Financial Crisis and European Cultural Investments. Territorial Impacts and Shared Utopias

This paper aims to analyze the impact of financial crisis on cultural policies and investments implemented by European Union countries. The growing political attention to some aspects of social life in contemporary society, contributed to identify culture as a factor of economic development and territorial cohesion at local and regional level. Many territories, in fact, consider culture as a tool to increase their competitiveness and attractiveness, and it is for this reason that, in recent decades, sector's investments were improved. Very different were the territorial effects and particularly interesting, from a geographical point of view, are relationships, not always symmetrical, between amount of investment and local cultural resources. Although investment in the sector are largely attributable to the domain of public action, emerges, on a European scale, a significant participation of the financial system whose contribution is even more significant due to the financial crisis. The allocated financial resources, in fact, already relatively low if compared to those used in other sectors, are facing a deep contraction determined by the crisis that has clearly highlighted the conjunctural vulnerability of the cultural sector. The research, by analyzing territorial cases, critically describes some cultural policies and related cash flows, in order to identify a cultural based developing strategy that, even in a recession, can contribute to redistribute capital and reduce regional disparities.