Community Culture to Reduce Inequality in Cultural Participation? Potentialities and Pitfalls of Barcelona Civic Centers Network

Barcelona’s cultural policy is recognized for its entrepreneurial model based on large events and culture-based urban regeneration, but less well known is its dimension of innovative community culture substantiated in the network of community centers, called centers cívics (civic centers). Arising from associationism and cultural decentralization, these represent one of the strengths of local government grassroots cultural action and its commitment to participation and the reduction of urban social inequalities. However, its management is not based on citizen participation in a broad and radical sense, but rather very limited and managed by private companies in an almost oligopolistic regime. Thus, the attempts to reshape community culture on cultural rights perspective by the Barcelona City Council in the hands of Barcelona en Comú-leftist party issued from indignados movement have not transformed this characteristic but have split community culture into actions of an activist nature and have left the civic center model originated during previous terms practically intact. A model that, although it generates a high number of cultural activities and courses, has a limited capacity to reduce cultural inequalities.