European Cultural and Creative Cities in Covid-19 times

Using cultural jobs statistics from Eurostat and the JRC’s Cultural and Creative Cities Monitor, this report identifies highly vulnerable cultural jobs and creative cities. Both national and city governments have issued a wide range of policy measures (from compensatory grants to tax reliefs) to maintain alive Europe’s cultural capital, while giving cultural institutions, companies and workers the time to get prepared to post-COVID times. Proximity tourism could indeed help compensate losses from international tourism, while new cultural services that meet societal needs (educational, health, environmental) would help restore the European social fabric and people’s well-being.
The policy directions that seem to emerge from the analysis also consider that a sustainable recovery of the cultural and creative sectors will require a truly out-of-the-box thinking to cooperate with other sectors to develop novel (welfare) services (in the field of education, mental and physical health, proximity tourism, environment, etc.) to make the contribution of culture to societal well-being much more evident.