CULTURA VIVA is an open programme of research and project development aimed at recognising and promoting participation, circulation and cultural co-production spaces in Barcelona. It is a comprehensive programme coordinated by Institut de Cultura de Barcelona in collaboration with other departments of the Barcelona City Council, alongside social and cultural projects and entities from the city.

CULTURA VIVA works with the relationship between communities, institutions and independent spaces of culture through the recognition and strengthening of a decentralised, participatory and network-based cultural production.

CULTURA VIVA is linked to the Barcelona Culture Council as a platform from which to carry out research alongside the organised local fabric in order to open up processes for debate and give visibility to the social and economic innovations of the culture.

Both the projects and the research, which feed from and seek to strengthen various open processes from the citizenship, revolve around

5 cross-disciplinary themes

COMMUNITY MANAGEMENT

Periods of crisis are not to “invent” community management, but for public institutions to guarantee its existence and sustainability. We want to understand community goods, not as a reality opposed to public property, but as processes that are alive in the territory and lead to new ways of performing and functioning as a public institution.

CULTURAL ECONOMIES

Cultural innovations are not exclusively based on generating an alternative economic model, but are consolidated around a set of practices that force us to experiment and set up new social and institutional strategies for exploiting culture through committed models and methods of exploitation that involve the communities that generate them. From digital commons to forms of social and cooperative economy, we need to face the challenges we encounter in order to recognise and broaden these socioeconomic innovation processes.

DEMOCRACY

Democratic radicality, transparency, values and ethical principles as part of the good governance of culture as a framework for stimulating social dynamics. This is also a tool for guaranteeing innovation in the development processes of public policies.

CITIZEN INNOVATION

A culture composed not of objects and closed experiences, but of dynamic processes for building and cooperation that is open to a wide array of contributions. A way of understanding culture as a laboratory for society in which we can test and prototype responses to society’s systemic crises.