Cultural Reactives

Cultural Reactives provides a model for structured cultural hiring through municipal spending. The aim is to support artistic creation and production rather than focusing on the exhibition phase alone, boosting the city’s cultural network and promoting digital tools. 

The project’s initial creation was prompted by COVID. The crisis highlighted the cultural sector’s vulnerability through its lack of alternatives to physical visits and participatory events, as well as inconsistencies in hiring. After the pandemic, Cultural Reactives continued as a positive practice with a focus on digitalisation and remote cultural offers, incentivising culture consumption based on heritage, traditions and identity in peri-urban areas to unburden the city centre and allow for new business models.  

Cultural Reactives is a key part of an integral strategy and model for culture. The model is groundbreaking as it redefines roles, public spaces, the way local culture is produced and consumed, and citizen participation, including non-traditional culture consumers. The 2021 approach improves governance, funding and knowledge, while generating employment and encouraging local culture consumption, as opposed to global mass culture consumption (e.g. streaming platforms), reinforcing citizen identity and wellbeing. 

When they launched Cultural Reactives, Murcia knew of no other city that had overhauled their entire cultural model as a result of the pandemic. New tools had been widely applied, but merely as patches to improve existing models, such as digitalisation or remote culture.  

This new cultural model is innovative primarily in the transparency of its processes of artistic selection, contracting and procurement, running everything through open calls at local, national and international levels. Also, Murcia City Council’s main objective was to generate a cultural model that was no longer based on the conventional, exhibition-based, approach. Instead, it favours the development of local talent by promoting production and creation, which in turn will nourish the artistic fabric of the city and enrich the local cultural offer, while also providing constant opportunities and support to artists and collectives. 

This project was based on an awareness that the city’s main cultural offer and activities were in the centre. Murcia Municipality’s 28 neigbourhoods, and 55 districts, hosted relatively few events, despite each district having a municipal cultural centre. 

Cultural Reactives assigned each beneficiary to a municipal venue, such as a museum, theatre or cultural centre, based on the needs of each project. This provided creatives space to work, and spread the cultural offer throughout all neighbourhoods. The result was to unburden the centre and revitalise all areas.  

Economically, the project provided a direct financial injection into a notably unstable sector. Social aspects were addressed in two ways: first, spreading culture across the city meant democratising culture and making it more accessible. Second, proposals that integrated social aspects and citizen participation were positively rewarded in the evaluation system.  

One of the thematic lines in the calls aimed to contract projects that encouraged artists to participate in urban landscape redefinition. This aligns with Murcia’s integral city strategy, supporting projects based on three key subjects: The river and water; Light installation projects to enhance heritage and iconic elements of the city’s southern area; Lighting projects enhancing the landscape and nature in the city, creating unique spaces and using advanced techniques to save energy and optimise efficiency. 

One particularly well-regarded aspect of this wide ranging model is its Citizen Laboratory Projects. Based on citizen participation, these research, production and entrepreneurship laboratories for neighbourhood or territorial structuring projects address challenges related to coexistence in urban environments.  

The practice also supports neighbourhood projects related to childhood in the city, street play, quality of life, loneliness, care networks, cultural diversity, the memory of the city, and any other topic that is innovative and interesting for local communities. 

Urban innovation projects related to mobility, critical urban intervention, and experimental architectural projects to improve public space, are also highly valued. This is based on the idea that local artists and creatives can directly intervene and come up with creative approaches to improve their day-to-day context. 

This project supports the city’s 2 592 professionals and companies – including cultural services, activities, commercial venues and rentals – who saw their income reduced by an average of 40% compared with what was initially budgeted for the year during the COVIC pandemic.  

It is designed to help the creative and cultural sector contribute to the local economy. This is important as artistic productions and activities, recreational activities, entertainment and other services, represent a total of 3% of the regional GDP, and in the case of Murcia, COVID-related losses are estimated at around 100 million euros. 

The model has also redefined public spaces for culture consumption, based on cultural reactivation through calls for projects. These boosted the local economy and cultural offer, enhancing local identity and wellbeing by involving citizens as traditional and potential culture consumers.  

The idea was to develop a new cultural model around three objectives: Provide opportunities and support to artists in all stages of their professional life; Bring culture closer to the public, making it part of daily life; Democratise culture through digitisation and accessibility. 

Supporting the cultural sector while reactivating cultural venues and areas should be relevant to all cities, regardless of their size or location.  

With this in mind, Murcia developed a transferability document for other cities interested in adopting their model. While retaining citizen participation, sustainability and circular economy projects as core values, various elements of the model can be amended to suit other city contexts. These include, for example, the budget and number of artists and creatives selected via open calls. Thematic programming lines can also be adapted to each city’s identity and context. In addition, programming themes can be tailored to suit local staff expertise, optimise resources and enrich learning for beneficiaries.  

As contracted projects would eventually take place within the city’s regular cultural programme, the practice involves redirecting existing funds. Knowledge of the local cultural context and stakeholders is recommended to tailor actions to local needs.   

In terms of supporting national objectives, this model is in accordance with the Local Government System and legislative actions of the Spanish Government via RDL 17/2020 May 5th, which approved measures to guarantee survival of cultural structures/workers as a consequence of COVID. 

Murcia has already shared its model – and transferability document – with fellow members of the Culture and Cultural Heritage Partnership of the Urban Agenda for the EU 2030. Having been Leader City for work revolving around this new cultural model, Murcia now wishes to support its implementation in other interested European cities.  

As Lead or partner of a network Murcia, would hope to share its first-hand experience, and build a network of cities to share local talent, providing cultural expansion and internationalisation to benefit industry stakeholders.