Published in “NORDLYS” Saturday May 28, 2005
In the year of City Development
Today you can hardly pass a newspaper stand, a business conference or an urbanist wihout hearing the slogan “invest in culture” trumpeted everywhere. The tune of the day is that future growth will take place in creative and culture-based businesses, and that better co-operation between the culture sector and business is needed. In the on-going debate Arne Rydningen has pointed out that the new economy is the economy of ideas and a field of a vast growth potential. In the economy of ideas access to knowledge and creative individuals will be decisive for where businesses will establish themselves in a competive global market. These changes turn the fight to enlist competent young people into a global one, rather than one on a regional or national level.
Challenges to Tromsø
These are challenges towns like Tromsø must have strategies to meet. There is every good reason why we must heed these tendencies. At the same time a critical perspective on new narratives on what the criteria of success for Europe of regions will be. The new economy is a term used for some discernable econoic processes. Additionally, “the new economy” is metaphorical in the highest degree. By means of its metaphorics new truths and modes of understanding the present are produced. Through the production of such new concepts one tries to be at the level with what is conceived as future challengesThe media have lately focused frequently on the challenges and the extent of “the new conomy”. It is relatively difficult to grasp fully what the concept entails and “the new economy” may thus best – perhaps – be viewed as a factory of metaphors that at its best produce new nd interesting links, but that at its worst merely will be a rewriting of the past and as such bot implay nothong fundamentally big or new.
How to understand?
How are we to understand the metaphor, «the new economy»? We may enlist assistance from Löfgren, who together with a research team has monitored the establishment of the Øresund region in Sweden and Denmark. Löfgren has pointed out what is new in the “new” economy is that culture and economy are being mentioned at the same time. In a way economy beomes emotional, where speed, extension and predictability in the economic processes generate a nervousness concerning how we are to gain control ofver the fuure. This nervousness renders prominent profiling, staging or what the Miller terms a Catwalk-economy. Places, regions, products and experiences becomes packaged, given an image and a clear prifile. One attempts to attach strong symbols to places to make them appear interesting in the competetive arenas of global markets. These staged symbols constitute first and foremost the new in the new economy. This does not necessarily entail that the content is altered. Earlier, for example, teaching and research were just that: teaching and research. Now these professions are listed in the category “creative professions” and this rewriting is possibly the greatest difference resulting from the launching the concept of «the new economy»?
New approaches
To change both content and packaging requires og some new organisational and political avenues of approach – but what exactly does this consist in? To trace some directions I wish to return to my earlier conversations with young, well-travelled and soon graduated and competent youths who have left Tromsø. These are youngsters who in a few years, like many of their kind, will be a part of the creative class and if the indicators of the new economy are correct, belong to the group that will be in demand on the regional and global arena. At the same time, however, they risk to end up in the category of well-educated and jobless academics, which paradoxically is the fastest-growing group of unemployed in Tromsø. One of the youngsters put it like this;
what I have learned is that one is not, but one may become a visionary. One becomes a visionary by means of what you participate in and by whom you meet. What we need is mentors; people who dare help young people to become skilled; people who may help us to acquire contacts. New ideas are the results of hard work.
What can Tromsø do?
What can Tromsø do, then? Provided one is serious about combining culture and business – this entails more than dressing up an old fox in new fur. Creativity is a social phenomenon; it is not a property inherent in individals it is what result when people meet. And the chances that creativity will be set in motion are greater when different people meet. This entails that different disciplines must be given greater opportunities to come together. On what are the arenas for such encounters in Tromsø? The café tables? True enough, here many good and new ideas have been hatched and networks built. But that apart; where in the town do we find the investments to bring together the different fields of knowledge in culture and business? To a town like Tromsø – the challenge consists in forcing oneself into thinking anew, to dare to make new arenas and bring forth new people. If one in real terms would like to invest in culture and business, culture must be regarded as something more than something added to the other and well-established industries. That is, it should be something more than just a conversation topic, a mere supplement intended to prevent a fall into oblivion when the different regions rival to stage themselves in keeping with the concepts of “the new economy”.
Concrete proposals
Concrete proposals could be for instance:
a) To map the cultural competence in the town.
b) To facilitate the establishment of a workshop to which knowledge agents may go to meet mentors who can assist them to develop their ideas and establish their own enterprises. Presently many good experiences of e.g. “cultural dialogues” are (ses www.kudi.nett)
c) To work systematically to identify and remove obstacles to co-operation with a view to creating good models for how to develop a real dialogue between fields of knowledge
d) To think new and to think young in the composition of organisational bodies. Our young people are competent, well-travelled and impatient – ties to them no longer exist and no obstacles prevent them from doing like the Norwegian fairytale hero Espen Askeladd; who packed his collar and went into the world perhaps never to return. Be it for the princess or half the realm.