ECONOMICS UNIQUENESS

78 ■ THE ECONOMICS OF UNIQUENESS
morphology in urban development thus becomes a major challenge. Creating a
sustainable balance between diff erent approaches to urban and land use calls for
a systematic and operational evaluation of diff erent development options (Choi
et al. 2010). Especially in historic city cores, there is an increasing need for a solid
assessment of the economic implications of the presence of cultural heritage assets.
Th is chapter includes a review of essential features of cultural heritage evaluation
and a sketch of various functionalities involved, along with a broad overview
of various methods and applications. Th is is followed by a section on the hedonic
price, as the best possible market-based approach, provided that the necessary
databases are available. Various empirical results are off ered to illustrate the
expounded cases.
Economic Valuation of Cultural Heritage
Cultural heritage has been redefi ned as an asset of historic, cultural, and socioeconomic
signifi cance in a contemporary society (Hubbard 1993; Riganti and
Nijkamp 2007). Cultural heritage management, including city monument conservation
activities, cannot be adequately addressed as an isolated activity that
is disjointed from broader urban or regional development policy, programs and
projects (Coccossis and Nijkamp 1995). Urban development means the creation
of new assets in terms of physical, social, and economic structures. Nevertheless,
at the same time it should be recognized that each development process
oft en also destroys traditional physical fabric, including social and cultural assets
derived from our common heritage. Although not always immediately computable,
all cultural heritage assets represent for society at large an economic value
that ought to be properly incorporated into any urban transformation process. In
practice, the inclusion of such assets in the planning process cannot be left to the
market mechanism, as most urban historic-cultural assets represent “unpriced
goods” characterized by external eff ects that are not included in the conventional
metrics or “measuring rod of money” commonly used in assessing economic
outcomes of investment.
An operational and reliable assessment of the socioeconomic and historiccultural
value of monuments, or cultural heritage in general—including the
impacts of preservation policy—is fraught with many diffi culties. Oft en experts
rely on tourist revenues to refl ect part of the interest of society in monument
conservation and/or restoration, but in many cases this provides a biased and
incomplete measure, so that preservation policy can hardly be solely based on
tourism. On the contrary, in various places one may observe a situation in which
large-scale tourism, sometimes marked by congestion, even aff ects the quality of
or access to a cultural heritage asset, as in the cases of Venice, Florence, or Rome.