Cultural commons as a key for bottom-linked policies. An exploration of the support for public and community partnerships in Barcelona.

Abstract

This article aims to heighten our understanding of community managed cultural facilities, considering that these may be key for the future of cities. The research includes observant participation, thematic analysis of group debates and in-depth interviews with activists and professionals in the domain of community action in Barcelona. I document the construction of active collaboration networks of a wide variety of organizations fostering cultural commons in Barcelona, and highlight the efforts they have made to develop performance assessment tools. The conclusions consider the issue of mutual understanding between neighborhood movements, community action professionals, and the social economy sector. I underline how public-community partnerships can use networking activities to develop a constructive and critical approach to public service delivery and enhance collective learning about economic democratization. Vital importance is given to institutionalization of regulatory tools and the indicators needed to assess the value added by these partnerships.

Experiences of local development through the management of cultural spaces (Klein and Tremblay, 2020) drive us to question the role of self-organized community actors in fostering the democratization of everyday life. Actual cases of community empowerment and, specifically, the way it develops in those environments known as the urban commons and the cultural commons, have attracted interest from both academia and the policy domain around the globe (Antonucci 2020; Feinberg, Ghorbani, and Herder 2020, 2021; Giannini and Pirone 2019; Kay and Wood 2020; Petrescu et al. 2020; Shah and Garg 2017; Steiner, McMillan, and Hill O’Connor 2022; Williams 2018). In Barcelona, over the last decade, bookended by the effects of the Great Recession and the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, there has been growing recognition for the socially innovative potential of those spaces and cultural projects set up by communitarian platforms involving committed local residents as the managers of cultural practices; at the same time, these initiatives have also gained prestige among the general public.

As a particular manifestation of spaces of hope (Harvey 2000), community-led cultural centers are one specific subtype in the vast domain of urban commons where struggles are taking place to regain citizenship governance over water, food supply, energy distribution, housing or the public sphere, among others. As initiatives promoting cultural emancipation, collective learning and autonomous creation, these centers react against austerity policies and social vulnerability. Despite the wide diversity in their focal points, in their organizational formulas and in their scales of action, they coincide in that they act upon urban economies and social relationships to push for a general move toward democratization and decommodification. Thus, in addition to promoting cultural activities, many of these centers undertake initiatives that address a large number of current societal challenges. These are initiatives that envision the construction of other imaginaries of possibility.

In Barcelona, the development of different initiatives into a political movement, with its own particular platform of associations called Xarxa d’Espais Comunitaris (Network of Communitarian Spaces), is proof of the existence of a ‘community-management’ model for cultural facilities. The network includes initiatives with a wide variety of organizational forms, from okupa (squatters) social centers to officially recognized platforms that run public facilities under agreements with public administrations.

… the forms of community-management are diverse (self-management of squatted or private spaces, management of municipal facilities and resources, cooperatives in rented premises, etc.) and are not based on a single model of work but are defined in a variety of ways that have to do with values, objectives and organizational models, in terms of the management of collective needs and their relationship with the shared resources of a given territory (Balanç Comunitari 2017-2020, Xarxa d’Espais Comunitaris).

In this article, I support the idea that understanding this type of management of cultural facilities may be vital in exposing how citizens can use specific demands, collective action and organizational proposals to gain the attention of policy makers and thereby claim their right to the city (Bailey and Marcucci 2013; Harvey 2014; Iveson 2013; Kemp, Lebuhn, and Rattner 2015; Novy and Colomb 2013). In this regard, this type of research includes an examination of bottom-linked initiatives as sites seeking complex equilibriums between institutionalization, community development and collective autonomy, and therefore it is essential for increasing knowledge on social innovation initiatives at the local level (Eizaguirre et al., 2012; Oosterlynck et al. 2013; Pradel, Eizaguirre, and García 2013). As for governance nodes for transforming cities and up-scaling their livability, the management of specific cultural facilities offers the opportunity to observe the limits and challenges of previous community development models that were influenced by neoliberal counter-reforms. The performance of these facilities as places where social struggles interact and where contributive democracy is put into practice is at the core of this research. But it also highlights the existence of other (or alternative) communitarian metrics than those related to enhancing individuals' social capital. With these aims, this study focuses on cultural management practices at a level close to citizens, involving them as creators and managers of cultural governance ecosystems, while rejecting the notion that their facilities are merely places for cultural consumption. At the same time, I give special attention to the relationship between these cultural environments and the realm of social economy, particularly the interactions between communitarian-led cultural management practices and forms of social economy.