New research published by The Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport (DCMS) explores the role of culture, sport and heritage (CS&H) assets, and investment in driving positive economic and social outcomes at the local level, and concludes that ‘the existence of and investment in CS&H assets can be seen to be important influencers of place-shaping’.
DCMS writes:
The place-making research was undertaken by Trends Business Research and NEF Consulting Ltd, and commissioned through the CASE joint strategic research programme led by the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) and its sector leading arms-length bodies — Arts Council England, Historic England and Sport England.
It follows an earlier report – Local economic impacts from cultural sector investments – which is based on a literature review of economic impact assessments of arts, heritage, museums and galleries, cultural events. It was commissioned by the DCMS and undertaken by consultants ECORYS. The review investigated specific culture, sport and heritage assets and investments in specific localities, and focusing on their economic rather than their wider ‘attractiveness’ impacts.
The report finds, at page 36, that ‘the density of cultural and heritage assets was highly and positively related to the density of firms in a local economy, indicating that where there are high densities of theatres, museums, monuments and so on, we tend to find concentrations of economic activity. Further, the density of cultural assets is found to be positively and strongly related to the net in-migration of businesses, which suggests that such assets are important ‘pull’ factors which influence location decisions. These findings hold regardless of the urban scale at which they are examined: cultural assets are equally important as attractors in non-major urban areas as in major urban areas and this suggests that the observed results are not simply a reflection of general urban agglomeration effects’.
The report goes on to state that ‘there is a significant and positive relationship between the density of creative firms and their performance as measured by levels of turnover, and density of heritage assets and cultural events… the existence of cultural and heritage assets creates direct commercial opportunity for creative firms, but also adds to the wider amenity value of a place’.
The report concludes that ‘the existence of and investment in CS&H assets can be seen to be important influencers of place-shaping. The precise mechanisms through which this influence is exerted (i.e. the nature of the impact ecosystem at an asset/investment and local level) require further investigation. However, we can clearly see that places that contain a greater density of CS&H assets and receive higher per capita CS&H investment are more likely to build a strong creative sector. They also are able to attract businesses to locate in local places more effectively than others and/or slow the rate at which businesses out-migrate to other locations’.
