The limits to shaping diversity as public culture: Permanent festivities in Barcelona

• Diversity is already a policy practice that defines Barcelona’s public culture.
• Barcelona is at the very initial stage of connecting diversity with cultural policy.
• Barcelona’s permanent festivities shows there are some limits.
• Two departments working separately: the cultural and the immigration departments.
• The challenge is how to create institutional bridges between elitist/social focuses.
• There is no collaboration between immigrant communities and cultural institutions.

In spite of the existence of an extensive debate on cultural policies on the one hand, and on local diversity policies on the other hand, there are still few studies dealing directly with this nexus. This emerging research trend will be discussed in the context of Barcelona and through the analysis of a specific cultural policy field: the planning of permanent festivities.After overviewing its migration history and after presenting the theoretical framework and methodology, this article frames Barcelona’s general cultural policy and intercultural policy patterns, arguing that the Catalan capital is really at a very initial stage of connecting diversity with cultural policy. After that, I will defend the argument that, in spite of recognising diversity, the analysis of Barcelona’s permanent festivities shows that there are also some limits to the development of this connection, due primarily to a lack of democratization of culture. Interviews and a discussion group confirm this empirical diagnosis. The argument I want to put forward is that this lack of participation of immigrants in cultural planning and diversity promotion is probably due to the fact that the two departments in the city represent, indeed, two approaches toward the question of how to promote the nexus between culture and diversity, and thus they are still working separately. The department of culture still has an elitist focus, centred on a culture of excellence, while the immigration department has a more social focus on cultural diversity.