Cultural Capital and Local Development Nexus: Does the Local Environment Matter?
This chapter discusses the relationship between cultural capital and regional development. Our idea is that the culture/development nexus is mediated by the endowment of social, ethical, and behavioral values of places. Adopting an approach in which cultu
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Abstract This chapter discusses the relationship between cultural capital and regional development. Our idea is that the culture/development nexus is mediated by the endowment of social, ethical, and behavioral values of places. Adopting an approach in which culture is shaped and defined by the socioeconomic elements present in an area, this work develops an operational definition of cultural capital and an empirical analysis pointing out that the cultural elements considered in the literature (heritage and the cultural industry) are not place-neutral. Instead, their economic effects arise only when they are embedded in particular cultural environments. Keywords Culture and regional development • Nexus • Cultural environment
1 Introduction In the past 20 years, the number of studies in the economic literature devoted to culture has greatly increased, also due to the wide debate generated by Throsby’s work, which launched the idea of interpreting culture as an endogenous territorial asset like other forms of capital, such as natural or physical capital (Throsby 1999). Following this approach, the European Spatial Development Perspective (ESDP, European Commission 1999), a major spatial vision and planning document of the EU, defined cultural variety as “ : : : the characteristic territorial feature of the EU,” which must “be retained in the face of integration” (ESDP, Sect. 1.1, point 1, p. 7).
R. Capello • G. Perucca () Department of Architecture, Built Environment and Construction Engineering, Politecnico di Milano, Piazza Leonardo da Vinci 32, 20133 Milano, Italy e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected] © Springer Science+Business Media Singapore 2017 H. Shibusawa et al. (eds.), Socioeconomic Environmental Policies and Evaluations in Regional Science, New Frontiers in Regional Science: Asian Perspectives 24, DOI 10.1007/978-981-10-0099-7_6
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This definition is particularly important since it emphasizes the place-based nature of culture, which has been sometimes ignored in the literature on the role of cultural capital in economic development. Within this literature, the large majority of studies have focused on two main elements of cultural capital. The first involves cultural heritage as a tourism attraction: Fainstein et al. (2003) pointed out that cultural heritage and the activities related to these physical assets are the main sources of attractiveness of places. The second element concerns the so-called “cultural industry” (Hesmondhalgh 2007). With this term, the literature refers to all industries producing culture-related goods and services, which in the decade before the economic downturn outperformed the more traditional sectors of the economy (Siwek 2002). The literature has also recognized the existence of certain intangible cultural elements (such as religious behaviors, social norms, or ethnical values), which identify the cultural environment of local systems. There are studies that have analyzed the indirect effect of intangible forms of
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