Cultural Statistics Framework and Measures of the Cultural Liveliness of Cities

General framework and new trends in cultural field The cultural statistics' production has always been founded on implicit cultural patterns which, in different ways, have drawed the analysis field and the related phenomena. The definiton of "culture" concept is an old problem and in its history we can find a lot of different approaches to it. The antropological reflection before and recently the sociological one have contributed to put in light crucial themes of the reflection on culture. While the disciplinary exchange between sociology, anthropology and statistic gave us very interesting and detailed studies about economy, politic, employment, social relationships and family we cannot say the same about the cultural studies. This weak link is probably due to the complexity of the concept on one hand and to the persistence of those implicit patterns, on the other hand. At the same time, in the real social processes, the growing weight of culture in developed society is clearly observable. Indeed, we begin to see very well the influence of culture on social and economic dimensions. Culture can create employment, culture promotes financial flows, culture affects private and public social relationships. The lack in interdisciplinary communication and the exponential growth of culture in society can generate a real risk for those institutions charged to produce cultural statistics. This is the risk: while very new and strong stimuli are coming from society, the institutional interpretation of these stimuli often remain very old, traditional and, sometimes, "aristocratic". New technologies burst into society and change the relation between local and cultural identity, the relation between cultural distribution and consumptions; metropolitan areas become over and over semiotical systems, mass media remain the hard core of cultural patterns' diffusion and nevertheless the institutional answer is often pointed on "beaux arts", museums, libraries, theatre... We know that recent transformations are involving theatre, museums, and libraries too, but we know also that if we want to avoid the risk of a disconnection between our analysis and real processes in society we cannot study only these dimensions. So, it seems reasonable to propose some macro-areas to define the cultural field and some sub-domains on which we can concentrate our analysis. In accordance with the Eurostat group "Leg on Cultural Statistics " reflections, and starting from the equation between culture and communication, we can say that the three macro-areas are related to the artistic field, the cultural heritage, the mass media …