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

Perception of the filmed urban space: an analysis of the imaginaries of Madrid constructed through series and social networks

Concurrent with the expansion of visual culture, film tourism has experienced a significant boost in recent decades, and the motivation to visit places where series made for television or similar platforms were filmed has been added to this modality. In this context, and taking the city of Madrid as a reference, this work proposes a line of research wherein analysis of the relationships between geographical and audiovisual spaces through cultural and tourist use unites the representation of both, by way of social networks (specifically, Twitter). As regards methodology, an ‘application programming interface’ has been designed which permits the download of a sample of tweets useful for both quantitative and qualitative analysis. The main results indicate the impacts that fiction series have had on recognition of the city (or certain of its elements) as well as relationships established between the narrative and geographical spaces when the latter are referenced via on-site activities. Theoretically, this research focuses on the relationship between real geographies, imagined geographies, and simulacra, as well as their involvement in the commodification of space and in the construction of vicarious geographical experiences