LAUSR

Abstract This article investigates the territorial conditions associated with the existence of creative activity clusters in extra-metropolitan areas. This issue is timely because the demographic, social and economic stagnation that continues to affect many of these areas requires recognition of the innovative dynamics that could alleviate it. We worked in a study zone composed of 2498 Spanish municipalities of between 1000 and 50,000 inhabitants distributed throughout the country. We began by identifying 514 municipalities with relative concentrations, or clusters, of creative activities. Next, we evaluated which factors explain the formation of the clusters identified: traditional factors related to markets and government policies—hard factors—or new factors related to, inter alia, amenities, tolerance, and the local climate—soft factors. To do this, we applied an econometric analysis that both manages employment and business data as exogenous variables and controls whether the demographic size and creative profile of the clusters influences the intensity of the clusterisation. The models obtained match the prediction only partially because they attribute the majority of the explanatory power to some hard-type factors but do not confirm the expectations raised by the soft factors. As a possible explanation we do not disregard the possibility that the literature has overvalued the benefit that extra-metropolitan or rural areas can extract from their specific advantages in the realm of “soft” factors. We believe that our study offers a valuable perspective on how creative activities are inserted into extra-metropolitan economies, and in this way, we contribute to a relevant social debate about rural development in both national and international spheres.