I recently came across the Danish idea of Janteloven, or the Law of Jante, again. I had heard of it before, but this time I started thinking about it in a completely different context: cities.

Janteloven is a complicated cultural idea, and reducing Scandinavian culture to a paragraph would be ridiculous, but the part that interested me is the social pressure behind it. The general idea is that you shouldn’t think you’re particularly special, smarter, more capable or more important than everyone else. There are some admirable values wrapped up in that. Humility is a good quality, equality matters, and nobody particularly enjoys being around the person who enters every room convinced he’s the smartest person in it.

The problem comes when humility begins to turn into something else, when standing out becomes socially uncomfortable and ambition starts to be confused with arrogance. The more I thought about it, the more I realized I’ve watched versions of this happen in cities for years.

Spend enough time around local government and you’ll eventually see it. Someone proposes a building that’s more ambitious than what normally gets built and people immediately call it excessive. A restaurant owner wants to try a concept the city hasn’t seen before and the conversation quickly becomes whether “people here” will support it. A developer proposes something unusual and instead of debating the merits of the project, people become preoccupied with the fact that the developer might make a lot of money. Suggest spending a little more to make a public project beautiful instead of merely functional and somebody wants to know why that’s necessary.

Then there is one of my favorites: “We’re not Miami.”

I’ve heard variations of that argument in cities everywhere. We’re not Miami. We’re not New York. We’re not Charleston. We’re not whatever successful place happens to be relevant to the conversation.

Of course you’re not, and becoming a cheap imitation of another city would be a terrible strategy anyway. The more interesting question is why comparisons to successful places so often produce defensiveness rather than curiosity. Nobody is suggesting your city become Miami. Maybe there is simply something Miami, Charleston, Copenhagen, Nashville or another successful place figured out that is worth understanding.

I’ve spent a lot of my career around local government, business owners, developers, political campaigns and economic development, and I’ve become increasingly interested in what I would call civic psychology. Some communities seem to give people permission to be ambitious. They don’t necessarily approve every idea or spend money recklessly, but there is a general sense that trying something unusual is acceptable. Other communities slowly train that instinct out of people.

Those communities don’t necessarily lack smart people. They may have plenty of capital, good real estate and every economic development incentive imaginable. What they sometimes lack is social permission, and I suspect that’s a much more difficult problem to fix than lowering a tax or creating another grant program.

There is more risk involved in proposing something genuinely different than we acknowledge. Long before a shovel goes into the ground, somebody has to walk into a room and essentially say, “I think we can do something better than what we have now.” If it succeeds, five years later everyone talks about the project as though its success was obvious. If it fails, the person who proposed it can hear about it for the next twenty years.

People aren’t stupid. They learn from that environment.

A developer learns what kinds of projects will result in six months of unnecessary aggravation. An entrepreneur learns what ideas will be mocked. An elected official learns which proposals result in three hours of angry public comment. A city employee learns that recommending the safe option is considerably less dangerous to a career than recommending the interesting one.

Over time, the system doesn’t even need to reject ambitious ideas. People begin filtering themselves before the ideas ever reach the system.

I think that’s where this becomes particularly dangerous.

We can count a rejected development application. We can’t count the developer who looked at a parcel and decided dealing with the city wasn’t worth it. There is no line item in an economic development report for the restaurant that opened three towns away instead. Nobody conducts an economic impact study of the beautiful building an architect decided wasn’t worth proposing. We measure what gets built, opened and invested. We have almost no way of measuring everything that was never attempted.

Eventually the absence of ambitious proposals can even be mistaken for evidence that nobody has ambitious ideas.

This also connects to something I’ve been thinking about with historic preservation. I’m a preservationist. I love old buildings and think we should make a serious effort to save the good ones. But I’ve become increasingly bothered by the phrase, “They don’t build them like they used to.”

Why don’t they?

We certainly haven’t lost the technical ability to make a beautiful building. In fact, our construction technology is vastly more sophisticated than anything architects had a century ago. Craftspeople still exist. Beautiful materials still exist. Architects are perfectly capable of designing interesting buildings.

Maybe part of what disappeared wasn’t capability at all. Maybe it was expectation.

Take a building in your city that everyone now considers historic and imagine proposing it today. Put the rendering on an easel at a public meeting. Look at the ornamentation, unusual roofline, masonry, arches, decorative details and all the things that make people fight to preserve it now. Then imagine explaining the additional construction cost.

I can almost hear the meeting.

Why do we need all that?

Can’t this be simplified?

Isn’t this a little excessive?

A hundred years later we’d be forming a preservation society to save the very details somebody would probably value-engineer out of the project today.

That’s not an engineering problem. It’s a cultural one.

I think the same thing happens with entrepreneurship. Cities spend enormous amounts of money trying to attract entrepreneurs, young professionals and investment. They develop strategic plans, hire consultants, create incentive programs, attend conferences and build branding campaigns around being “business friendly.”

Meanwhile, ambitious people are evaluating something that will never appear in the economic development brochure: What happens here when somebody tries something?

That question matters.

A talented 25-year-old who repeatedly hears that his ideas are unrealistic doesn’t necessarily become less ambitious. He may simply become ambitious somewhere else. A restaurateur with an unusual concept doesn’t abandon the concept because one city doesn’t understand it. She opens it somewhere else. A developer who wants to create an exceptional project can usually find another parcel.

We spend a lot of time talking about brain drain. I’m beginning to think ambition drain might be just as important.

And ambition tends to cluster.

One person opens the restaurant everyone said wouldn’t work and suddenly there’s a two-hour wait on Saturday night. Somebody buys the neglected building next door. Another entrepreneur sees all those people and opens a coffee shop. A developer starts looking at apartments nearby. Someone else thinks the neighborhood could support a small hotel. None of those people necessarily coordinated with each other, but each successful act of ambition lowered the perceived risk for the next person.

Eventually something very powerful happens: trying things becomes normal.

Unfortunately, the opposite can become normal too. If every new proposal is greeted with suspicion, if anyone who makes money is automatically assumed to have taken advantage of someone, if every aesthetic improvement is dismissed as unnecessary and every ambitious idea is met with “that will never work here,” people adapt to that environment as well.

This is also why I think some city branding efforts fail before the logo is ever designed.

You can hire an excellent agency to tell the outside world that your city is innovative, exciting, entrepreneurial and ready for investment. You can buy ads, produce beautiful videos and come up with the perfect slogan. But if the people actually trying to build things inside the city encounter a culture that is suspicious of ambition, eventually the marketing and the product diverge.

You can’t really brand your way around civic self-esteem.

That doesn’t mean every ambitious project should be approved, every developer should get what they want or every expensive idea is worth pursuing. Quite the opposite. Some ambitious ideas are terrible. Some developers propose bad projects. Some beautiful renderings hide lousy economics. Government has an obligation to ask difficult questions.

But there is a tremendous difference between asking, “Is this a good idea?” and asking, even implicitly, “Who do you think you are to suggest this?”

One improves ideas. The other eventually reduces the number of people willing to bring them.

That’s the part of Janteloven that I find so interesting when applied to cities. A community doesn’t need a law against ambition. It only needs to make ambition socially and politically expensive enough that fewer people bother with it.

And once that happens for long enough, the results become self-reinforcing. Nothing ambitious gets proposed, which proves to the skeptics that ambitious things don’t happen there. Talented people leave, which reduces the number of people pushing for change. Developers choose safer projects because that’s what gets approved. Residents become accustomed to mediocre buildings because mediocre buildings are what they see.

Eventually “that’s just the way it is here” starts sounding like an explanation instead of a warning.

I don’t think the answer is for cities to become arrogant. Civic boosterism can become ridiculous too. Every community doesn’t need to declare itself the next Silicon Valley or convince itself that every vacant parcel is destined to become a world-class destination.

What I think cities need is something closer to healthy civic self-esteem: the belief that your community deserves beautiful buildings, that a struggling downtown can become successful again, that a neglected block doesn’t have to remain neglected forever, that a local entrepreneur might create something people will drive an hour to experience, and that a building constructed in 2027 can be every bit as worthy of preservation in 2127 as the building everyone is fighting to save today.

That’s very different from believing your city is better than everyone else’s. It’s simply believing that it is capable of becoming better than it is now.

Maybe one of the most overlooked responsibilities of leadership is creating that kind of environment. We tend to judge leaders by what they build, approve, fund or accomplish during their time in office, but perhaps part of leadership is also creating a culture where capable people feel comfortable bringing forward ideas that initially sound a little unreasonable.

Because after spending a lot of time thinking about economic development, I’m increasingly convinced that some places don’t have an idea shortage, and they may not have a money shortage either.

They have a permission shortage.

The trouble is, by the time you can see the economic consequences of that on a spreadsheet, many of the people you wanted to attract have already found somewhere else to be ambitious.