Cultural, Creative and Sustainable Cities

Dear Colleagues,

The Cultural and Creative Cities Monitor has been developed by the Joint Research Centre of the European Commission to help policy makers identify local strengths and opportunities and benchmark their cities against similar urban centres. The Monitor offers a fully accessible database of 29 carefully selected indicators covering 190 cities in Europe. The analysis shows the polycentric pattern of Europe’s cultural assets, which offers local authorities the opportunity to design diverse and context-specific strategies. In particular, medium-sized cities appear to have, on average, more cultural facilities per inhabitant than larger cities. The paper presenting these findings is among the top social media articles in 2019–20.

The last two decades have recorded a massive increase of interest in culture as a major resource for sustainable development. Nevertheless, the practical implementation of culture-led strategies remains a challenge. The varied impacts of culture are indeed difficult to monitor, as they cover many different domains of the economy, society and individuals’ lives. While the Monitor succeeds in breaking from a narrow economic perspective of culture by including, for instance, indicators of cultural participation, diversity and openness, its full potential to address relevant policy research questions is yet to be explored.

This Special Issue welcomes theoretical and empirical contributions that aim to provide deeper insight in all aspects of culture and sustainable development in cities, e.g., inclusiveness, reduced inequalities, green growth/tourism and health and wellbeing. Empirical analyses showing the relationship between the Cultural and Creative Cities’ performance and sustainability goals/green indicators will be particularly appreciated. Applications of the Cultural and Creative Cities model to other geographical contexts or units are also welcome. Theoretical contributions with a sound conceptual basis on the future scope of the Monitor, with a focus on cultural sustainability metrics, are of interest as well.

Dr. Valentina Montalto
Prof. Dr. Pier Luigi Sacco
Dr. Michaela Saisana
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

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Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.