Gallery Districts of Barcelona: The Strategic Play of Art Dealers

This article focuses on Barcelona's art market to explore the underlying factors behind the clustering of art dealers in several of the city's districts. Drawing upon quantitative and qualitative data, the article analyzes how such clustering reveals a strategic action in the sense attributed to it by Crozier and Friedberg (1981 Crozier, Michel and Friedberg, Erhard. 1981. L’acteur et le système, Paris: Éditions du Seuil.  [Google Scholar]). Gallery districts are not a reflection of structural factors (economic, urban development-related, or social) but are the result of a combination of strategic choices—either individual or collective—which explain the permanence of leading gallery districts or the emergence of new ones.