Cultural heritage and creative cities: an economic evaluation perspective

Creative classes are usually found in inspirational, cultural environments. From that perspective, the presence of an attractive cultural or historical environment that is actively enjoyed by many people is a major asset for many cities. Cultural heritage has become a resource of both historico-cultural and socio-economic significance in a modern society. The needs of a leisure society as well as the needs of those who want to relax from their daily labour race are often met in places with a local identity and an appreciative specific built environment. Undoubtedly, a main challenge of the modern creativeness fashion is to translate creative and cultural assets and expressions into commercial values (value added, employment, visitors etc.), which means that private- sector initiatives are a sine qua non for effective and successful urban creativeness strategies. In the present paper a survey of methods to value cultural heritage is offered. Most valuation approaches appear to use stated preference methods, but we also observe a limited set of studies using hedonic price approaches. Given the orientation on the local benefits of cultural heritage, the latter class of methods is a promising area of research on the valuation of amenities in creative cities.