Lucerne and the Magic City

The older I get, the less I understand cities. Not because they've ceased to fascinate me, but because I find it increasingly difficult to believe certain narratives. The contemporary world is immersed in urban debates that seem disconnected from reality: parameters, densities, land use, residual values… And I walk through my neighborhood and I'm only interested in the gardens, the smells, the morning mists, the squares, and the sunny terraces where I can have a coffee and read a book.

Looking at it in perspective, the time of cities is a mere blink of an eye in planetary history. Our ancestors Homo sapiens They lived rooted in the home. Since the agricultural revolution, some ten thousand years ago, humans ceased to depend on natural cycles and began to dominate them. The first agricultural societies lived in accordance with the seasons, the calendar, and the rainfall patterns. To reap the harvest, it was necessary to think in terms of the future, to plan for it, to domesticate it. This moment made possible the explosion of population growth, the consolidation of property ownership, the institutionalization of community, and, above all, the feeling of belonging to a place, to a home.

But there's no need to go back to prehistory: literature always challenges what I learn from the official documents of contemporary urban planning. The book Master wallJoan Rosàs's book, published by L'Avenç, speaks of the house as both a space and a family with extraordinary clarity. Amidst the contemporary bureaucratic frenzy, it is important to rediscover the origins of homes as refuges: solid stone constructions with carefully cultivated vegetation to ward off weeds, wild animals, and even spirits. For centuries, farmhouses have featured fabulous symbolic elements such as the "espantrujas": two pieces of tile with a brick in between that resembled a tongue.

The home was the center of social order before the invention of cities. Ninety percent of the population lived off the land, with the home serving as the basic unit of production, transmission, and memory. The entire family shared the fruits of their labor, their effort, and their profits (and losses), all in service of a single purpose: preserving the common patrimony. No one owned anything for personal gain; everything belonged to the household. If the heir died, the widow assumed leadership, because the home was everything: representation, lineage, bonds, and community.

Industrialization severed this age-old bond, and the home ceased to be a spiritual and communal space, becoming increasingly an economic commodity. The urban economy has long since transformed houses into "assets," the city into a market, and neighborhoods into mere circumstances, in Rosàs's words. And cities are rapidly transitioning from load-bearing walls to apartment blocks with concrete slabs and pillars, where everything is new and nothing is passed down from one generation to the next. Children recognize all the iconic car logos, clothing brands, and fast-food labels, but they cannot distinguish the leaves on trees or the markings on the stones of houses.

While reading Rosàs, we went to the Lluèrnia festival, the Festival of Fire and Light in Olot, and I rediscovered my love for cities that resist the passage of time without succumbing to imitation and the banality of big brands. Under the artistic direction of Xevi Bayona, we saw the germinating heads of the Olot School of Art, bridges trembling, giant mushrooms in the old washhouses, and beams of light cutting through the river with hypnotic rhythms. We saw portraits drawn by secondary school students in the Plaça Major, repainted with extraordinary sensitivity. We walked along the banks of the Fluvià, without artificial light, and without falling. We explored Olot with the exultant creatures on a cold November night, warmed by the magic of the nighttime scenography. And then I thought that I prefer those cities that shun the ordinary and, for a few days, invite us to feel very different things among the same familiar stones. On November 7th and 8th, there was a fantastic feeling of "home" in Lluèrnia.

In the age of rampant individualism, everything is compartmentalized, fragmented, and replicated. Cities have lost their ambition to amaze, to celebrate the advantages of community life. Similar Christmas lights are strung everywhere, and cities race to install identical Christmas trees: these are the rules of consumerism, and no one dares to challenge them. But the ingenuity of Olot's Lluèrnia festival is, for now, unrivaled. With a radically contemporary, highly technological, and disruptive approach, it allows us to relive a dimension of the city connected to fire, volcanoes, astrology, and ritual. Thinking about cities also means experimenting with different uses. In Olot's case, it works like a charm!