Cultural Economy for the Environmental Preservation of the Landscape as a Key Resource in Historic Territories

Abstract

Sustainable production besides economic, energetic, and environmental aspects should consider social and cultural features of the territory in which it relies. This occurs above all for agriculture that is intrinsically related to the territory. Today, the territory as a landscape represents a complex eco-system (subjects, communities, traditions, cultures, and specific agricultural systems) and a valuable vehicle for art and history and it is also a strategic asset to defend and promote with environmental policies. The topic of urban preservation and regeneration has been increasing by opening up to other factors such as the engagement of local communities and the contribution they can give toward the development of the identity and the symbolic universe of every community especially for historic territories. The main research question of this study is: Can historic territories be described as the landscape of a complex eco-system able to support a new cultural policy? In addition, which type of connections between physical resources and the virtual-cultural ones of that landscape are strategic assets for promoting historic territories? This theoretical manuscript is oriented toward improving territorial policies. In more details, it tries to develop a new model to reach a “global community of creativity” as a bridge between the networks of historic territories, which is meant as roots of variety to transfer to future generations, and between local and global quality in an emergent landscape. In order to reach this new model, the local community and ecosystem capabilities require a multi-level connection among both art, science, and culture as well as nature, technology, and civic capability. The result is that the new model is able to share common goods, which are both internal and external. Following this path, it is urgent to develop policies in an emergent perspective that are able to combine artistic, ecological, environmental, and cultural assets. In particular, the goals are to: (i) explore the complex value of territorial contexts that develop/evolve from both a medium-term and long-term point of view that is not described by Gross Domestic Product (GDP) standard indicators, (ii) reach the suggestion of a continuous re-articulation of sectors of knowledge proposed by cultural resources, and (iii) highlight that cultural marketing is involved in the interpretation and transmission within a large network of participants, users, institutions, markets, virtual, and territorial places. The starting point is identified as the landscape of historic territory, but an important achievement will be to transfer the main results to other territories by studying specific case histories of urban and non-urban landscapes.

1. Introduction

Three different pillars are usually taken into consideration with regard to sustainability: economic, energy, and environmental aspects are usually evaluated when the sustainability assessment is carried out [1]. Nevertheless, for agriculture, in the last several years, attention has moved to other important features of the production system [2]. The relevance of the impact on biodiversity [3] and the social and cultural structure of the productive territory has advanced considerably.

Territory, in the form of a landscape as a complex eco-system between material and immaterial assets, is primarily home to resources of art and history and needs to be defended and promoted with preservation policies. Landscape resources inspire the research on new forms of freedom and civilization. From these resources and when considering art and history as embedded resources, fundamental tools for people, communities, and populations emerge as a guide toward education and learning about environmental strategies. However, the resources of historical territories must be preserved above all for their civic and social importance, which will encourage the comprehension and circulation of new strategies for knowing and living our civitas between urban and non-urban areas. One of the main consequences is the importance of knowing about art and history since the aim of the landscape is to be a common good as well as an incentive for “knowing the landscape and art in order to know” [4]. Actually, the focus of the debate on the nature of cultural economic assets lies first with the plurality of functions that these assets are called to perform. In particular, this is valid from the perspective of knowledge in society as a fundamental component of quality factors in economic development, which does not have to be related only to “growing”. The landscape is an integrated form of those quality factors between nature, history, and art as well as between culture, science, and technology [5].

In this sense, it should be remembered how, in the first years of the new millennium, urban policies and important projects for the redevelopment of various cities were integrated into processes oriented towards territorial promotion in which the economic, commercial, and tourist dimensions often tended to prevail over the cultural ones [6]. However, reference toward the creative city was growing progressively [7] as an ideal model for the post-industrial processes of local development. Previously, these processes were valued in terms of low cost, profitability, territorial attraction, and positive local repercussion. More recently, the topic of urban regeneration has developed wide interest by opening up to other factors such as the engagement of local communities and the contribution that the project itself can give for the development of the identity and symbolic universe of every community. In other words, a shift can be identified toward the relevance of interdependences between material and immaterial factors of growth as leverages of wellness of both human beings and the environment [8]. The efficacy of urban regeneration interventions [9] is increasingly visible not only in economic terms but also in relation to the contribution of these interventions to the valorization of people’s identity and aspirations [10,11]. Thus, it is relevant to learn about local arts and history to be recognized both as a complex landscape including inside issues (i.e., knowledge of history, arts, cultures, and traditions) and outside ones (i.e., network with other territories) and as a complex platform for basic human creativity on both a local and a global scale.

The territory landscape, meant as a community and ecosystem capability, is oriented to build quality through connections among art, science, and culture and between nature and technology in order to reach a glocal community society of creativity. Local is because it is centered on proper arts, history, and culture. The landscape is able to generate a specificity of products and sense making [12]. Global because it “transforms” that specificity into a value for the world.

A complex process of co-generative potentialities can be identified in a world where cultural assets assume considerable meanings of “sense making” or in the construction of meaning (“bio-structures” of the ethics of responsibility and digitalized structures of action) and of sustainability as projection and communication to the future generations of memory and dynamic identity. The priority is, therefore, to be involved in the “complete” preservation and transmission of the current heritage (cultural, artistic, and scientific) as an integrated landscape for all those who represent the future.

Moreover, in this context, it is possible to find a deepening of the relationship between the “conservation” and the “valorization/appreciation” of cultural resources or, in other words, between the value conveyed to future generations and cultural resource values imposed by active users in order to promote their multiple and differentiated methods that generate variety. These resources connect material and immaterial ones and need to be well-known, investigated, and understood to identify how they can be better used to respect their durability in the future [13].

According to this, it is imperative to develop a perspective able to combine artistic, ecological, environmental, and cultural assets to explore the complex value (with a strong ecological nature) of landscape contexts that develop/evolve from a long-term point of view. This is aimed to reach the suggestion of a continuous re-articulation of sectors of knowledge proposed by cultural resources and the cultural-territorial marketing that is involved in the interpretation and transmission within a large network of participants, users, institutions, markets, virtual, and territorial places in an emergent complex landscape. In the recent past, Urbani [14] helped clarify this perspective through this analysis.

2. Institutions and Markets for “Conversations” as Territorial Attractors

The set of the cultural eco-system of institutions has to overcome an old “elitism” and closure without stealing energy from specific research. It has to work to give the wider access and transmission of knowledge whose cultural assets are the “natural” generators.

Therefore, this process creates the need of multi-channeling, which has to be understood to interpret correctly the demand and the offer of culture in territorial and/or disciplinary contexts, which depend on the efficiency and continuity of the commissioning of collection and selection (before financial sources: included a more courageous tax-free policy and financial monetary instruments of the cultural sector). Purchasing that could be stimulated by suitable credit forms that give strength to render the relationship between the bank and the commissioners and cultural producers more efficient [15].

However, they both need a new relationship with the cultural resources’ management and new institutions for the integration, coordination, and specialization of the cultural politics of the territory as a complex multilevel landscape [16].

Precisely, these institutions are responsible for the enhancement—often being their driving force—of the unique qualities (local resources), which may facilitate the total availability of the whole territorial system including active sensors of inclusive identities and fundamental levers of participation and co-planning of a new, creative, and sustainable society able to give priority to the preservation of the cultural resources, which characterize the livability of each historic territory [17].

Improving their competencies and operative skills, they can create new “places” on the territory (in addition to the traditional ones like galleries and museums) aimed to free abilities and experimental resources located in the communities in their peculiarities and primary local identities by hybridizing with global ones such as, with more confidence, the fine and minor arts. These places are cultural entities that can grow and spread the culture produced through human and scientific research and experimentation [14].

It is becoming essential to understand and describe the dynamics of these entities if we consider their interdependencies and the new foundations between new and old art-cultural institutions as important. This occurs when regarding the concept of community or grouping of which the cultural operator or manager become an art-cultural integrator between living spaces and sources of creativity from the small cities to the inner cities until the post-industrial blocks or the suburbs undergo urban renewal. The art-cultural resources included in a complex availability policy, which are very important parts of the territory landscape, complete their full transition from passive icon-works when compared to event consumers in order to gain a shared experience between cultural operators and providers. The process of gaining experience occurs in a cultural space, which is the lifelong learning of a multidimensional integration, and which makes the cultural resources (and, in particular, the artworks) and the landscape complex vehicles of conversation [18].

2.1. The Artwork That Changes Its Role in a Territory Landscape as Experiential Space

The first question is: Is the role of artwork changing? There are at least two types of emerging environments when speaking of art availability, which point out a diversification in the means of access to art. We are witnesses to gradually inclusive circumstances, which is supported by the diffusion of artistic activities in the territory (both real and virtual). These activities lead to a greater involvement and to a higher level of non-generic exposition to art over the long term to ensure compatibility between styles, channels, forms of expressions, aesthetic cultures, and to reduce the average targets of access—physical and economical but above all cognitive and symbolic [19].

The decrease of the inequalities in the availability of art and culture above all among different social and professional backgrounds or among different territorial areas (rural, industrial, or metropolitan) remains a fundamental aim even though, in the last 50 years, we have seen a positive evolution at least in Europe. Financial incentives and price facilities or more favorable timetables combined with the general development of middle education and culture have surely contributed to this evolution. However, the true step change could be achieved if the proposals can adapt to new areas of research, new languages, and new settings. The proposals of promotion and distribution able to push various categories and social areas toward a true and widespread inclusion with channels, products, and differential subjects, which have their core in research centers and universities. This inevitably stimulates new projects, which can be activated by the several cultural “places” including museums, cinemas, theaters, art galleries, medieval music concerts, or rock concerts. A local-global strategy, which actually knows how to lead to a policy able to involve a cognitive participation through “... bridges and networks between different forms of interest in art and culture”, which was said many centuries ago by Ernst H. Gombrich [20].

2.2. The Role of Education, Lifelong Learning, and the Emergence of New Intermediaries

Schools and cultural institutions aimed at nurturing and fostering the arts are essential to develop, in the long term, a new artistic sensitivity and to inspire, from the earliest years of childhood, a profound awareness of that fundamental need, which is considered to be our most spontaneous inclination to self-expression and to personal and collective creativity. We can see the outcome from music to painting, from literature to theater, and from dance to artisanship (with a special regard to the preservation of historical resources).

The above-mentioned aptitudes, however, need to be channeled, stimulated, supported, and strengthened if many of those “young budding artists”—as Calvino used to call them—are expected, once “grown up”, to keep on contributing to the cultural tradition such as an intervention that could enable some of them to enhance their own professional aspiration among different fields or, at least, to take advantage of these distinctive abilities in a creative, innovative, and personal way in every sector they will be willing to commit themselves to with the aim of pursuing dynamic intercultural and inter-artistic hybridizations [21].

The truth is that art is in the landscape territory, which is an active source of knowledge and a boundless “instrument” for innovation, creativity, self-expression, and social life propelled by inevitable hermeneutics, which becomes essential not only for us but also for those we share our lives and working experiences with. It is also important for those organizations and institutions in which we grow our talents day-by-day to constantly strive for collective innovation and self-taught education from which the strategic relevance for the management and the managerial sciences directly or indirectly derive [22].

Generally speaking, art is a powerful driving force capable of introducing new managerial training and decision-making development plans and it is intended to convey a research-based purpose for new cultural contexts in the dynamic of landscape: from music to screenplay and from theater to cinema with regard to the processes for the preservation of the resources of the historical territory.

When referring to art and painting, in the landscape territory, relying on intermediaries is an undeniable choice from sellers to book publishers specialized in informative and educational materials/publications, from music scores to movies, from CD-Roms to the more recent multiple web channels, and from theaters to art galleries and museums linked to a specific geographical and the local area of fruition [21].

These multiple ways of mediating between the author and the final user along with critics and philosophers as well as historians or educators influence the processes of art diffusion, consolidation, and understanding and, even if they have sometimes led to deep misunderstandings and miscomprehensions, the achieved results have produced more advantages than disadvantages, according to Ernst H. Gombrich’s [23] embraceable opinion (The History of Art, p. 600). However, these intermediaries and mediation channels often turn out to be imperfect or incomplete with regards to their public or private functions, but this could even be, as it often is, an opportunity if it is inserted into territorial landscape-related contexts in which such kinds of intermediaries are contained and shaped.

2.3. Creativity, Relational Aesthetics, and Innovation in Territory-Landscape Towards New Identities

What has been happening, as is now evident, is a widespread transformation of the channels, subjects, and forms of cultural (and, in particular, artistic) production and fruition, which are linked to specific territories and landscapes [24,25]. In addition to the traditional activities dedicated to the transmission of the arts cultures and to their diffusion and spreading such as collecting and the micro-macro systems of the art galleries, other practices are increasingly common and they both integrate and, sometimes, conflict with the most established ones. Though less institutional, they are not less important. They are able to generate new ideas, new trends, and new values and they appear under heterogeneous names such as social art, political art, and environment-space art etc. We are no longer dealing only with “land art” but also with other forms of artistic expression open to multiple ways of creation and perception through shared, social, and technological processes. A relevant, although not the only, authority in this field is Nicolas Bourriaud with his iconic manifesto “Pour un aesthétique relationelle” [26].

For this reason, it is necessary to introduce links in order to avoid dispersion and artificial separation such as among meta-organizers, represented by the company museums, the territorial museum network, the urban centers, or even the new virtual spaces—both on and off line—which are able to translate heterogeneity and fragmentation (of the channel and of the subject) into resources for our creativity. These links should have the ability to create new “territorial set-ups” through careful urban planning aimed at maintaining and protecting the integrity and the cultural, historical, and artistic identity of the territories-landscapes (1). In order to reach this goal, a comprehensive strategy intended to achieve a sustainable urban and, more generally, territorial “regeneration” is necessary to overcome the logic of the “small scale intervention” [27]. In the mid-seventies, well ahead of his time, G. Urbani used to affirm in his Plan for Umbria that a “good” conservation implies an ecosystem-based approach centered on territory-landscape (2).

Therefore, the public institutions as well as the private ones have the responsibility not only to create sociability, sharing, and matching in order to compare the emerging differences and potentialities more efficiently but also to overcome the exclusions and expand the sharing ability to the farthest limits of the mind and space. A process like this, however, might produce both cohesion and, at the same time, conflicts. Its prospects are well described and summarized in “The Rotterdam Declaration”, which is a document signed by 300 members and 25 European countries.

“…relationships with cities, regions, and the people and the inserting of hybrid cultural and artistic activities in a given, and immediately broader, social context appear to have undergone radical change within, for example, geographical and physical locations that have still not been included in the scope of cultural policies (in the same way as re-appropriated urban wasteland and squalls that have been converted for cultural use)”.

2.4. The Auto-Generative System of the Arts and Ecology Value in Territorial-Landscape Compatibilities

What actually emerges is an auto-generative system of the arts (as an arts qualified component in landscape spatial forms) as an open, not linear, and multi-subjective user-friendly process. It is characterized by a complex community and by eco-systemic interdependencies whose performance often refer to habits or, better, to strong compatibilities and relational investments. In this case, value formation is not efficiently represented by thorough pricing or not always well mediated by markets and dynamic intermediaries. At this point, it is clear that networks better withstand the challenges brought on by complexity, the omnipresent nature of knowledge, and the efforts of adjustment so that other analytic categories try to face them and seem to better embrace other theoretical, methodological, and practical challenges of the art economy as if they originated by value ecology placed in a specific territorial context and into a defined landscape perimeter with their own stories, traditions, and identities.

With the former categories hailed from an ecological approach, the arts system-process starts to re-consider the meaning of the term sustainability as a combination between currently available resources (both natural and artificial) and future potential (characterized by insecurity as a range of possible options). This occurs by taking advantage of the interdependence between the territory landscape, the economy, society, and institutions, by intercepting the forthcoming as well as the current needs, and, as mentioned, by considering only the specific territory of origin [28].

A set of future preferences that the market’s mechanisms cannot directly point out needs some precise supply-demand analysis. Historical, artistic, and cultural resources prove to be strongly coherent with the ecological perspective where the development subsists if, and only if, it is compatible with future demands (thus cognitive) that are supposed to be strongly related to the quality of the stock of current resources and integrated into a specific territorial context in which the “history marks” have the function of memory aimed at educating to read the past in order to understand the present and to build a sustainable future.

Art as an ecologic resource based on awareness and with strong “environmental and territorial landscape” connotations can contribute primarily to the improvement of our representations of the growth approach starting from the maintenance of stock quality to be passed on to the next generations. However, secondarily, to understand the links between nature and culture among a large range of possible decisions, which is coherent with the principles of inter-generational equity and able to reduce the factors of entropic decline. It is a growth that gives particular importance to quantity in particular to the current one, which introduces “non-worth” consumption and irreversible damage such as reducing the margins to be appointed to future options. Subsequently, this leads to the exclusion of the evaluation of future generation expectations and to the denial of sustainability. It happens due to a contraction of the compatibility between present and future, current exploitation, and potential and the emerging use of an unknown or only possible development. A possibility (especially territorial) that even today we have to be willing to experiment and explore [29].

This requires the public bid to properly meet the increasing differential demand with regard to carrying out functions of innovative promotion related to activities preserving and regenerating environments and artifacts that history leaves us in territory landscapes. The functions of creation are able to set management, entrepreneurial, and leadership strategies geared to the access, diffusion, and symbolic-cognitive ownership to establish/create solid ground of helpful and usable knowledge sharing for aware users/consumers (accountable and cooperative may bring unselfish and reliable individualism, which we see in many works of Rawls and Ishaia Berlin). This occurs in order to see beyond the national thinking to a highly complex, unforeseen, uncertain world. Arts are, therefore, sources of public good with insufficient availability, producing a value, which is not easily measurable through the traditional wealth indicators. However, it has been proven that they are essential to a user’s preferences, which requires ever higher quality (of time, space, environment, and built relationships) against quantity whose evaluation and benefits are related to long-term results not easily registered by the current price structure. For this reason, proper actions between public and private entities are required.

All this needs to establish institutions and governance at a regional, national, and global level able to support the spread and appropriation—besides higher motivation—for the proper access to these goods along with their spatial and time transferability along the complex sector of cultural assets (see Figure 1). This governance should take a network including a horizontal and hierarchical structure to which traditional cultural services is already widespread throughout different areas, which are required to take part in an inclusive way. This is what will lead to the establishment of agencies incorporated in a logic of spread and is involved in territorial landscape regeneration.

It is thus about to consider what the art and culture system’s sustainable conditions would be in the impact between the supply chain and cultural resources self-contained in the landscape of which they are an integral part. These conditions are briefly taken into consideration in the following paragraph.

2.5. Game Skills in Science and Technology for a Two-Way Transferability: A Suggested Concept Methodology

From this point of view, artistic institutions and art can constitute essential vehicles for recreational and educational competences which lead humans through various ages. They work as a support and an active nourishment of their intellectual and social growth during the participation in the elaboration of symbols, practices, and customs, which belong to that kind of civic area in which we can begin observing “Civi” in petroglyphs (even in the Italian ones, in Valle Camonica in the Mesolithic, which is between 8 and 10 years ago). As early as 1938, Johan Huizinga’s Homo Ludens traces the first differentiation of the gaming role in embracing specific challenges in the unnecessary domain or in the free action one or rather in the freedom of the non-ordinary action as a primary source of the self-created meaning.

Game playing is not a simple free action since we can understand from the Anglo-saxon use of the term “game” where rules and results are known, but according to Bateson, in his famous Mind and Nature, 1979 [30]—a “frame of action…, a mutual frame, the border of a particular social world or social system” where rules and results are not always present in children’s games.

The acquaintance of artistic skills produces outcomes, which are also usable in game skills like transversal skills, plural skills, and dynamics that overcome a sheer guidance to a target in order to develop a way of competent playing of exchange and the recombination of useful knowledge in new languages, symbols, and representations. It creates connections and transforms roles and contexts in a dynamic and innovative way: they are useful for strategic and managerial actions. However, this highlights the cycle of destruction-reproduction of new knowledge coming from the “reintegrative” consumption of artistic and cultural resources in the territory landscape. As in the underlying scheme, which describes the connection between the stock of inherited knowledge and their innovation, it could also be extended to the territory landscape and its destructive “consumption” and, therefore, to the need for its restoration (see Figure 2).

The structure of the cultural and artistic field can be shown in a very descriptive scheme with a production function and a relation, which highlights the effects of the production on the artistic and cultural resources. We traditionally evaluate the effects from the point of view of the physical quantities produced.

Here we consider, however, the effects on the knowledge heritage. The production function considered (from a merely descriptive point of view) the alloy or more specifically the new knowledge generated (or the innovative and creative knowledge, which has been incorporated in those artistic goods and services produced) with a series of explicative causes.

Y = F(A, r, T)

(1)

where: A is the existing cultural heritage at a certain time. Basically, it expresses the set of artistic and cultural knowledge available for consumption. It represents the “total” capital stock at a given time, which is provided by the “inherited” capital from the previous generations and by the new capital reproduced thanks to technology. An example of “reproduced” capital is a copy of the existing original capital such as the several duplicates used to protect the original statues from air pollution or the ancient manuscripts. Otherwise, it can be a representation of paintings, poems, and songs inside a physical medium such as CD-Roms, books, compact disks, or videotapes. Alternatively, it can be used as a replacement for something that is irremediably lost. Both “natural” (or inherited) and “reproduced” capitals can be indiscriminately used in order to share the knowledge they contain and to create new art and culture as enrichment of the territory landscape. Unless the copy is a perfect substitute for the original object, the only way to distinguish them is the “quality” of their communicative and educational functions [4]. A is the basic stock of heritage resources in the territory landscape.

r is the level of utilization of A, which means the artistic products (and knowledge) used in order to share the knowledge itself but also the knowledge used as input to produce new art and culture able to expand the wealth of the territory. Therefore, r is some kind of “utilization rate” of artistic and cultural resources. Its optimum depends on the principles of equity between and within generations illustrated previously as well as on scarcity, exhaustibility, and renewability restrictions on resources. r is a sort of leverage to maintain and develop the wealth of territory landscape.

The employment of resources implies some kind of deterioration, which means that the capital can only be used to a lesser extent in the future (unless it is replenished) but also that the educational functions of art and culture can be subject to a qualitative decline. In order to compensate for the damage derived by consumption, some interventions are required. The aim is to restore the productivity (communicative ability) of the damaged artistic product. For the proper safeguard of knowledge, at least in the long term, the restoration should compensate for the damage due to consumption. However, it is only natural that some cultural and artistic knowledge is eventually lost. This can happen for different reasons such as the change in taste and preferences (as in the case of the Gregorian chant) and new prevailing artistic movements, which are considered “to be more important”, as well as inability to preserve certain goods such as archaeological sites.

Several “categories” of consumption can be distinguished, starting from different hypotheses about the yield produced by the resources.

• “Non-reintegrative” consumption based on the hypothesis of diminishing returns: it damages the existing heritage (and its productivity) without producing new knowledge (e.g., mass tourism)
• “Reintegrative” consumption, which occurs in situations of constant returns. It creates new knowledge, which integrates the consumed knowledge (e.g., the average consumer who watches a show, reads a book, visits an exhibition)
• “More than reintegrative” consumption, which creates original and innovative knowledge through the employed resources, it follows the hypothesis of increasing returns (e.g., by using, reworking, and innovating the knowledge acquired and consumed previously, the artists can create new works).

T is the level of “technological knowledge” at a certain time. It represents all the means that can be used for the creation and diffusion of artistic and cultural products as well as for the creation of instruments, which facilitate the diffusion of information or extend the capital usage by substituting and reproducing it (and so, it creates the “reproduced” capital mentioned earlier).

T includes instruments and knowledge that can restore the “communicative” ability, the quality of the diffusive process, and the productivity of the artistic-cultural resources (e.g., maintenance and restoration activities, “additional” services). T is a factor of knowledge productivity in the territory landscape.

Thus, what are the conditions for the “sustainability” of the art and cultural system?

It is possible to start with a “minimum” sustainable state: this phase assumes that each loss caused by the consumption or by the deterioration of the communicative/ educational capacity or by other events (degradation, destruction, negligence) must be balanced by new investments in the cultural system, which aims at generating new equivalent artistic benefits. These benefits can be of a different nature: new production, new knowledge, the renewal of the quality of the knowledge—diffusion processes and the connective usability (the last one can be real or only perceived).

In this way, the more the historical and cultural integrity of the landscape where the benefits are granted and become valuable is safeguarded. The sustainability will become more meaningful due to the landscape’s historical and cultural integrity. A responsible game blooms from such a perspective: a game that is fundamental in developing the analysis and continuous re-inventions from the free creativity in order to re-establish balance, harmony, and pleasure that are constantly threatened in the different spatial, communitarian, and organizational contexts. Therefore, this is a skill that can, deliberately or un-deliberately, create new cultures in order to withstand the irrational by granting the opportunity of reducing the global entropy. It contributes to increasing, in any subject, a real and rich ability of imaging and reconstructing, which is emerging or, in the future, this ability, together with the necessary willingness to face the unknown, requires a stronger and stronger cultural basis, which is a basis that can be reinforced by art knowledge. Using even the individual and/or communitarian scaffolding practices as a support of learning how to learn [31,32].

3. Limitations, Future Research, and Some Conclusions

It is well known that GDP represents the general level of incomes since it measures the market value of all final goods and services produced in a certain period and country without considering citizens’ welfare. In fact:

(A) GDP does not consider incomes of citizens in a country (that are considered in the Gross National Product (GNP), but it considers the income produced in the territory of a certain country. The production of both Italian and foreign companies is considered part of the GDP even if it is transferred by using other current accounts and by being used for expenditures in foreign countries. This means that tax incentives can attract investments and investors with effects on the increase of GDP of a country but without enriching the economy of that country.

(B) There is a class of goods and services (water treatment plants, medical care, insurances, safety and security systems, expenses for the reduction of the traffic congestion, etc.) that is considered part of the GDP even though it consists of deleting a potential problem and not of developing satisfaction.

(C) A third reason is related to the existence of another class of goods and services (such as walks into the woods or on strand, baby-sitting service offered by grandparents, domestic health care of an ill senior, etc.) that is monetized. If these services were privatized and given an economic value, additional work would be needed to pay for services that formerly used to be free. As a result, this would worsen feelings. The GDP would grow, but human welfare would not.

(D) A fourth reason is that productive processes consume and deteriorate natural and social resources, but this degradation is not considered in the GDP. Environmental degradation and running out of the limited natural resources [33,34,35,36] are particularly adequate examples to describe the narrowness of the GDP. Although oil and wood are running out and biodiversity is being dramatically wrecked, none of these factors are considered in GDP.

(E) Lastly, the GDP only represents an average measure and it does not consider disparities (e.g., the ratio between purchasing power and the cost of life or the ratio between education-related expenses and consumption). Thus, a so-called “Easterlin Paradox” can be faced. Even if, in the short term, the GDP of a country grows, the welfare of that country drops from all points of view (social, institutional, cultural, psychological, civil, etc.).

Therefore, many GDP variations could be not connected with collective welfare, but they can be strictly related to short-period profits that affect the stock markets or the ratio Deficit/GDP. This involves negative effects such as discouraging investments and increasing unemployment. For this reason, some experts proposed the introduction of alternative indexes, e.g., Human Development Index, Index of Sustainable Welfare, or the ISTAT BES Report. The acceptance of the four-variable scheme “average income, inequality index, unemployment rate, and CO2 emissions” is not sufficient to express the ratio between economic growth and social and cultural growth. Consequently, other indexes would be necessary such as Education Index, Civic Engagement Index, Environmental Degradation Index, and Cultural Heritage Degradation Index.

Even for the activities of companies, arts can help create new relationships or manage communication and information. Thanks to arts, several skills can be learned such as how to use knowledge in a completely different way and not only following Weber or Porter. The cultural properties are the most valuable part of those common goods produced in unsatisfying quantities and, consequently, they help broaden the gap between the real expected prosperity and the GDP-related prosperity.

As specified previously, the level of satisfaction expected by these “rare” common goods cannot be represented as a mere purchase. One of the main goals of the policy is to create partnerships and collaborations as described in this study. Moreover, it must be underlined that the artistic and cultural heritage is not eternal. Therefore, its sustainable conservation, maintenance, and promotion are absolutely necessary. This goal will be reached only by improving the access to heritage and by broadening its knowledge as a shared common good. However, the main difficulty for this achievement is related to enforcing that consciousness as a cooperative community with a long-term approach, which is fundamental to safeguard the territory landscape with a focused policy. Future research needs to analyze and map an integrated territory-landscape with a multidisciplinary approach from big data to network analysis and, lastly, to case studies. This is a strong commitment and a binding responsibility to give to the next generation a sustainability project “about the Arts and for the Arts, for our territory, and for a living culture in a complex landscape”.