A local and territorial approach to the operation of the culture economy in medium and small cities: case study of the Spanish cities of Mérida and Cuenca

The chief objective of this research is to analyze the weight that several factors linked to territory and/or urban society (such as proximity, heritage, image, or infrastructures) exert in the development and operation of cultural clusters in small and medium-sized cities. To this end, a local territorial approach combining quantitative and qualitative methods has been undertaken and applied to the Spanish c ities of Mérida and Cuenca. The results from this case study show that many parameters observed in the international bibliography that form part of the idiosyncrasy of medium and small cities (‘closeness’, possibility of face-to -face contact, quality of life, low production costs) are considered by selected interviewees as essential to understanding the operation of their organizations and the urban cultural economic cluster as a whole. In general, these parameters appear in the international bibliography as contributing to the development of the cultural economy, but their importance in medium and small cities had been tested only rarely