WHAT’S the correct context in which to receive dubiously-assembled GERS figures on Scottish economic performance, surrounded by the howls and hoots of defeatists and inferiorists?

Try standing on the Nørrebrogade bridge in Copenhagen bathed in sunshine, listening to a “creative activist” celebrate the launch of his new book, while healthy-looking Danes unapologetically sip champagne from their bikes.

Look around you at a sovereign nation of five million or so, who do most modern things extremely well. And then smile, or shudder tearfully, whichever happens first.

I’m as guilty as any Yesser for carrying around my knapsack of well-polished Scandinavian stats and percentages. But the joy of visiting and networking them on the ground – which I’ve been doing this week – is that their good-society stories often turn out to be a mixture of both planning ... and sheer luck.

Meaning, it’s not just that they’re maddeningly-beautiful super-rationalists. Scotland may be able to stumble into a similar state of perfection. That is, if we keep trying to improve our chances.

Take, for example, the much-celebrated “liveability” of Copenhagen. The wide streets are flanked by tall and cool tenements, mixed in with striking public amenities and a predominance of local traders and brands.

And (of course) the cycling culture, with its dedicated lanes, piles of casually parked bikes everywhere, and clumps of friends and families pedalling happily through their daily lives. In the sun over these last few days, the place has felt like an urban paradise.

Jan Gehl is rightly celebrated as the city’s visionary planner over the last 30 years and he has been exporting his model all over the world. He’s prescribed several thousand miles of cycle lanes to be laid down in NYC in the last few years – more than in Copenhagen over the last four decades.

Yet it turns out that this walk-and-bike-city, full of healthy and happy travellers, was a virtue made from necessity. It’s not that Copenhagen’s city fathers weren’t gripped by the same car-is-king brutalism as urban planners elsewhere in the post-war world: a six-lane expressway was built in its northern neighbourhood of Bispeengbuen.

But the road’s blundering impact actually triggered a search for an alternative model. “We had the notion that common space could pull people out of isolation,” says Gehl. “One group was pushing cars out of the city, while others were trying to push them in.”

And in any case, Copenhagen wasn’t the wealthiest place after the Second World War – so concrete-jungle modernism moved very slowly. “We thought we were unlucky and very poor,” says Gehl’s planning colleague, Soren Elle. “We were actually lucky, but still very poor ... We made small adjustments in a pragmatic, Danish way”.

It’s interesting to note how waves of progress and advance move between these islands and a nation like Denmark – sometimes anticipating bigger waves, sometimes building on them.

We were in Copenhagen as the guests of Alternativet (“The Alternative”). It is, at first glance, one of the more radical of the new progressive political parties that have successfully arisen in Europe over the last decade – a kindred force with Podemos in Spain, the Five Star Movement in Italy and, most notably, the digital libertarians of the Pirate Party, who look like they will take power in Iceland at the next election.

Alternativet’s co-founder, Uffe Elbæk, is something of a street celebrity in Denmark. As Uffe pushed his bike along the pavement, we could hardly get to our meal in the meatpacking district for well-wishers.

Alternativet is trying to completely re-imagine how political parties relate to citizens. Even in a high-trust society like Denmark, politicians are rated “below used-car salesman and journalists”, as Elbæk put it at a Nordic Horizons seminar in Edinburgh last year.

Since then, under Denmark’s proportional system, Alternativet garnered enough national votes at the last general election to win nine seats. They are now spread out on a far-flung wing of the Folketinget, the Danish Parliament, in rooms that buzz with a million ideas, from scores of impressive youth.

They don’t have an ideology, but they do have six values – courage, generosity, transparency, humility, humour and empathy – which shape all their activities and explorations. Alternativet crowd-sourced their first manifesto, via “political laboratories” held up and down the country (though the final product was edited and selected by party officials). Indeed, the political party is only one “entity” on the Alternativet “platform” – which wants to run a variety of “fourth-sector” enterprises on it, anything from cafes and publishing houses to education courses and solar-power cooperatives. Elbæk, who is famous for founding a business school called Kaos Pilots in the second city Aarhus, likes to borrow this phrase from Vivienne Westwood:

“As long as it has buttons and zippers on it, you can get away with anything”. Being a political party is the “buttons and zippers” that allows Alternativet to try to rethink the culture of politics.

They want to consistently address three crises – of sustainability, democracy, and empathy (the last is particularly acute, given Denmark’s current anxieties about immigration). But they are also not averse to formulating their own collective dance to Love Is In The Air – while solemnly citing the American anarchist Emma Goldman, who didn’t want to be part of your revolution if she couldn’t dance to it.

Hanging out with the free-wheeling Alternativets could easily induce an acute bout of Scandi-envy.

It seems that an egalitarian society hasn’t meant a grim, dragged-down conformism, but an active and self-conscious culture of play.

Never mind that Denmark produced Lego, or Noma (the world’s best restaurant), or BoConcept, or Lars Von Trier, or the most radical of the 1960s Situationists, Asger Jørn. In the heart of Copenhagen, the nation’s capital, there operates a fully autonomous anarchist community called Christiania.

It’s a grungy Arcadia where communes and their businesses thrive, alongside a “Pusher’s Alley” crowded with masked vendors of skunkweed, and where every class of Copenhagenite was kicking back this sunny Wednesday. (Passive smoking is unavoidable, and to be honest, a wee bit traumatic).

There may be local extremes we wouldn’t necessarily reach for. But on deeper inspection, Danish creative progressivism is not all that alien to us. One soon realises that, for example, the Alternativet “platform” model has been copied here (minus the political party bit) by Common Weal – its director Robin McAlpine was over here for a fact-finding visit a year or so ago.

And what Uffe means by “fourth-sector” policies and initiatives – that is, synthesising best practice from the public, private and NGO sectors – is what we already know as “social enterprise”, or perhaps even (mild shudder) the “Big Society”. We might have something cautionary to communicate back to our Dansk comrades, who are perhaps enjoying a little wriggle-room from their cradle-to-grave welfare state.

It’s also good to compare similarly shaped roots (and routes). The folk-education movement, started in the 19th century by Grundtvig and Koln, has its obvious parallel (and even predecessor) in the Kirk – and the socialist-based primacy of popular education of Scotland.

The hipsters of Alternativet also love to cite their nation’s cooperative movement, as a “model which inspired the world” – but that movement turns out to have very recognisable roots. Danish ministers visited the Rochdale Pioneers in the late 19th century to explicitly copy their model.

And in any case (just to be Jockular about it), one of the first producers’ cooperatives was established in Aberdeen in 1498, the Shore Porters Society. While the world’s first consumer cooperative is recorded as taking place in Fenwick, East Ayrshire. In short: good ideas can be old, echoed, shared and updated, between societies where citizens and workers want meaning, purpose and joy, even as they wrest security and stability from a capitalist epoch.

On the sun-kissed Nørrebrogade – with academic Silas Harrebye railing against the “headlines-and-deadlines society”, in front of a bronze statue of a young couple deep in earnest debate – I received a welcome shot of optimism. GERS, its errors, our collective ambition? Oh, I’ll be home soon enough. For a day more, let me drink at this well.

Social Change and Creative Activism In The 21st Century, by Silas F Harrebye, is out on Palgrave now