. Of course, it hasn’t turned out that way. The exact opposite happened. Even with the Internet now being ubiquitous in all industrial countries (and all international beach resorts) cities have reasserted themselves as the best place to be. Why is this so?

One reason is that the more we talk with them the more we want to get to know people and that usually means things like drinking and eating together. In many Asian countries, no business negotiation can get going until the principals have had a meal together with not a few toasts. Everywhere, the more we telephone and send emails, the more we build up expectations and indeed desires that, one day, we will meet ‘properly’.

The only exceptions are international R&D studies and large-scale construction and mining projects which depend on the management of formal systems and routines. This is revealing. Their priority is the flawless execution of an agreed plan. The work is objective and quantifiable and, above all, impersonal. In a sense, anyone can do it.

Creativity is more personal and subjective. It involves individual intuition and hunches and seeking out new ideas and testing them against other people’s ideas, and we need to like and even trust someone before baring our souls to them. It’s hard to do this on the phone.

A lot of new ideas are old ideas meeting for the first time. So we need to be where there are lots of ideas milling around. The two places where this happens most are in cities and online.

Creativity has always been an urban phenomenon and the growth of the creative economy goes hand-in-hand with a resurgence in city living. While it’s possible to have a good idea anywhere, even on a beach, we need other people to stimulate our imaginations and help us decide which ideas are worth pursuing, which are rubbish and which we should devote time to. Creative people are like hungry magpies and like to look in unexpected places to snatch ideas. Then they need to test their ideas and make them fly. Creativity is a competitive business.

Another place brimful of new ideas is the Web. John Naughton, who wrote ‘A Brief History of the Future: The Origins of the Internet’, came up with the interesting idea that the Web is a huge surprise machine. He means it is deliberately designed to surprise us, that surprise is not an incidental by-product. He makes a subtle but important distinction between the Internet and the Web. The Internet, which provides email, works on the same principle as the telephone. We obtain someone’s address and we send them an email. But without an address we cannot send an email. The Web was invented by Tim Berners-Lee because he was frustrated at not knowing his colleagues’ email addresses. So he designed a hyperspace platform on to which anyone could upload pages which other people could then log on to. It is the Web, not the Internet, which gives us surprises.

Singapore scores high as a habitat for creative companies. Once, as a joke, I said that a creative city needs three things: good coffee, universal Wi-fi, and liveable, walkable streets. Singapore has all three. It has some amazing buildings, though one hopes the vast hotels and specialised campuses do not squeeze out the smaller nooks and crannies, areas and alleys, that are so important for creativity to thrive. Creativity cannot be imposed top-down by order. It has to sprout from the ground and grow in its own way. Richard Florida, author of ‘The Creative Class’, says creative cities need more weird people, not more shopping malls.

Singapore also has an astonishing level of broadband penetration. In a population of 5.07 million, about 2 million homes have broadband and the penetration of 2G and 3G phones is 140% (Infocomm Development Authority, Singapore). Add in Wi-fi hotspots and the penetration rises to 170%. This puts Singapore on par with Korea and far ahead of the USA and European countries. It is one of the benefits of being a small city state where infrastructure costs are relatively low.

These two habitats produce endless surprises, not orchestrated by government but dreamt up by individuals as part of their daily momentum. It produces events like NOISE Festival showcase which provides networks for young artists to show off their talent and runs in February and March. It enables start-ups and corporation to connect easily and discover what is happening (another term for being surprised).

Exponential is an over-used word but networks really do have exponential effects. Interweave a city’s physical networks with digital media and the chances of surprises multiply exponentially. It doesn’t matter that no one can count them, or know them all. What matters is whether people are willing to be surprised.

How important do you think the Web is in spawning the growth of creative ideas?

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