Cool Cities and Un-Cool Countries

I picked up the current issue of Der Spiegel on "Europe’s Cool Cities" while in New York City (un-cool, according to Spiegel) this week. London and Paris are out. Amsterdam, Barcelona, Dublin, Copenhagen, Tallinn and Hamburg are in. What makes these cities so cool?  According to Der Spiegel they are magnets for the cultural creatives – young, talented people with brainpower and spending-power who are attracted to other young talented people. Here Der Spiegel is picking up on something I wrote about over two years ago. Richard Florida, in his book The RIse of Creative Class. wrote about the ‘Three T’s" – Technology, Talent and Tolerance – as the necessary ingrediants for attracting and keeping cultural creatives. Somewhat new in the report by Der Spiegel (available only in print edition) is the emphasis on "Second Cities": while the mega-cities contend with fiscal crises, insufficient infrastructure, and skyrocketing real estate prices, the Second Cities have a better chance of creating the space for a sustainable creative culture:

Die Krise der Mega-Citys ist die Chance der Second Citys. Von Manila dürften die allerwenigsten behaupten, das sei eine coole Stadt. Cool sind Städte überschaubarer Grösse, die Sicherheit bieten, Aufstiegschancen gewähren und eine identifizierbare Elite haben, die innovativ genug ist, um für ökonomischen Fortschritt un für Wohlstand zu sorgen.

One thing that Florida stresses is that in a globalized "flat" world there are few barriers preventing the  creative class from moving to next cool city, if they see better opportunities or living conditions.  Here the EU definitely has advantages in terms of cultural mobility. After 9/11 the US has thrown up numerous barriers, and the global creative class has stayed away. But it may not matter anyway to the creative class: America is no longer cool.  Adam Gopnik touches on this in his article on Nicolas Sarkozy in the New Yorker:

Now, for the first time, it’s possible to imagine modernization as something independent of Americanization: when people in Paris talk about ambitious kids going to study abroad, they talk about London. (Americans have little idea of the damage done by the ordeal that a routine run through immigration at J.F.K. has become for Europeans, or by the suspicion and hostility that greet the most anodyne foreigners who come to study or teach at our scientific and educational institutions.) When people in Paris talk about manufacturing might, they talk about China; when they talk about tall buildings, they talk about Dubai; when they talk about troubling foreign takeovers, they talk about Gazprom. The Sarkozy-Gordon Brown-Merkel generation is not unsympathetic to America, but America is not so much the primary issue for them, as it was for Blair and Chirac, in the nineties, when America was powerful beyond words. To a new leadership class, it sometimes seems that America is no longer the human bomb you have to defuse but the nut you walk away from.

So in a period of just six years America has transformed itself in the eyes of the creative class from the cool older brother who cound initiate you into what is new and exciting to the crazy drunk uncle, who you have to humor in order to minimize the damage he might cause.