OECD Culture and Local Development.pdf - PACA

3. PROMOTING LOCAL DEVELOPMENT BY CREATING CULTURAL PRODUCTS
These indicators can be used to identify territories, while at the national level
they identify different degrees of concentration for sectors of activity. Thus, in the case
of France, if we distinguish the arts, culture (the arts plus cultural industries) and creativity
(culture plus certain so-called creative industries) by increasing order of extension,
we find growing indices of concentration (Table 3.4.). This reinforces the hypothesis
of cultural and creative arts districts as opposed to the notion that these activities
are scattered throughout the territory. (Paris has been left out of the sample to avoid
biasing it through that city’s very high concentration of artistic, cultural and creative
activities, and to provide a more useful overview of the hypotheses tested).
Table 3.4. Concentration indices for three types of activity
(France excluding the City of Paris)
HERFINDHAL GINI 1 GINI 2
Art 0.12 0.11 0.03
Culture 0.19 0.13 0.25
Creativity 0.29 0.18 0.44
Source: Greffe X. & Simmonet, V. (April 2004), Analyse de l'identification des concentrations culturelles, Paris: DATAR, p.23-6
Synergy
Specialisation and concentration may not be enough to define a district or cluster,
because the determining factor will be the quality of interdependencies among the
industries in the territory concerned. Yet, as with concentration, synergy only deserves
attention if it appears more prominently than does synergy among the same activities
at the national level. For example, while it is logical to expect a certain flow of trade
between book publishing and image publishing at the national level, a district for
these businesses will not appear unless the flow is greater than the national figure.
The first step is to define the correlations between activities that appear logically at
the national level. The second step is to identify the quality of synergy within a given
territory, in order to determine whether it is of greater quality than synergy at the national
level (See Annex 2.2).
These three series of statistical methods can produce some surprising results. For
France, principal cultural districts identified were different, depending on the technique
used (specialisation, concentration or synergy). The specialisation approach tends
to confirm a priori impressions. The concentration analysis shows that those impressions
are false, and that some cities are either more or less creative than expected. With
the most rigorous approach, that of synergy, the results are surprising. Thus, the city
that comes out as the leading cultural and creative district is Besançon, whereas
Avignon, with a very strong reputation in these fields, turns out to be particularly poorly
124 CULTURE AND LOCAL DEVELOPMENT - ISBN 92-64-00990-6 - © OECD 2005