5. Participatory Centers and Urban Commons in Zaragoza's Cultural Policy Centres

Abstract

The creation of neighbourhood relationships has become an area taken on by municipal cultural politics in the following two ways: On the one hand, through a strategy of collaboration with the new self-administered social centres, which have started to reappear in the cities, and, on the other hand, through the creation of different cultural centres and/or grassroot enterprises organized around the promotion of entrepreneurship and citizen participation. As a consequence of this, a variety of centres have started to spread, in which two logics, contradicting each other, are mixed: The logics of public administration and the logics of the commons in the social centres. The present paper expounds the theory underlying the urban commons and the new public cultural politics in order to show the different ways in which the two relate to each other in the main social and cultural centres in Zaragoza.