The case of the community-managed facility Casa Orlandai (Sarrià – Sant Gervasi)

Authors: Dra. Victoria Sánchez Belando y Dra. Marina Pera

The Civic Centre Casa Orlandai, located in the Sarrià–Sant Gervasi district, is a local socio-cultural facility managed under a Common-Public Partnership (CPP) model, officially recognized by the local administration under the framework of a Civic Management Agreement. Casa Orlandai is a municipally owned facility that has been entrusted to the Cultural Association Casa Orlandai (ACCO), which is responsible for its management. The centre, which forms part of the citywide network of 52 civic centres, was inaugurated in 2007 as the result of grassroots mobilization by residents and organisations from the Sarrià neighbourhood, who called for the recovery of a historic building from the perspective of the area’s social and cultural history. Since then, the managing association—born out of that collective initiative—has developed a community-based project with the participation of local residents and financial support from the municipality.

Within the DEPART project, the case of Casa Orlandai is significant from several perspectives for analysing urban cultural participation, the inequalities that affect it, and the role of equity policies in shaping and developing local cultural action. First, this case helps reveal the relationship between cultural participation, collective memory, and the social appropriation of socio-cultural infrastructure by studying an experience that is historically and territorially rooted—one that represents, both materially and symbolically, part of the collective memory of the Catalan community movement and pedagogical renewal efforts.

Moreover, the emergence and development of the Casa Orlandai project in the district with the highest per capita income in the city (182.8 out of 100), and with a foreign population largely from EU countries, makes it a contrasting case compared to other neighbourhoods. It enables us to observe the role that factors such as national origin in the European context and gender play in terms of cultural participation and involvement in the management of a community-based model.

Through Casa Orlandai, our research project aims to observe the strategies such initiatives implement to foster equity in cultural participation, taking into account the role of territory (the neighbourhood’s socio-economic and cultural context), origin (migration), and the gender of participants. By examining the Casa Orlandai case within the broader set of project cases, we hope to identify the spaces, people, and communities involved in promoting equity in cultural participation, how they are involved, and what progress or limitations exist in this regard.