How Barcelona is pioneering new cultural policy by embedding cultural rights
Project: producing a cultural rights strategy
The Purpose
To produce a plan which will open the way to formal recognition of cultural rights at an international level.
The Challenge
The cultural sector in Barcelona has experienced structural instability. Over the last few years, challenging financial and labour conditions have been amplified by the COVID-19 pandemic. This has been felt hardest by those operating outside of established or large-scale institutions, including grassroots culture, individual artists, and freelancers.
The Plan for Cultural Rights focuses on access, cultural practices, innovation, democratic governance, the recognition of diversity, creativity, cultural production and community engagement.
The Solution
The Plan for Cultural Rights aims to address this by supporting those within the cultural sector, while also promoting the right to produce and access culture freely across the city.
Launched in April 2021 by Barcelona City Council, the Plan for Cultural Rights incorporates 9 measures:
- Culture in neighbourhoods and community action: cultural practices and new centralities.
- Grassroots culture and cultural sectors: cultural creation, experimentation, research and production.
- Popular culture: popular and traditional practices as activities for participation and social cohesion.
- Culture and education: cultural participation and lifelong artistic education and practice.
- Feminist culture: diverse and equitable culture.
- Culture and public spaces: access to, and participation in, culture in the street.
- Culture and digital rights: instruments and policies for access to knowledge, transparency and digital innovation.
- City museums: innovation, education and the right to participate in Barcelona’s cultural heritage.
- Barcelona Libraries (2030 Master Plan): the right to read, to access information and knowledge, and to foster new creative practices.
The Impact
The program was launched in November 2021. Barcelona City Council seeks to support artistic and cultural experimentation and provide new tools for professional cultural production. The program also uses the network of Art Factories to deliver activities that can reach creative producers and audiences across the city. The Art Factories are a network of 11 repurposed industrial buildings in peripheral neighbourhoods.
The measure includes a range of policies and programmes, designed to support all the people and organisations that carry out creative and cultural activity in the City: from the creation of a new artistic residency plan to the development of the programme for the 2024 Manifesta Art Biennial, which will be hosted by Barcelona.
Innovations also include the introduction of REC Cultural (Citizen’s Economic Resource), a cultural currency that supports participation in the cultural activities of the city. Working through a mobile app, each resident will be able to upload the amount of Euros they want to spend; Barcelona’s Institute of Culture will then subsidise it by up to 50%, thus ensuring that residents have greater access to culture.
It is a pioneering approach to designing a cultural policy based on cultural rights. It focuses on access, cultural practices, innovation, democratic governance, the recognition of diversity, creativity, cultural production and community engagement.
Source: World Cities Culture Report 2022
Images Courtesy @ City of Barcelona
