Dr. Amat, what's happening to Barcelona?

BarcelonaDoctor, what's happening to Barcelona? Jordi Amat, who isn't a doctor but makes astute diagnoses, seeks answers to the sense of loss that has been taking hold in the city for years and is escalating into a full-blown revolt. Loss of the right to housing, loss of identity and civic vitality, loss of a collective project—in short, democratic loss. He explores this in his essay The Battles of Barcelona (Edicions 62), a personal journey through cultural imaginaries—literature, film, music—over the last fifty years. At the book's official launch at the Academy of Fine Arts, the institution that awarded him its prize for humanistic essays, historian Borja de Riquer and philosopher Josep Ramoneda were present this Thursday.

As a "petit bourgeois" resident of the Eixample district who lives in a family-owned apartment and symbolically declares himself "a son of Maragall," Amat considers himself privileged and, at the same time, a citizen aware of the social and democratic breakdown that surrounds him: something is wrong if many Barcelonans "can no longer live." Something is wrong when the languages used in the WhatsApp group for his building on Consell de Cent street are Spanish and English. This doesn't lead him to subscribe to tourism-phobia or the blasphemy of expats, nor to point to the 1992 Olympic Games as the root of all evil. No. "The Games transformed Barcelona because beforehand, a whole series of people had thought about how to remake the gray and unequal city of the 60s and 70s," among whom he cites, of course, the architect Oriol Bohigas as a paradigm.

"Who is thinking about the city today?" Riquer and Ramoneda ask him. He also asks himself this question in a book that has more questions than answers. A book that ostensibly draws from literature, "which works very well for assessing discontent, but not for providing political solutions." But let's get back to the point. If it wasn't the Games, when exactly did the discontent begin? What is the origin of the problem? When did the city begin to fall into the hands of foreign investors?

The author places the turning point at the 2004 Universal Forum of Cultures and in the image of the then-mayor, Joan Clos, dancing on Passeig de Gràcia to the rhythm of Carlinhos Brown. A few years later (2008) it premiered Vicky Cristina Barcelona by Woody Allen, the nonagenarian filmmaker who has just closed a deal to do the same in Madrid with money from Ms. Ayuso. An operation that speaks volumes about the Catalan capital's poorly digested success. But while the people of Madrid still want to respond, the people of Barcelona, with their well-being wounded, are disavowing it.

On the book's cover, two other photos frame the chronological period: a 1976 CCOO demonstration with workers marching in the style Novecento Along Ferran Street, now the epicenter of mass tourism (photo by Pilar Aymerich), and an image of the protests to prevent the eviction of the Orsola house in 2025. Between inevitable sentimental attachment and unbearable unease, the city is once again thrumming to save itself. And Jordi Amat, a man of order, erudition, and inquisitive observation, chronicles it. Of old and new battles, while outlining a compromise solution: "Rental extraction, yes, but less, much less."