Remembering Lluís Permanyer

Living next to Lluís Permanyer has given me the opportunity to have conversations standing up, on the street, when we bumped into each other in the neighborhood. You could sense the polite forms and rhythms of a Barcelona of the Right in the Eixample, from when he played in the gardens of the car-free Gran Via, between Rambla Catalunya and Passeig de Gràcia, and his father was a Barça director. The conversations had a certain order: a smiling introduction of mutual recognition, a biting critique of the City Hall's latest invention, and a somewhat hurried farewell in the style of "Have a good time, the rain is falling," because they were waiting for him at Radio Barcelona or in some university lecture hall to give a lecture. He liked to walk everywhere to prove to everyone that Barcelona was still a city.walkable.

Permanyer was the person who bridged urbanity and urban planning, and the journalist who for decades has set the standard for Barcelona's good taste as an active denouncer of ugly Barcelona, with its disproportion and overhauls. He was the journalist to whom Joan Miró confided the exclusive that he wanted to give Barcelona the mosaics at the airport and La Rambla and open what we now know as the Fundació Miró, on Montjuïc.

On October 1, 2017, we spent a couple of hours on the corner of the school where we were to vote in the independence referendum. The crowd stood up to the National Police vans coming down Pau Claris and stopped for a moment to command respect. And he said to me: "Just like in the tram strike of '51, it is the people of Barcelona who make history."