Narrow or Broad Definition of Cultural and Creative Industries: Some Evidence from Tuscany, Italy

The problem of defining the creative sector is crucial. Recent contributions in creative industries have reduced the sectors taken into consideration, increasingly focusing on industries with high creative intensity. Other contributions have widened the set of analyzed creative industries to include the tourism industry, cultural heritage activities, and the experience economy. In particular, this latter definition meets a real and significant need but it also brings to light several still unexplored criticalities. This paper contributes to this debate by carefully considering several consequences that the adoption of either a ‘narrow’ or a ‘broad’ classification of creative industries might have for a heritage-driven region like Tuscany, Italy. The work identifies and maps cultural and creative industries both in Tuscany as a whole and in the art city of Florence and analyzes their evolution, in order to consider the various implications for the different definitions of the ‘creative sector’ that have been adopted.