Advanced Cultural Districts

Innovative Approaches to Organizational Designs

Alberto Francesconi

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN:
  9781137555342
• eBook ISBN:
  9781137555359
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business Strategy
• Index: Business

Advanced Cultural Districts explores the organisational design issues within the cultural heritage sector, with particular focus on the advanced forms of cultural districts for local socio-economic development.

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Industrial, Cultural and Advanced Cultural Districts

Abstract: Francesconi offers a summary of the literature on industrial districts, cultural districts and advanced cultural districts aimed at local development. He briefly recalls the birth of the concept of district in the industrial field. Then, he offers a deeper reflection on the similarities and differences between the industrial district and its culture-driven counterpart, the cultural district. Lastly, Francesconi analyses different typologies of cultural districts, from more traditional to more advanced forms, according to some critical factors: the integration of heterogeneous idiosyncratic cultural resources, the degree of integration of industrial and cultural industries, the geographic extension, the different criteria for designing the boundaries, the role of public and private actors.

Keywords: advanced cultural district; cultural district; culture-driven development; industrial district.

Francesconi, Alberto. Advanced Cultural Districts: Innovative Approaches to Organizational Design. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. DOI: 10.1057/9781137555359.0004.

1.1From industrial districts to cultural districts

The literature has extensively investigated how and why firms should decide to locate in a specific place. Basically, local agglomeration of firms is due to some sort of increasing returns, giving rise to positive feedback, such that the more firms are already located in that place, the larger the incentive for more firms to do the same.

The basic tenets of the economies of agglomeration are presented and discussed in Marshall’s (1890, 1919) contribution, making up the so-called Marshallian triad:

Demand and cost spatial effects: being close to a large final market (the demand side) and being close to other complementary firms lying upstream and downstream along the same value chain allow the possibility of far-reaching informal coordination that can work as the decentralised equivalent of a large, vertically integrated firm. This results in clear competitive advantages in terms of travel costs, the coordination of production, the optimal use of time, and so on.

Specific and thick labour markets: the spatial concentration of firms operating in the same productive sector and requiring a certain range of skills facilitates the parallel concentration of skilled workers and the training of new ones, thus ‘thickening’ the local labour market and making it more efficient and reactive to changes in the evolution of demand.

The ‘industrial atmosphere’: this atmosphere, a ‘local, shared organizational culture working as the real entry barrier of the local system, allows firms to share experiences, information, forecasts about the future market dynamics, as well as extremely specific and critical bits of knowledge about productive processes and products’ (Sacco, 2008: p.7).

Agglomeration has taken a variety of forms, from clustering around one or several large firms, to constellations of complementary small–medium firms (as in the case of Italian industrial districts), with all the intermediate possible variations. Notably, the mere clustering of firms in a specific site is not sufficient per se to promote the development of a local area. Spatial concentration has to be supported by a sustainable social system, where knowledge, social norms and conventions of mutual trust become the pillars of an all-encompassing network of interaction and exchange. With the concentration of productive assets (especially physical capital), a parallel concentration of intangible assets also takes place: knowledge, social relationships and place identity gradually develop, enriching the urban character of the agglomeration.

Starting from the seminal work of Marshall (1890, 1919), Porter (1989) and Becattini (2000a, b) have studied industrial clustering phenomena. Becattini, who focused on the Italian industrial districts, has extensively analysed the underlying social dimension, placing particular emphasis on the ‘industrial atmosphere’ aspect. Porter, who focused on the North American cases, has placed particular emphasis on the working of economic factors, and speaks of industrial clusters and of the different constellations that the spatial concentration of firms may take.

In the post-industrial era, the weight of traditional industrial districts in local development scenarios has diminished, as new forms of productive specialisation have taken over, characterised by higher degrees of intangible value added (Sacco et al., 2013). These new forms, which are typically creativity- and innovation-based (Belussi & Staber, 2011), assign a new role to the cultural dimension, which in the traditional industrial city has typically to do with leisure, entertainment and tourism (see e.g. Mommaas, 2004). Culture has acquired a fundamental role in the modern economy. The culture of a territory is commonly recognised as a potential factor for its development. Defined in its broadest sense, the notion of culture encompasses a wide range of idiosyncratic meanings: historical, political, legal, technological and artistic. In this book, the concept of culture is thus used in the sense of cultural capital (Scott, 2000; Throsby, 1999, 2001; Santagata, 2002; Sacco & Segre, 2009). Culture is a capital asset accumulated by a community whose members refer to it to connote their identity. Moreover, this cultural capital, tangible and intangible, enters the production of material and immaterial culture-based goods through two strategic inputs: human creativity and human intellectual activity. Culture-based goods are at the edge of a new wave of economic progress based on new creative and cultural industries (Hesmondhalgh & Pratt, 2005; Lazzeretti, 2012). Culture may be profitable per se (Lazzeretti, Boix & Capone, 2010), especially in some sectors (e.g. tourism and creative industries). Moreover, and most importantly, culture may be a transversal factor, which also facilitates and feeds innovative processes in other production fields. In this regard, culture plays several interdependent roles in local development, from fostering in socially diverse contexts (Everingham, 2003) to empowering the development of human potential (Matarasso, 1997). Owing to its economic characteristics (strong intellectual and creative component, increasing returns, flexible specialisation), its social traits (high power of identification and rich symbolic content) and its positive impact on other economic fields (namely tourism and the environment), culture is a resource of extreme interest for both scholars and policymakers. However, it assumes the activation of a model of territorial development focused on the valorising of, and not the mere economic exploitation of, the artistic–cultural and landscaping heritage. A culture-driven development model aims to create important synergies between the cultural sector and the local production field, through agreements signed between public and private actors, with the scope for securing sustainable development of the territory, together with the protection and valorising of its landscape, its identity and its culture. This model can find a concrete application within the organisational form of the cultural district.

Many studies (e.g. Cheng, 2006) emphasise the parallelism between industrial and cultural ‘atmosphere’ in these new instances of local development processes, thereby establishing an ideal, although unintentional, continuity with the industrial districts approach. Becattini has already highlighted this linkage. In the more recent literature on cultural agglomerations in post-industrial cities, the social dimension is even more evident and compelling than in the literature on traditional industrial districts (Lloyd, 2006).

Of course, other important communalities between the industrial district and the cultural district are:

Small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) operating in a bounded geographical area.

Progressive learning, supported by environmental characteristics, by informality, by sharing of tacit knowledge and by experimentation (through processes of learning by doing).

Local ‘specialisation’ in a specific cultural or creative industry.

There is a stream of research that tends to conceive the cultural district as a direct extension of the industrial district model, for example, in terms of the vertical ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• 1  Industrial, Cultural and Advanced Cultural Districts
• 2  The Challenge for Territorial Development
• 3  The Territory as a Reference Key
• 4  From Straight Lines to Spirals
• References
• Index