Theorizing Culture in the Creative City

Abstract

This chapter discusses the complexities in the relation of power, culture, and the citizen in the transition from social democracy to neoliberalism in Barcelona, and provides the theoretical framework to argue the centrality of creative cities to frame and condition discourses – particularly cultural ones – on citizenship. As Barcelona made this transition, the changes in municipal priorities were discursively solved for the citizen within the realm of cultural policies. These are indispensable to understanding how the provision of culture for the citizen is devised, on what ideas of culture and of the citizen that it addresses it is based, and how and for what reasons these ideas are transformed through time. Building the city for the socio-democratic municipality was very importantly a business of affecting social cohesion and coexistence, and of encouraging and instilling codes and values capable of generating meaning for citizens through cultural management. In this sense, culture was a tool of local government that privileged and attempted to shape specific forms of being a Barcelonian by way of tapping into and stereotyping something akin to a local structure of feeling. After the Olympic Games, the resulting creative city was to turn its own identity into a city brand, where local residents were given the task of exhibiting and incarnating the kind of authenticity expected of them and, in so doing, of bringing the brand to life. We will call this condition the biopolitics of urban branding. For the city brand, all local residents are imagined and desired to be cultural mediators capable of producing cultural labor for the visitor.