From Calatrava to the ‘Concha Piquer’ effect: policy change, unintended impacts of the ‘creative city’, and factors leading to cultural management inertia in València

Abstract

In several cases the ‘Calatrava effect’, a deformation of the model of the ‘creative city’, has failed and the resulting effects have been perverse. In 2015, amid the collapse of this urban, cultural and socially segregating and elitist model, new local governments emerged that proposed a radical U-turn in terms of cultural and urban policy. However, in València, external factors (such as the conditioning resulting from long years of elitist and clientelist cultural policies) and internal factors (such as internal political competition between parties) have generated the ‘Concha Piquer effect’: the paralysis of democratising cultural planning and the permanence of an elitist instrumentalisation of culture. Some factors can be found in other European contexts that could help explain the relative continuity of the creative-city planning model in València, despite its challenges and limitations to democratisation and social participation in cultural policy.