Cultural activities: places for cultural expression, organisation and transmission
D 1 Theatres, operas, musical venues, cinemas
D 2 Higher education institutions, libraries
D 3 National and regional archives
D 4 Cultural organisations (associations)
D 5 Creative industries (jobs)
3.2 The analytic framework of CHI indicators
The territorial dimension in policy development is a key issue in the context of an enlarging
European Union, where nation-states are giving up some of their political importance and cultural
coherence to supranational institutions and lower government levels. At the same time, regional
entities are (re)building their cultural identity and are (re)discovering, or even (re)valorising their
history and their “typical habitats”. According to the French scientist Paul Vidal de la Blache (1845-
1918), “history and habitat” are the basis of cultural heritage and eventually of a revival of
regionalism in Europe (De Pater & al, 2002 p 80). The territorial cohesion of cultural resources is
thus a multidimensional issue which involves:
- The presence of built heritage as a carrier of heritage. As a rule, the location pattern of built
heritage and artefacts and the endogenous cultural industry is determined by history and
habitat characteristics.
- The physical linkages between these carriers of cultural elements can be seen as the hardware
(the infrastructural system).
- The images and actual uses and users of CH elements, the positioning and commodification of
cultural elements can be seen as the software of the CH system, changeable and more flexible
than hardware, sensitive to temporal changes in tastes and values.
- The orgware (organizational networks) refers to the ways local communities, regional
authorities or national organisations are preserving and managing CH.
- Gradually, it has become clear that the territorial development of CH and CI is very much
dependent on the partnerships that support the process of development. The concept of
shareware has recently been introduced to refer to this new contextual variable: Sharing
culture for the future (Fig. 2).
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