Contents lists available at ScienceDirect City, Culture and Society journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/ccs From creative city to generative governance of the cultural policy system?: The case of Barcelona's candidature as UNESCO City of Literature Maria Patricio Mulero a , Joaquim Rius-Ulldemolins b,* a Department of Sociological Theory, University of Barcelona, Spain b Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology, University of Valencia, Spain ARTICLE INFO Keywords: Cultural policy Urban culture Creative city Literature field UNESCO ABSTRACT Since the 1980s, cultural policies have been increasingly oriented to promoting cities. However, under the paradigm of the creative city, this approach had presented several dilemmas and contradictions. Since then, there have been various attempts to tackle such issues through a more systematic approach to cultural policy — what we identify as cultural governance oriented to cultural generation. Barcelona is a paradigmatic case illustrating this trend. The city's candidature as UNESCO City of Literature in 2015 reveals an attempt to combine international promotion, development of local cultural industries, citizen cultural engagement. Moreover, this project emerges as an attempt to capitalize on the local literary heritage and on the image of local literature as a sign of identity. Finally, we highlight some limits and contradictions arising from the approach adopted by Barcelona. 1. Cultural policy in the entrepreneurial city The relationship between local development models and cultural policy is one of the key points of discussion on the role played by culture in cities such as Glasgow (García, 2004a,b), Liverpool (Connolly, 2011), Bilbao (González, 2011) and Barcelona (Rius- Ulldemolins, Hernàndez, and Torres 2016, Rius- Ulldemolins & Sánchez, 2015). These cases have been considered a model for other towns wishing to project themselves as a global cities (Scott, 2008; Williams & Currid-Halkett, 2011) or creative cities (Comunian, 2011; Krätke, 2011). The growing importance of cultural policy and instrumentalizations in drawing up local policies has been highlighted in these analyses (Belfiore & Bennett, 2008; Gray, 2007). This instrumentalization consists of addressing the objectives of other domains of public policies, such as economic and urban development - and to a lesser extent social cohesion - based on cultural policies. This policy attachment -in terms of Clive Gray (2002)- allows the cultural sector to capture more public resources in certain cities but at the same time has led the local cultural sector to have less control of its objectives, organization and strategy (Rius-Ulldemolins et al., 2016). The evolution of the post-industrial society has led to a new relationship between economy and culture, with the latter increasingly shaping the former in Western societies (Mommaas, 2004; Pratt, 2008). The breakdown of the Fordist system of industrial organization and the crisis of the Welfare State and its Keynesian mode of regulation has led to a profound reorganization of the political system and the production system. In the context of these changes the local level takes on a renewed prominence, with governments gaining weight and assuming a new role. Thus, local governments have gone from being passive implementers of central and regional policies to being active promoters of local development (Blanco, 2009). Since the dawning of the 21st Century, they have played the most important role in cultural policy developments (Menger, 2010). The so-called entrepreneurial turn (Harvey, 1989) of local policies that focuses on urban revitalization based on large architectural projects and spectacular events, development of services and new industries, has a major cultural element, which often takes the form of creating artistic neighborhoods or clusters of cultural industries (Rius-Ulldemolins, 2014b,d; Scott, 2000, 2010; Zarlenga, Rius- Ulldemolins, and Rodríguez Morató 2013). Thus, it states that cultural strategies are key to the survival of cities (Zukin, 1995: 271). Among these cultural strategies catalyzing urban development is the generation of mega-events (García, 2004a,b; Rius-Ulldemolins et al., 2016) and construction of flagship museums (Bianchini, 1993, pp. 1–19; Paül, 2014; Rius-Ulldemolins, 2016) or European City of Culture nominations (Balsas, 2004; Mooney, 2004) or most recently the UNESCO Creative Cities. From these strategies, a new cultural policy has been drawn up, as the cases of Liverpool and Barcelona show. This policy aims to combine urban change, economic development and social transforma- tion (Connolly, 2011; Rius-Ulldemolins, 2014b, d). This model is part of http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ccs.2017.05.001 Received 26 August 2016; Received in revised form 21 January 2017; Accepted 2 May 2017 * Corresponding author. E-mail addresses: mariapatriciomulero@gmail.com (M. Patricio Mulero), joaquim.rius@uv.es (J. Rius-Ulldemolins). City, Culture and Society 10 (2017) 1–10 Available online 09 May 2017 1877-9166/ © 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. MARK