Politics of the Heritage. From the building of the state-nations to the local economic development Introduction to the knowledge based economy

When I was young both the liberal and the marxist politicians and economists said that, to invest in culture, you had to make money before. Culture was at the end of the value chain; if you had got a welfare condition, then you could think to Art and Culture. Things changed actually a lot in the while. Culture-driven development, Creative classes and cities, Knowledge-based economies have become to-day new slogans and fashonable recepies, master keys for the local economic development. They seem a kind of revenge of the Culture on the Industrial production, now obliged to fully overturn the old style of thinking because of the need to make innovation and manufacturing cool products in the place of mass goods. This manual shows how long Culture and Cultural Heritage have been exploited in the economic and political world, in the building of the modern state nations, then to face to the first Western crisis of the Fordist paradigm in the Seventies of the last century, till to try inventing the new European Union cultural identity. The twenty-two chapters of this book also offer a shrewd path through many banal and simplifyng, sometimes too bright pictured approaches to the culture-led development and its satellite notions, clearifying the bad and good sides of this theory, to make able the reader, and possibly the planner, to find his/her original and site-specifc way in the always mobile and different on going territorial contexts.