Cities and neighbourhoods are different according to their cultural market and cultural industries, their opportunities for cultural consumption, or the lifestyles they permit to express or enjoy living or visiting them. Places have a cultural character and dynamics that made them recognizable, and that influence in their vitality and development. How to know and compare the cultural character and dynamic of places?
This project develop a conceptual framework in order to produce ‘descriptive inferences’ about the character of culture in cities according to the number and nature of their cultural amenities. Three main approaches are developed: districts of cultural industries, strategies of territorial development, and cultural scenes. Each approach is defined by several dimensions, and they are specified according to several sub-dimensions. These sub-dimensions combine in different patterns in different places to conform different types of districts of cultural industries, strategies of local development or cultural scenes (the entertainment city, the creative city, the communitarian, the cultural, the cosmopolitan or the city oriented to visitors).
An operative framework is developed to analyze comparatively the cultural dimensions of places, as well as, their cultural districts, strategies and scenes. We have collected the number cultural amenities in Spanish cities and neighbourhood for around 100 different types. These data make possible to know the cultural character of a city and their neighbourhoods, to compare among different cities, to know the localization of different cultural districts or scenes, their historical change, as well as their impact on urban development or inequalities.
Basic conceptual and empirical advances are presented as working papers, conference presentatio "‘How is my city?’ " site.