12 Dicembre, 2024

Culture Based Development & Pro-Circular-Economy Behaviour in India

Tempo di lettura: 3 minuti

Culture Based Development (CBD) is a novel research paradigm that offers a systematic approach to studying cultural bias in economic choice. It has been widely published in over 50 academic publications and a book about the founding principles of CBD is forthcoming next year. The essence of CBD is that it offers a synchronized theoretical and empirical approach to capturing and revealing the impact of culture on human choices and behavior. In specific, CBD approaches culture as an amalgam of local attitudes, which can be quantified in two different aggregate types of culture: living culture and cultural heritage.

Living culture is the modern propensity to consume currently generated ideas and attitudes. Cultural heritage is the propensity to relate to traditional inherited attitudes from past periods, embodied in inherited objects shown in museums etc. According to CBD, the local living culture and cultural heritage are the source of an individual’s cultural capital. The exposure of the individual to this cultural capital shapes the individual’s order of preferences.

Preferences for social interactions are derived from this initial order of preferences that an individual has shaped. Hence, by the logical chain sequence, local culture shapes the local social capital. Next, cultural capital and social capital jointly determine the behavior and interaction in the socio-economic system. Put differently, depending on the modern art and the inherited culture that people consume, they shape their views about the world, and this determines how much they will care for other people in the society and for the ecology in particular.

Circular Economy is the aware behaviour of the individuals and firms in a locality, that leads to a more sparing use of the ecological resources of the locality. Therefore, our study undertakes to trace the dependence of the circular economy on the choices that people in the locality make as consumers and producers and firm owners. In all these cases, people’s choices, according to CBD, are underpinned by the local cultural capital and the engagement of the local individuals with local living culture and cultural heritage. 

The logical dependence between entities here can be described as follows: local culture shapes individual’s feeling for responsibility towards the local ecology, which determines whether their behavior will be reckless or sparing on the economy, which in its turn results into the better or worse implementation of the circular economy as a phenomenon.

The hypothesis that we entailed to test in our study was concerned with cross checking whether local cultural consumption/exposure of the individuals indeed contributes to explaining their behavior towards the ecology. We tested the hypothesis by using two examples of behavior that can have consequences for the ecology. Namely, we used car driving (approximated with air pollution) and intensive economic productivity (approximated with the level of local gross value added GVA). In other words, we checked whether higher exposure to modern art and historical monuments explains the difference in the behavioral concern for the ecology, expressed in less car driving and less ecology-burdening firm productivity.

To test our hypothesis, we used data from India. We combined various sources to be able to inform all elements of our hypothesis and test the dependence of interest. Namely, we used pro-ecological behavior and other individual characteristics using the World Value Survey wave 2014. We combined this data with data from the Survey on Literacy and Culture in India 2014, which provided us with information about the local exposure to living culture and cultural heritage. We did this because we wanted to demonstrate that the cultural industry is the main source of exposure to cultural capital and the source for the formation of attitudes in an individual. 

Our findings reveal that richer places are more reckless in their use of the ecological endowments of places. However, local cultural capital can serve as a buffer that reduces the propensity of local people to abusively exploit the ecology. Thus, the consumption of modern art can be used as a channel to promote a successful circular economy in the real world.

Articoli correlati

Dimensioni della cultura e sviluppo del territorio

L'importanza della cultura nello sviluppo locale è stata ampiamente riconosciuta e vale la pena approfondire la sua natura territoriale per meglio comprenderne il potenziale impatto positivo nelle diverse aree. Le varie prospettive esistenti in tema di cultura, il modo in cui essa influisce sulle performance locali e i canali attraverso i quali questa relazione si esplicita sono importanti oggetti di studio. Le sfide attuali e le possibili evoluzioni della ricerca in questo campo sono elementi fondamentali di cui tenere conto per proseguire in tali ragionamenti

Activate the potential of the cultural and creative sector in non-urban areas

Research and policy traditionally neglected the non-urban cultural and creative sector, leaving it vulnerable. The European project, “IN SITU: Place-based innovation of cultural and creative industries in non-urban areas,” aims to address this situation. Attention is directed not only to traditional economic development matters but also to the social economy and community-based actions that support the life and development of territories. Challenges remain significant but a shift in how we view non-urban regions as sites of creativity and hubs of cultural production is emerging

Cultural Industries, Urban Regeneration, and Territorial Development:The Case of Gwangju, South Korea

The evolving interplay between culture and the urban economy in Gwangju, South Korea, reveals how a city’s historical narrative, high art events such as the Gwangju Biennale, the rise of cultural industries, and urban regeneration can drive economic development. Analysis of qualitative insights, quantitative data, and the city’s political history highlights a distinctive model of culture-led growth in Gwangju, where historical memory, creative sectors, and government support are interwoven to shape its economic and cultural landscape.

L’esperienza di gioco come strumento di trasformazione urbana e sociale 

Il ruolo trasformativo dell'esperienza di gioco nella pianificazione urbana e nel cambiamento sociale è significativo. Il gaming, come fenomeno culturale, può influenzare i comportamenti individuali e collettivi grazie all'interattività e ai meccanismi di apprendimento esperienziale. L'applicazione di questi principi nella pianificazione strategica e urbanistica può facilitare i processi partecipativi e il testing di scenari urbani. Esempi nei settori della mobilità, degli spazi pubblici e della sostenibilità mostrano i vantaggi e le sfide di questo approccio innovativo. L'integrazione del game design nella pianificazione urbana può contribuire allo sviluppo di città più vivibili, resilienti e inclusive, richiedendo un attento bilanciamento tra innovazione tecnologica e bisogni sociali