ABSTRACT
This chapter shows the importance of the urban cultural model in center and peripheral cities, at first as a unifying structure that encapsulated Enlightenment ideas of benefit (profit?) and cultural and social control. Madrid, the cultural and political center, spread the positive influence of the Enlightenment to peripheral cities of the Spanish Empire, but at the same time this relationship of the center to the periphery also attempted to control society and culture and was better for monitoring the far-reaches of the kingdom. Models of urban culture and citizenry were exported to other cities as a framework that served to unify behavior and values, and in this way to control and authorize intellectual production and to standardize territorial relationships.
