ABSTRACT
The so-called “governments of change” of Ahora Madrid and Barcelona en Comú have recently reframed cultural policies. Both coalitions were led by Podemos, a left-wing party born in 2014 and initially linked to the “indignados” movement. In this spirit, these administrations boosted a cultural program explicitly aimed at overcoming what was framed as perverse effects of the entrepreneurial approach to cultural policies, including gentrification or the thematization of urban heritage (Pratt 2011).
Along these lines, both cultural policy programs were characterized by significant contrasts concerning the creative city project, such as the non-construction of new big cultural facilities and the non-organization of new global cultural events (Barbieri, 2018; Rius-Ulldemolins and Gisbert 2018). However, these policies have also shown different limitations when it comes to achieving their social participation and self-management goals (Zamorano 2018).
In this context, some questions arise: Do these cultural policies represent a new model of action in the field? Which would be the distinctive contributions and innovations of this model in comparison to historical communitarian models of cultural policy? This chapter addresses these issues by providing an in-depth documentary analysis of Madrid and Barcelona's cultural policies between 2015 and 2019. In this way, the chapter seeks to delineate the theoretical boundaries between the creative and new redistributive approaches to cultural policies.
