Socio-economic cohesion has been a foundational overarching objective of the European Union. The European Union’s recent enlargement, not to mention the worldwide economic downturn, persisting asymmetries of globalization and deindustrialization have deepened existing cleavages and accentuated persisting effects of unbalanced development. The mainstreaming of the sustainability concept and the ascendance of creativity and innovation as regional development tools have caused municipalities and regions to explore ‘soft’ strategies aimed at fostering culture and creativity in order to revive their image and their economies. A shift in the thinking about cohesion policy after the publication of the Fifth Cohesion Report in November 2010 has signalled the need for European municipalities and regions to focus on bottom-up strategies so as to compliment top-down redistributional arrangements as paths towards regional development. This article focuses on the concept of territorial cohesion as spatial justice and its implications for the sparsely populated Swedish northern periphery. The aim of this study was to investigate the value of cultural industries (CIs) as a regional policy tool in the periphery in the context of justice, sustainability and the three dimensions of territorial cohesion: territorial identity, territorial efficiency and territorial quality. Findings suggest that viewing CIs as tools towards regional development in the periphery follows the tenets of (spatial) justice, sustainability and the dimensions of territorial cohesion.