Cool Neighbourhoods

When in Copenhagen last month I went for a stroll to Norrebro, a neighbourhood about which you'll hear quite different opinions. From Alternative, arty, multicultural paradise to non-integrated immigrants ghetto passing by Far-left stronghold. I was there just a few hours, but I guess there's a bit of true in each of those opinions. I mainly got the Alternative/Arty/leftwing cool side of the coin, but a shop with a "burkinis" advertisement also gave me a glimpse of the communitarist-islamist crap side. Anyway, the overall impression was nice, and the place reminded me a bit of Berlin's Kreuzberg (my lovely Kreuzberg)

I searched the net to see if this Norrebro-Kreuzberg link was a common impression and I ended up reaching this site ranking the best "Hipster" neighbourhoods in Europe. Notice that the terms Alternative and Hipster, while lacking of a clear and universal meaning, mean pretty different things to me. I guess I'm interested in "Alternative" (but not "too alternative", as I grow older I tend to enjoy a bit of gentrification and "boboization" and a decrease in the number of squats) and not that much in "Hipster", but the thing is that alternative areas tend to become targets for a Hipster invasion, so probably these Hipster neighbourhood should be quite interesting to me.

I've been to some of the places listed there. Some are amazing, but others did not leave any particularly remarkable impression in me when I was there, so I wondered about the criteria they used to rank a neighbourhood as "Hipster". At the same time, I wondered also about the criteria that (in good part unconciously) I use to put an area in my "list of cute alternative hoods". I'll give you a list of the criteria that I think I follow:

• A tolerant, international, multicolor, multilanguage population
• Stree Art everywhere
• Community managed micro-gardens, pots lining the streets and climbing the buildings (Marseille!!!)
• Aboundance of old buildings (early XX century is still OK) some beautifully restored, some still waiting for better times, but few abandoned ones. Being dotted with some ugly 60's/70's mid-rise buildings can be a plus (like in Kreusberg).
• Independent Book stores, art shops
• Creative spirit, social links among residents
• Nice cafes with outdoor sitting
• Affordable prices and availability of small studios so that a single person can pay the rent and live alone (like in France) rather than sharing the flat with strangers (like in UK)

There's an element that I have not put in the list cause it's so important that if not present the neighbourhood can not even be taken into consideration. The neighbourhood must be in a city (and hopefully a country) where islamism, racism, xenophobia, homophobia and nationalism are illnesses that have hardly affected the population (well, indeed, having some isolated cases of these scumheads can be nice to hunt them on the streets and inspire some reivindicative art and social awareness). An open society that won't pay attention to how much melanine you have, how you dress, who you fuck with, where you or your ancestors were born... This said, it would be very difficoult to me to consider cities in the USA or most of Eastern Europe as sound candidates to be high in an "alternative places" list. This also applies to the capacity of a city to attract creative minds. Sometime ago I felt shocked when I read somewhere that Warsaw was going to be the next Berlin in terms of creative industry and appeal for digital entrepenours. Come on, Warsaw has a nice skyline and a beautifully rebuilt downtown, but Polish society is in general very conservative and religious (old style Christianism, not the universalist and "altermundialist" kind of Christianism that we see with certain frequency in Western Europe), nationalistic and not particularly keen of people that are "different"... A place like that can not be a hotspot for creative minds.

Without meeting that premise, a place can for sure be still interesting to pay a visit, but won't be a "lovely place where I'd love to live for a while".

I can see here the criteria that they used for their rank. Basically it makes their cities list rather useless to me.
They don't mention at all anything regarding the tolerance and openness of the society... and use stuff that I could not care less, like Vintage fashion, vinyl shops, co-working spaces... Having being a vegetarian for half of my life I'm pretty happy to see that veganism has become more and more common, but seeing it associated to "trendiness and coolnes" rather kicks my balls... Also, I use my bike rather often to move around Toulouse, but I don't see the presence of "independent bike shops" as particularly important.