K3 and the 3 Ts
It’s hard to believe that Möllevången — the funky-yuppie area at the centre of Malmö where I gave my Down With Fun lecture last night — was, just a decade ago, considered a dangerous area, the kind of place where women don’t feel secure walking around alone at night. Now it’s a tidy place with multi-ethnic restaurants, cosy cafes playing Black Uhuru and serving chai latte, art project spaces, and lots of open wifi. Late-opening Iraqi and Afghan groceries light the corners, and young people throng the streets.

There’s no mystery about the transformation of Möllevången. Everyone I asked explained it with one decisive event: the opening, in 1998, of K3, advertised at the time as “the new digital Bauhaus”. K3 is a government-funded School of Arts and Communication which describes itself as “a multidisciplinary research and educational school working within two broad areas: design and culture and media” (I count three there — or possibly one — which suggests that we’re dealing here with people more attuned to art than arithmetic). K3 isn’t exactly an art school, but the three Ks in its nickname are Konst, Kultur and Kommunikation; art, culture and communication. (The Krets Gallery staff told me that someone from K3’s Subcultural Strategies department came to see my lecture but couldn’t get in because there were already too many people inside — her entrance strategy was blocked by too-much-subculture, maybe.)

Now, all this tends to support Richard Florida’s ideas about the positive power of the creative class in transforming post-industrial economies. Knowledge-based economies depend, he says, on a growing creative class (up to 40% of the population, by his definition) whose ideas fuel the new forms of economic growth. Florida drew up an index based on what he calls the three Ts — talent, technology and tolerance. In his book “Flight of the Creative Class” he ranks nations into a “creativity index”. The Top 10 for the 3 Ts, according to Florida, are Sweden, Japan (together again at numbers one and two!), Finland, USA, Switzerland, Denmark, Iceland, Netherlands, Norway and Germany.

Not everyone agrees. One Anon yesterday commented “Richard Florida’s a dink. Sweden’s the most tolerant country, except when it comes to Muslims … blacks … freedom of expression, etc. etc. etc. Basically, anyone who isn’t Swedish or at least non-Muslim European and has views that aren’t suspect by the national culture or government.” But it seems to me that, in Möllevången at least, there’s plenty of ethnic diversity. If there are tolerant bits of Sweden, they’re in these “creative class” areas. Florida calls Swedish values “soft” ones — tolerance, openness, equal opportunities, and social care — and says that these are central to economic growth in knowledge economies. What he means, clearly, is that you don’t expand your economy without liberal political values. He’s using Sweden, to some extent, as a stick to beat Bush’s America with.

Florida’s creativity index puts Scandinavia far ahead of any other region — the most creative area in the world. (I struggle, though, to find the name of a single Swedish contemporary artist who’s really made a splash internationally in the last ten years or so. The Danish Olafur Eliasson is probably Scandinavia’s most successful artist. He lives and works in Berlin now.) Florida attributes Sweden’s success to Korean-style educational and computer literacy rates. You could also wonder whether being a bit chilly doesn’t also boost a nation’s rankings: most of his top ten creativity hotspots are freezing.

Talking to Swedes after my lecture, I showed them Inglehart’s Cultural Values map on my iPod, pointing out how Sweden and Japan were almost alone at the top right hand corner, the place where self expression values dominate over survival values, and secular-rational values over traditional and religious ones. Some Swedish-resident Americans who were interviewing me weren’t at all convinced that Swedes were “self-expressive”. They thought there was a conformism here, a pack mentality. A Swedish psychologist said that he preferred to call this a “collectivist” mindset, which of course the Japanese also share. I then wondered whether you couldn’t be both collectivist and self-expressive; after all, Japanese street fashion is both the most flamboyantly expressive in the world and the most collectivist-conformist. We tend to assume that only notionally-separate, unique individuals can be “expressive”, but why not entire groups (the 3T 3K types milling around Möllevången), classes (the “creative class”), nations (Sweden, Japan) and areas (Scandinavia)? After all, expression is communication, and that takes two. Or do I mean three?

(Via Click opera.)