Creative city policies have been critically assessed at length. Nevertheless, the bottom-up initiatives that go beyond and challenge the meaning and uses of creativity that underpin creative city policies, have received less attention. Thus, the aim of this paper is to study the nature of local Socially Innovative Initiatives (Moulaert; MacCallum; Mehmood & Hamdouch, 2013) developed in the socio-cultural field and their capacity to counterbalance the tendency towards a market rationality in urban cultural affairs. We examine this problem through a significant case study: the community-managed socio-cultural centre Can Batllo opened in 2011 in an old industrial neighbourhood of Barcelona. By analysing this case we propose to explore how and to what extent Socially Innovative Initiatives offer alternatives to creative city policies focusing on the production of socio-cultural services and innovation in governance and decision-making processes. We have collected data using qualitative methods that include observation, in-depth interviews and the study of documentary sources.