Cultural and creative sectors (CCS) are increasingly recognized as a driving economic force. In addition to their undisputed soft power, creative jobs are expected to prove more resilient to ...automation, and may therefore play an important role in the future growth cycles of advanced global economies. But how is Brexit going to affect the UK’s flourishing creative economy at an urban level? Pre-Brexit evidence from the European Commission’s Cultural and Creative Cities Monitor (CCCM) clearly shows that UK cultural and creative cities excel in Europe in their capacity to attract and integrate foreign creative professionals. Creative non-nationals represent a diverse, crucial human capital pool for CCS, as 22% of CCS employers hire at least one non-UK worker. The effect of Brexit on the cultural and creative potential of UK cities can be devastating for CCS competitiveness if not properly addressed. As CCSs are widely regarded as leading sectors of the UK economy and major drivers of innovation and growth in the UK’s long-term developmental vision, suitable policy measures should be taken to prevent this possibility.
In the last decades, policy discussions have increasingly considered participation in arts and cultural activities as a vehicle to reach broader social policy goals, such as social inclusion or ...active citizenship. However, convincing empirical evidence on the social impacts of arts and culture is still scarce. In particular, little attention has been given to the impact that cultural participation may have on individuals’ engagement in civil society, especially in Europe. In order to address this lack of evidence, this paper explores the connection between cultural participation and civic participation in Italy using Likert-scale data collected in the ISTAT “Aspetti della Vita Quotidiana” Survey (2014). To do so, two composite indicators—the participation in cultural life indicator and the participation in civic life indicator—have been built using an approach based on partial order theory and the concept of Average Rank. The effect of cultural participation on civic engagement has been estimated using a quantile regression model which controls for potentially cofounding factors such as education, income, age and gender. Results do confirm that participation in arts and cultural activities is highly correlated with participation in civic life. It is particularly worth noticing that at higher levels of civic participation, cultural participation has a positive and strong effect on civic engagement of people having a low educational level.
The recovery and resilience of the cultural and creative sectors after the COVID-19 pandemic is a current topic with priority for the European Commission. Cultural gems is a crowdsourced web platform ...managed by the Joint Research Centre of the European Commission aimed at creating community-led maps as well as a common repository for cultural and creative places across European cities and towns. More than 130,000 physical locations and online cultural activities in more than 300 European cities and towns are currently tracked by the application. The main objective of Cultural gems consists in raising a holistic vision of European culture, reinforcing a sense of belonging to a common European cultural space. This data article describes the ontology developed for Cultural gems, adopted to represent the domain of knowledge of the application by means of FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) principles and following the paradigms of Linked Open Data (LOD). We provide an overview of this dataset, and describe the ontology model, along with the services used to access and consume the data.
The purpose of this study is to identify the main factors of city life satisfaction across Europe. Data come from the recent fifth survey on quality of life in European cities and cover 83 cities ...located in the European Union, the European Free Trade Association countries, the United Kingdom, the Western Balkan Region and Turkey. In addition to running classical econometric analysis, we quantify the relative importance of the various determinants of overall satisfaction with life in cities, thus offering novel insights to shape evidence-based urban policies. The results highlight that two main policy-relevant areas contribute to the satisfaction with city life: the presence of amenities, on the one hand, and the inclusiveness and safety feeling, on the other hand. Socio-economic characteristics are generally not relevant, with the exception of economic insecurity.
JEL Codes: R10, R58, I31
•We apply Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) to develop an alternative version of the European Commission’s Cultural and Creative Cities Index.•We provide an index score that reflects expert opinion, ...cities’ diverse socio-economic backgrounds, and observed relative strengths.•The application of Benefit-of-the-Doubt (BoD) weights implies that, on average, cities improve their performance by approximately 16 percentage points.•We also identify peer cities and target values for performance improvement within a cluster of cities sharing similar demographic and socio-economic features.•We practically illustrate how Bilbao, Krakόw and Umeå can draw policy insights from their benchmarks, showing how DEA can work as a powerful tool for peer learning.
Culture is an integral part of a city's quality of life, a driver of urban change, and a genuine economic sector. To support benchmarking of urban culture and facilitate peer learning amongst policymakers, the European Commission has recently created the ‘Cultural and Creative Cities Index’. While this index builds on a standardised method to aggregate 29 indicators for the 155 selected cities, it is explicitly acknowledged that a ‘gold standard’ for a ‘Cultural and Creative City’ does not exist. Instead, different approaches should be allowed for in capturing cities’ cultural and creative vitality. This is the point of departure for this paper, which employs a Benefit-of-the-Doubt (BoD) modelling approach to allow cities to combine such respect for performance diversity with peer learning and benchmarking. Expert-based weights are used to provide expert-consistent bounds for the shares of key dimensions in a city's final BoD index value. We identify three city clusters, amongst which there are large performance differences. Accordingly, we focus on the within-group identification of peer cities and target values, which we illustrate in more detail for Bilbao, Krakόw and Umeå, towards the formulation of fit-for-purpose policy measures that can support culture-led development.
The world is changing under the pressure of environmental and health crises, and in this context, location choice and political choice become of even more poignant importance. Following a ...Culture-Based Development (CBD) stand, our paper highlights the link between political voting and the cultural and ecological valuation of a place. We start from the premise that the individual utility functions of the urban inhabitant and the urban voter coincide, since they both express the citizen’s satisfaction with the life in a place. We suggest that the unified citizen’s utility function is driven by a trade-off between the availability of virtual and physical spaces for interaction. We expect that this trade-off can lead to dissatisfaction with the place and consequent political discontent if the incumbents’ access to green areas and artistic environment in a place is simultaneously hampered for a long time. Our operational hypothesis is that the political sensitivity of citizens is related to the local availability of green areas (geographies of flowers) and cultural capital endowments (geographies of flower power). Using individual-level data from the WVS from the period close before the pandemic—2017–2020, we test empirically this hypothesis. We use as an outcome of interest the individual propensity to active political behaviour. We explain this propensity through the geographies of flowers (i.e., green areas) and geographies of flower power (i.e., cultural and creative industries). We compare the effects for urban and for rural areas. We find strong dependence of politically proactive behaviour on the geographies of flowers and geographies of flower power, with explicit prominence in urban areas. We find a more pronounced effect of these two geographies on the utility function of incumbent than migrant residents. We also crosscheck empirically the relationship of this CBD mechanism on an aggregate level, using data from the Cultural and Creative Cities Monitor. The findings confirm the Schelling magnifying effect of micro preferences on a macro level.
How can we measure culture in urban areas? Can empirical metrics on culture function as an urban planning tool for cities' well-being? This paper fits into the research path examining the role of ...culture as a resource for development, with a specific focus on empirical measurement aspects. A novel dataset (The Cultural and Creative Cities Monitor – CCCM) gathering 29 indicators for 168 cities in 30 European countries is presented. The CCCM measures the presence and attractiveness of cultural venues and facilities (Cultural Vibrancy), the capacity of culture to generate jobs and innovation (Creative Economy), and the conditions enabling cultural and creative processes to thrive (Enabling Environment). Results show that cultural and creative assets are diversely distributed across European cities, which offer local authorities the opportunity to design context-specific development strategies. In particular, many medium-sized cities appear to have, on average, more cultural capital assets per inhabitant than larger cities. On the basis of these findings, we draw conclusions on the conceptual and methodological relevance of the CCCM and advance proposals on how to further use the CCCM data to drive culture-led and evidence-based urban policy design.
•The Cultural and Creative Cities Monitor (CCCM) is a novel culture-specific dataset covering 168 European cities.•It gathers 29 indicators which relate to the Cultural Vibrancy, Creative Economy and Enabling Environment of a city.•Capitals generally lead on ‘Creative Economy’ but non-capitals, mostly medium-sized, do better on ‘Cultural Vibrancy’.•The CCCM dataset - freely accessible - can support policy-relevant questions and evidence-led urban planning.
There is a socio-economic threshold beyond which creative cities are at risk to become inaccessible to young, promising, but often low-income, cultural and creative professionals, thus undermining a ...major source of cultural dynamism. Building on this argument, scholars have increasingly weighed out the benefits of culture-led development. Yet, the literature dealing with this topic is mostly based on single case studies, failing to provide broad comparable evidence, particularly for European cities. To improve our understanding of how culture-led development may unfold in an urban context, we empirically analyse the creative and cultural performance of 190 cities in Europe, using the European Commission's Cultural and Creative Cities Monitor – a unique dataset that gathers 29 culture-related indicators for a very diverse sample of urban areas. We find that there is no strong correlation between empirical indicators of a city's cultural vibrancy and its creative economy performance. This may be due to deliberate policy choices, among which specialisation choices, or rather to unintended (and unsustainable) consequences of culture-led investment strategies that a deeper understanding of the interaction between the culture and creativity dimensions may help correct, if backed by sound empirical evidence.
Lactose malabsorption is a very common condition characterized by intestinal lactase deficiency. Primary lactose malabsorption is an inherited deficit present in the majority of the world＇s ...population, while secondary hypolactasia can be the consequence of an intestinal disease. The presence of malabsorbed lactose in the colonic lumen causes gastrointestinal symptoms. The condition is known as lactose intolerance. In patients with lactase nonpersistence, treatment should be considered exclusively if intolerance symptoms are present. In the absence of guidelines, the common therapeutic approach tends to exclude milk and dairy products from the diet. However, this strategy may have serious nutritional disadvantages. Several studies have been carried out to find alternative approaches, such as exogenous β-galactosidase, yogurt and probiotics for their bacterial lactase activity, pharmacological and non pharmacological strategies that can prolong contact time between enzyme and substrate delaying gastrointestinal transit time, and chronic lactose ingestion to enhance colonic adaptation. In this review the usefulness of these approaches is discussed and a therapeutic management with a flow chart is proposed.
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