In the block of discord, a century ago three modernist houses—Casa Batlló, Casa Amatller, and Casa Lleó i Morera—competed for prominence and the taste of the bourgeoisie of the time. Today, it continues to be a space of debate and tensions, but for very different reasons: endless queues of visitors as a result of mass tourism that chokes the city, neighbors and families who must leave the neighborhood, expelled by rising rental prices, and English imposing itself on every corner and in every daily interaction, in a city where Catalan is losing presence.
With this background image, we converse with the philologist and writer Jordi Amat (Barcelona, 1978), who has just published Les batalles de Barcelona: Imaginaris culturals d'una ciutat en disputa (1975-2025), an essay that reviews the imaginaries that have defined the city in these last 50 years. Because Barcelona is not just a physical space, but a cumulus of stories that define it and of the cultural products that project it to the world.
And, currently, a narrative of discomfort is being built in the city. "I live in Barcelona, I love it and I suffer it, as I suppose many of you do," said Victoria Szpunberg in a colloquium after a performance of L'imperatiu categòric. A feeling and discomfort shared by many neighbors who, for Amat, needs to be expiated to build a new narrative of a truly democratic city, where the neighbors who were born or work here can continue to live.
— Why have we met here, on the Block of Discord?
— Fifty years ago, in 1975, which is the starting point of the book, we would not have met in the Eixample; surely we would have done so on the Rambla, which was the civic nerve of the city. But with the Transition and, especially after the '92 Games, the imaginary of democratic Barcelona was built on the Eixample: it was the living image of the bourgeoisie, but also of modernism and modernity. This is reflected in the exhibition El Quadrat d'Or, an exhibition organized within the framework of the Olympics, which highlighted that bourgeois modernism.
"The Rambla has become a non-place, a backdrop for this Barcelona-Disney that wants to be sold to the world"
— The Eixample is also where you write the book from. You make this known in the first pages, when you lay your cards on the table and make it clear that the vision reflected in the book is that of a petty bourgeois.
— It seemed essential to me to say it. Because I speak from privilege. From the center, in geographical, cultural, and socioeconomic terms. And I am aware of it. And speaking from privilege determines the way we see and analyze facts. We take for granted that culture elaborates critical discourses, and this criticism is usually constructed from the periphery. I think, for example, of Pérez Andújar's texts, but also of cinematographic productions like El 47 or Petit Indi.
— Besides writing from the center, you also acknowledge another point of view: you present yourself as Pasqual Maragall's son. Are you so in a metaphorical or ideological sense?
— Clearly, not in the biological sense [laughs]. I am a son of Pujolism by family tradition, but I feel comfortable claiming the Maragallista heritage: modernizing the city and making it more democratic, but without losing its identity.
— Let's go back to Barcelona: today we met in the Eixample as a symbol of this imaginary of a modern and bourgeois city. But 50 years ago we would have met on the Rambla. How has the image of this promenade changed?
— The current image of the Rambla is that it is no longer ours. Besides some works that seem endemic and make it uncomfortable to walk there, La Boquería is the element where it is most reflected: a market designed to feed Barcelonians has become a place for cut pineapple for tourists.
— The Rambla is, in fact, the protagonist of the first cover image of the book. A photograph by Pilar Aymerich of a workers' demonstration on the Rambla in the late seventies.
— And this image reflects the change that the Rambla has undergone in our imaginary in recent years: from being the central space of the city even for demonstrations, to a deserted street during the pandemic, when we discovered that no one lives there. The Rambla has become a non-place, a set for this Barcelona-Disney that they want to sell to the world. And this is one of the great battles of the book: how do we recover the Rambla as a space for citizens? Because if we don't recover the Rambla, Barcelona loses its identity.
— And the second image, on the other hand, is in the Eixample: in a specific episode of recent history: Casa Orsola. Why this image?
— Casa Orsola is an episode that summarizes the current moment, and I also have a personal relationship with it. For years I passed in front of the building almost daily: to buy newspapers or even the monas for my godchildren. Until one day the news broke that the lifelong tenants had to leave because the owner investment fund had decided to convert the apartments into seasonal rentals.
But the most significant thing about Casa Orsola is that someone like me, a petty bourgeois, and his neighbors suddenly felt that this problem could directly affect us. During the demonstration, we made up our slogans like "the fear of the burofax," even knowing that, in my case, I will probably never receive one. When the middle class becomes the harmed party of a Barcelona model oriented to making the model citizen a liberal and cosmopolitan elite, it means that the city has a problem.
"Not rethinking well the city model towards which it wanted to advance has caused tourism and neoliberalism to take advantage of the city to turn it into a product to be commercialized"
— You describe this change of model in the book based on a Barcelona that has ceased to be productive in the economic sense and has become, itself, the product.
— Since the mid-19th century, Barcelona was the axis of an industrialized region. But from the last decade of the 90s, it became a city of services and, ultimately, a product and a commodity oriented towards tourism. And this change occurred as a result of the '92 Games and the great urban transformation of the city. Because if managing defeats is a pain, managing successes can be even more complicated. And the management of the '92 success has caused a very long hangover.
— In what sense?
— The success of '92 was immense, but it has been poorly managed. Not rethinking well the city model towards which it wanted to advance has caused tourism and neoliberalism to take advantage of the city to turn it into a product to be commercialized. All of this has contributed to many Barcelonans today feeling their city as hostile.
— And, for this reason, you dare to affirm that the myth that created and sustained Barcelona after the '92 Games has long ceased to function and to appeal to us.
— In the book, I analyze the text of El vol de la fletxa by the philosopher Josep Subirós, which recounts how the aesthetically beautiful and iconic image of the arrow's flight served to construct this myth of success of '92, which promised a newer and more modern city, but turned Barcelona into a commodity designed for tourists and the elite. The problem with myths is precisely this: when they stop working.
"El Procés did not think about Barcelona, and this fact explains part of its collapse"
— And after the myth of '92, you still speak of another mythology: that of the Procés. In this case, however, you state that it is a myth that has no capital or metropolis and, therefore, does not think about Barcelona.
— El Procés generated a reflection, to a certain extent obsessive, on the country's model, but it had a blind spot: it did not think about Barcelona. It did not come to think about the role of a hypothetical capital of the Catalan State. And that was a profound error, an error that, in a certain way, explains its subsequent collapse. Because, just as Barcelona has needed Catalonia in modern history, Catalonia cannot be explained without reference to Barcelona.
— And why does it seem to forget the city?
— Barcelona is an undeniably global city, which wants to establish itself as an icon of progress and modernity, which exports knowledge and attracts talent. And if it wants to rise as a global city, it is difficult for it to simultaneously become a regional capital. And this tension is present to this day: we are aware of the loss of Catalan identity in the city, when, for example, one walks down the street and hardly hears Catalan spoken.
— You also state that it is not only a myth without a capital, but also without literature about Barcelona.
— El Procés, a moment of very powerful political fervor, rarely had a literary translation. It is curious because we have a very powerful corpus of narrative about Barcelona from the last century, but at the time of the Procés, no literature appeared that rethought the city. Instead, great Catalan successes did appear, but conceived from outside the city: from Alcarràs to Canto jo i la muntanya balla by Irene Solà.
— And currently? Do we not have good literature about Barcelona either?
— In fact, I would say that this Barcelona that citizens experience with hostility has had a very powerful literary translation: books that reflect on precariousness, on how discomfort and our relationship with the city penetrate our daily experience. And this literature of precariousness has been written from an eminently feminine perspective.
"The contemporary unease experienced in cities like Barcelona has been written from an eminently feminine point of view"
— Feminine?
— When we think of novels about Barcelona, we surely think of works like The Truth About the Savolta Case (Eduardo Mendoza) or Private Life (Josep Maria de Sagarra). But there is a whole other feminine line, ranging from Mercè Rodoreda, Víctor Català, or Carmen Laforet and reaching our days with voices like Llucia Ramis and her Things That Happen to You in Barcelona When You're 30, or Preferred Consumption by Andrea Genovart, which are equally valuable. And this contemporary unease experienced in cities like Barcelona has been written from an eminently feminine point of view.
— After the myths of '92 and the Procés, what myth or imaginary would you say is being built now around the city? What imaginary?
— Now we are destroying the myth of the global city. A myth that has the tourist and the expat as icons and as scapegoats for our ills, onto whom we project our neuroses about the city and from whom we construct our criticism of it.
— And after destroying it? Will we create another?
— Yes. We will need to build a new myth: a myth in which citizens can continue to live here. Because right now that is, literally, a fantasy, a mythical projection. But more and more political and economic actors understand that we cannot continue like this, because then populisms appear that democratic cities like Barcelona do not like at all.
— In the book, in fact, you pose this uncomfortable question: is a city democratic where those who were born there cannot live?
— Following the enlightened values of liberty, fraternity, and equality; there can be no liberty without social cohesion. And if there is no social peace —because although conflicts in a city are necessary, they are not good— then there is neither equality nor liberty. And we must say this, even I: a petty bourgeois speaking from privilege.
"The professor from Casa Orsola must be able to live in Barcelona, because he is the icon of who we Barcelonans are"
— You said that La Rambla and Barcelona should be "ours" again. Whose? What do you mean by that "we"?
— Barcelona must belong to the people who live and work in it. The problem arises, then, when the people who live and work here cannot live here. If a professor who teaches in the city cannot afford housing with their salary, we have a first-magnitude democratic problem. The professor from Casa Orsola must be able to live in Barcelona, because he is the icon of who we Barcelonans are.
— But in the city also live and work, for example, expats, who you said earlier were the icon of our discomfort.
— Cities, traditionally, are spaces of exchange and interrelation, of mixing. But it cannot be that the price to pay is the loss of identity and roots to the point that living in Barcelona or Frankfurt is the same. That is a failure.
— Let's imagine the future. If in a few years a writer had to write a book about Les batalles de Barcelona from 2025 to 2075, what image or symbol would they choose as the starting point of the text?
— The finished Sagrada Família. We didn't think so, but we will see it finished, and Barcelonans still haven't resolved our relationship with this temple which, let's not forget, is expiatory. We have had a quarter century of growing discomfort with the city. And this discomfort needs to be expiated so that Barcelona can be ours again.
Therefore, an image that can be representative of this new myth that must be built around the city can be that of a Sagrada Família to which Barcelonans go and make it their own. Only then will we be able to expiate the discomfort with the city and stop feeling that we live in Barcelona, we love it and we suffer it, as Victoria Szpunberg said. Only then will we begin to build a new feeling of city.