Mutations of Barcelona’s cultural policy model: Political change, local planning and political instrumentalization of culture in Barcelona

Abstract

Barcelona has been a poster child for the entrepreneurial turn in cultural policy, with an approach based on seizing opportunities for promoting the city in the global arena. This model has been successful in terms of urban branding but has driven growing urban inequalities that have drawn criticism from social and academic spheres. Hence, after the 2008 crisis and the ensuing public budget cuts, growing opposition to the model emerged. Criticism of the city’s cultural model crystallized in the leftist, activist candidacy of Barcelona en Comú, a new party that took power in 2015. Since then, pro-commons discourses on cultural policy have emerged that criticize the past model. The new pro-commons approach proposes a radical turn advocating policy as a tool for cultural democratization. Yet this left-wing populist orientation has encountered great hurdles to changing the Barcelona Cultural Policy model (which is based on artistic institutions, creative factories and the instrumentalization of culture for urban branding). Indeed, analysis of the structural cultural expenses of the city council and the innovative local Cultural Rights Plan paradoxically reveals a continuation of the idea of the creative, entrepreneurial city, focusing once again on developing cultural facilities and fostering new urban and cultural clustering. Thus, rather than a radical change in cultural policy, we see great continuities with the previous Creative City model.