Why in Barcelona can we not stop talking about the place where we live
BarcelonaI'm writing this column while hearing a hellish noise. In my building, two renovations are happening at the same time, one on the first floor and another on the third. I live on the second. I work imagining I'm the filling of a construction site sandwich, and in fact, the racket often forces me to wander around bars or libraries. Today, however, I'm staying home, because the noise of drills and hammers, or the strident whistle of the builder who enters and leaves the building and hums dubious tunes on the stairs, is very suitable for the book I've been reading for a few days: Un metre quadrat, by Llucia Ramis (Anagrama, 2026).
Housing is a topic of conversation that spans so many fields (political, economic, sociodemographic...), and contains such ugly words (like "real estate," "subletting," and others), that sometimes we forget the humanity it shelters. Just at the beginning of "Un metre quadrat", Ramis places us in the technical framework and quotes articles from the Constitution that refer to citizens' rights regarding private property and decent housing. But once she introduces her writing, the author represents property as a human and sensitive space. One of the first images she evokes is very beautiful: the memory that when we were little and played tag, we called the safe place where no one could disqualify us "home."
The book constantly moves between these two poles, structural and emotional reality. Ramis presents the apartments where she has lived with a touch of data (the years she rented them, the address, the year of construction, the square meters, and the price she paid) and then recounts her own story. She draws on personal memories, looks for the people with whom she shared the daily space, and in some cases, also manages to get the current tenants of the apartment to let her in, allowing her to compare past and present. This more personal part is combined with a historical review of housing policies, from architectural plans to changes in laws. She also intersperses interviews and data. From time to time, it makes me think of Francesc Candel and how he described apartments, building materials, and people's movements. On one occasion, Ramis quotes him directly, and it makes sense, because both, when describing the city, start from housing as an essential base from which we process the world.
With Llucia Ramis's book, I couldn't stop chatting. Accompanied by the incessant and uniform sound of a drill that occasionally faced a too forceful wall and made a sharp screech, I read and my mind conversed with the author: "This has happened to me too," "today's students probably can't do this anymore" (going on vacation without planning which apartment they will live in in September), etc. It's such a common conversation, the one about housing! For a few years now, it has occupied hours and hours of chatter among friends and family. We talk about it in apartments, cafes, restaurants, and terraces, while we look around us and wonder how others manage to live there. Everything the writer explains feels familiar, and I enjoy it most when she talks about herself, because that's when life imposes itself on structure.
The places where we live mark our lives
For me, the entire city is a home. At eighteen years old (technically, seventeen) I left Anoia to study in Barcelona. I entered the capital through Paral·lel, and since then, my apartments have gradually moved further away from the sea until I settled far from the center. Each move has meant a resizing of the capital for me. When you live at the foot of the Collserola mountain, as is my case now, Barcelona is repositioned and, instead of seeming bigger, it still seems smaller. If I climb a hill, I see it almost entirely, and on the other hand, to get down to the sea, it only takes me an hour and a half walking.
Only, yes! When I lived in the village, I begged my parents to take me to my grandparents' house by car, please, because they lived so far away, on the other side! Over time, I've become aware that from my parents' house to my grandparents' house was only a fifteen-minute walk. Fifteen minutes and I would be there to give my grandpa and grandma a kiss. But it seemed like an abyss, an eternity, perhaps because I had shorter legs or perhaps because I hadn't lived in any dimension other than that one, and everyone knows that distances don't always measure the same. Now it happens that when my parents come up to Barcelona and I make them walk, they tell me: “Oh, you see everything close by!” And if I push it too much, they return to the village exhausted. The city is squeezed between the sea and the mountain, and since I look at it from further and further away, in the end it presents itself to me as an alien body. But it's a lie. We all inhabit Barcelona, and it is shaped by our bustling.
One of the reflections I like most about Un metre quadrat is when the author talks about Palma and explains: “I got used to dimensions and a light, which, while not decisive in building an identity, perhaps were in creating a state of mind –and she continues–: I spent weekends and holidays surrounded by nature, which might sound corny or like a luxury, but which in any case shaped my sensitivity.” The places where we live mark our lives. They are not a whim, as people who think it's natural for citizens to have to leave their neighborhoods want us to believe. Llucia Ramis's book, in its argumentative part, but above all, in its personal part, reminds us of this. No rational argument she presents is a revelation, but, on the other hand, each layer of sensible truth comforts us.
