D) CULTURAL ACTIVITIES (PLACES FOR CULTURAL EXPRESSION, ORGANISATION AND
TRANSMISSION)
The last category includes places, institutions, organisations which are not considered as cultural
heritage per se but reflect the ambition of a community to further, share and promote their cultural
heritage, thus (re)defining their identity. They need to be considered in this study because they
capture the “dynamics” of the heritage and allow analysing heritage not as an isolated field but as
an element of the territory, affecting and being affected by the main socio-economic currents of
Europe, among which are new forms of mobility, citizenship, education, governance. Places for
cultural expression are those in which cultural resources which cannot be physically traceable
acquire a spatial setting (performing arts companies and productions as opposed to music, ballet and
opera houses), and where contemporary cultural expressions “accumulate” in repertoires and are
disseminated to the public, producing new or strengthening old identities. The inclusion of
educational assets highlights that culture need to be taught, researched and systemised in order to
become part of a social system; and the inclusion of cultural organisations underlines that culture
gets “embedded”, or “appropriated” by the society in varying forms. In this light, the so-called
creative industries, can be taken into consideration, on the argument that they are:
(i) (increasingly important) job generators, and hence examples of interrelations between culture
and economic development;
(ii) elements of “continuity” in the production of new culture and symbolic meaning;
(iii) “concentrations” of cultural dynamics in specific locations, and therefore producing spatial
effects.
Recent cultural studies also highlight that the new cultural production sectors or “creative
industries” tend to be at the same time highly “centric” in regional systems (Heilbrun 1992;
Dziembowska-Kowalska and Funck 2000) — and therefore at the core of economic regeneration
efforts — and strongly embedded into trans-national networks, and thus of paramount importance
not only as job generators but also as “bridges” (Castells 1996) towards the new organisation of the
world economy that we know as “global”.
In short, this category of indicators refers to the stage of generation of the heritage as a social
construct and to the capacity to transmit it and defend it. It has marked spatial effects because
“places” generate flows (for instance, audiences to performances or students flowing in a place and
enhancing its social capital) and networks within and over territories. In this category we include:
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