Cultural and creative sectors at a crossroad: from a mainstream process towards an active engagement

The COVID-19 pandemic has led to a current global health crisis with dreadful repercussions all over the world. A global economic recession is anticipated, with strong impacts in all economic and social sectors, including the cultural sector. Although all sub sectors will be impacted (heritage sites, theatres, museums, operas, art galleries), the cultural built heritage is particularly at stake, as it relies on multiple stakeholders through a wide range of heritage-related activities (tourism, recreation, housing, real estate, construction, craftsmanship, etc.). Sites management and heritage conservation have not only been vulnerable to strong economic and social disruptions, like most of other cultural fields, but have been greatly challenged because heritage values and the paradigm of conservation (50 years after adoption of the UNESCO convention) are being themselves revisited in the perspective of the Sustainable Development Goals. The paper aims also to consider cultural heritage as part of the Cultural and Creative Sectors (CCS) and how creativity and innovation contribute to post-COVID recoveries through Schumpeter-related creative destruction process. The current crisis might be perceived in a perspective of long wave theory of innovations and economic growth. The economic history is filled with many examples of such transition period when inventions, innovations, and growth reactivate the economic development in an upward long-term trend. In such framework, crisis can trigger innovation and creativity and can be understood as opportunity to increase the CCS resilience and sustainability, as well as harness the universality and the power of creativity. Finally, the paper aims to describe implications of such situation by providing to the CCS ways to learn and experience cultural entrepreneurship, resilient strategies, new sustainable and circular business models applied to the cultural heritage sector and its conservation.