Citation: Zemite, I.; Kunda, I.; Judrupa, I. The Role of the Cultural and Creative Industries in Sustainable Development of Small Cities in Latvia. Sustainability 2022, 14, 9009. https://doi.org/10.3390/ su14159009 Received: 19 June 2022 Accepted: 18 July 2022 Published: 22 July 2022 Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affil- iations. Copyright: © 2022 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ 4.0/). sustainability Article The Role of the Cultural and Creative Industries in Sustainable Development of Small Cities in Latvia Ieva Zemite 1, * , Ilona Kunda 1 and Ilze Judrupa 2 1 Department of Sociology and Management, Latvian Academy of Culture, Ludzas 24, LV-1003 Riga, Latvia; ilona.kunda@lka.edu.lv 2 Department of Territorial Development Management and Urban Economics, Riga Technical University, Kalnciema street 6, LV-1048 Riga, Latvia; ilze.judrupa@rtu.lv * Correspondence: ieva.zemite@lka.edu.lv; Tel.: +371-2028-6296 Abstract: While sustainability is a much-researched issue, little has been written about the role of cultural and creative industries (CCIs) in implementing sustainable development, specifically in small cities. The authors pose the following questions: What is the interrelation between CCI practices and the four pillars of sustainability (economic, environmental, cultural, and social) in small cities? What are the practices that CCIs use, and which they perceive as contributions to sustainable development? The authors use a single case study strategy, methods including a theoretical study, a quantitative pilot survey, a focus group discussion, semi-structured interviews, and content analysis. Overall, the article indicates that there is a varied and diverse repertoire of small- and large-scale practices carried out by CCIs in small cities in Latvia, and thus contributes to the existing scholarly literature by “teasing out” those practices. The study indicates that each of the practices may contribute to two or more sustainability pillars, thus they are analyzed in pairs to find out what traits are reflected in these practices. Notably, CCI entrepreneurs believe that sustainable development is important and that they contribute to it. Keywords: sustainability; small cities; cultural and creative industries; mixed methods 1. Introduction 1.1. Background, Research Question, and Purposes Cultural and creative industries (CCIs) are an important and expanding part of local economies; they are known to engage in innovation and risk taking [1,2], and thus in exploration of new avenues for development. Moreover, CCIs are present and active not only in metropolitan areas, but also in small- and medium-sized cities that have their own distinctive traits and sustainability challenges. While entrepreneurs are seen as a panacea for sustainability challenges, Jeremy Hall and colleagues justly note that, “despite the promise entrepreneurship holds for fostering sustainable development, there remains considerable uncertainty regarding the nature of entrepreneurship’s role in the area, and the academic discourse on sustainable development within the mainstream entrepreneurship literature has to date been sparse” [3], p. 439. Thus, the authors consider that it is worth examining the question of if and how CCIs could contribute to urban sustainable development, specifically in the context of small cities. Small cities are distinctive on a number of fronts [4–10], and enhancing the existing small city resources while using them for growth and change is an issue of sustainable development. Typical sustainability challenges reside in four sustainability pillar-related spheres [4,7,10,11]. Do CCIs act as typical businesses, maximizing profit only, or do they care for sustainability in their practices? CCIs have been frequently seen as a metropolitan phenomenon; however, in recent years, this “predominantly stereotyping approach” has been changing [12]. There is an increasing trend for exploring CCI traits in the regions/rural areas [1,2,5,13–16]. Sustainability 2022, 14, 9009. https://doi.org/10.3390/su14159009 https://www.mdpi.com/journal/sustainability