Cultural economy, sovereign debt crisis and the importance of local contexts: The case of Athens

This paper presents an overview of the cultural economy of Athens during the last three decades and a preliminary assessment of how it is being affected by the current sovereign debt crisis. Drawing upon the concept of embeddedness and using a combination of statistical and ethnographic data we examine the cultural economy in relation with social stratification and urban policy dynamics. We argue that the cultural economy of Athens acquired a consumption- and import-oriented character. Manufacturing activities shrunk as a result of competitive pressures from both post-Fordist advanced economies and emerging ones. Consumption-oriented activities developed through the meeting of new middle classes’ cultural demand with micro-entrepreneurship and large-scale investments of economic elites in a context of deregulation in urban cultural policy and public investments in urban mega-projects. The restructuring of the cultural economy was a part of a broader political–economic arrangement, established following the affiliation of Greece to the EC/EU, where public spending (based on public borrowing and EU Structural Funds) sustained both middle classes’ income and corporate profits. The 2010–2011 sovereign debt crisis threatens the whole political–economic arrangement of the last few decades whose symbolic aspect was the restructuring and growth of the cultural economy.

► We examine the consumption- and import-oriented character of the Athenian cultural economy.
► The Athenian cultural economy did not adapt to post-Fordist knowledge-intensive production.
► The cultural demand is shaped by the social mobility and urbanization.
► The offer depends upon micro-entrepreneurship and economic elites’ symbolic strategies.
► Urban cultural policies integrated cultural producers to city competitive strategies.