The Alhondiga project: glocalising culture for the community

Abstract

Positioned as a local, community alternative to the Guggenheim Museum, the Alhondiga cultural centre is one of the many projects of urban regeneration through culture in the city of Bilbao, Northern Spain. It is a multipurpose leisure and arts centre extending over 43,000 square meters, built in the early XXth century as a wine warehouse and redesigned recently by Philip Starck. While the Guggenheim Museum has maintained its international outlook and connotations, oriented towards cultural tourism and being filled primarily by tourists visiting the city, the Alhondiga project is a usable, open space used primarily by the local community, offering an experience that straddles the local and the global, the traditional and the contemporary, the everyday and the cutting edge achieved through a mix of material space design and cultural programming. The presentation will analyse how elements of material and immaterial culture blend in order to foster education, leisure and citizenship agendas in a community which in the past was culturally inward looking. It will evaluate the contrasting understandings of culture and its consumers that emerge from the venue and its programme and the attempt to combine the local and the global both in content and in terms of audience appeal and engagement. It will do so through a quantitative and qualitative analysis of the different activities and events, both regular and occasional, over a period of two years, and what they reveal about how community inclusivity and engagement are targeted through cultural programming.