Page 3 - Social_Sustainability of Culture

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Introduction to the topic

Sustainability focuses on meeting current human needs without compromising the ability of future
generations to meet their own needs. Traditionally, the sustainability paradigm encompassesthe
interactions between humans and the economic, social and environmental aspects of living. Adding
culture to the already widely accepted three pillars of sustainability: social, environmental, and economic is
important for society to address because the addition of a fourth pillar to represent culture creates
a holistic approach to sustainability. In the last couple of years, in Europe as well as all over the world,
culture and creativity from one side, tourism from the other, emerged as growing economic sectors.
Creative and cultural sectors covered almost the 7% of Europe GDPR, while tourism was shifting more and
more from mass tourism to different forms of more authentic discovery of places, people, heritage with
what might be called cultural tourism or experiential tourism, a more aware and responsible way of
travelling.

The growth of these two sectors opened an interesting discussion when sensitiveness towards
environmental protection has become a key topic on all EU government agendas.

The key questions in this moment are the following:

- How do we ensure to culture the role of enabler of sustainable development and how do we make culture
and its events sustainable from the environmental point of view?

- How do we make sure that tourism has a reduced or no impact on the environment of the places where
tourists are travelling through the promotion of new forms of tourism, cultural and experiential,
transformative and slow tourism?

These topics have been at the center of a policy discussion both world wide and at EU level. United Nations
connected culture with many SDGs assigned to culture and creative industries a key role as enabler
of sustainable development.