ECONOMICS UNIQUENESS

76 ■ THE ECONOMICS OF UNIQUENESS
Introduction
Cultural heritage and local identity have become buzzwords in modern political
parlance. Th ese concepts clearly have social and historical roots, as they refer
to local characteristic creative manifestations, accepted value systems, historic
memory, language, literature, art, architecture, engineering, and urban planning.
Cultural heritage is the result of cumulative human activity expressed and projected
in a material sense (comprising historic city cores, built structures, iconic
monuments, and landscapes) or in an immaterial sense (which includes music,
dance, and literature). Cultural heritage may be seen as the legacy of physical
artifacts and intangible attributes of a group (or society at large) that are inherited
from past generations, maintained in the present, and bestowed for the future.
Cultural heritage thus off ers a focused and systematic lens to look from the present
into the past, with a projection into the future.
To qualify as cultural heritage, goods ought to have historic signifi cance and,
more oft en than not, an intergenerational meaning and a sense of local identity
(Coccossis and Nijkamp 1995). Clearly, cultural heritage includes an array
of expressions, such as performing architectural heritage, archaeological sites,
cultural landscapes, monuments, arts, literature, and so forth. Cultural heritage
will be presented in this chapter as those parts of historic-cultural capital that
have an explicit and recognized connotation to the past and may be seen as a selfidentifying
landmark of a place (Th rosby 1999). Consequently, cultural heritage
and identity are oft en closely interrelated concepts.
Part of our heritage is visible and tangible, and has a physical expression; for
instance, the ensemble of a historic built environment comprising ancient temples,
palaces, and gardens. It is noteworthy that the United Nations Educational, Scientifi
c and Cultural Organization (UNESCO 1972) makes a distinction between
cultural, natural, and intangible heritage (Arizpe et al. 2000; Klamer and Zuidhof
1999). Indeed, cultural heritage is a broad and heterogeneous concept, so that a
comparative study of cultural heritage or an unambiguous economic evaluation
is fraught with many diffi culties, of both a methodological and empirical nature.
Th is chapter will focus on the physical and tangible artifacts created by
humanity in the past. A signifi cant share of these assets is part of our everyday
living environment, both biotic and abiotic. Th e daily living environment thus
encompasses a broad variety of collective or public goods, such as a quiet atmosphere,
green urban areas, aquatic systems, and historic-cultural capital, as well
as other forms of environmental capital.
Environmental capital, a concept that incorporates the set of all material and
non-material collective assets around us, is clearly a broad and multifaceted
ramifi cation of goods that contributes to societal welfare or well-being, either by
being enjoyed through consumption externalities, or by being used for economic