The arrow was poisoned.

We don't know if Jordi Amat intended to write a cultural essay and inadvertently ended up with a political book, or if he intended to write a political book and decided to disguise it as a cultural essay. Either way, The Battles of Barcelona (Ediciones 62) deserves the conversation it is generating. Beyond constructing a delightful historical journey through how culture has imagined and narrated the city over the last fifty years, Amat has the lucidity to permeate the book with the most uncomfortable question possible: can we say that Barcelona is a democratic city today? Is a city democratic when its inhabitants cannot afford to live there? The author does not ask this from an anti-establishment position, nor from the social periphery: the son of a good family—as he himself explains in the book—Amat is a member of the board of the Círculo de Economía and directs the most influential cultural supplement in Spain. Babelia.

The thesis of the book is that from the final years of the dictatorship onwards, Barcelona experienced a crescendo A democratic process culminating in the celebration of the Olympic Games. There would be a common thread linking the neighborhood movements of the late Franco era, the management of the first democratic city councils, and the urban transformation promoted by Pasqual Maragall under the pretext of the Games. From the late 1970s to 1992, the city continued to improve. Simply put: things were done with people in mind. A social-democratic soul and policy. Barcelona is more livable, fairer, more cultured, and more cohesive. crescendo He reaches a climax with the flight of Rebollo's arrow lighting the Olympic cauldron: not only have we built a democratic city, but now everyone sees it.

Amat is lenient with Pasqual Maragall. Both in the book and in the interviews he gave, he refuses to interpret the Games as also the necessary seed of the subsequent degradation, marked by rampant overtourism and the progressive appropriation of the city by private interests and global capital. It follows from the reading that it is those who come after Maragall who mismanage the legacy and ruin everything. Here Amat forgets that the Olympic pact between administrations and the private sector has a dark side: it lays the foundations for unfettered tourism and hands over the keys to the city's international promotion to hoteliers through the Turisme de Barcelona consortium. Rebollo's arrow was not only laden with legitimate pride in a job well done, it also carried its dose of poison.

The interviewers frequently asked the author about the potentially paradoxical relationship between the global city that is also the capital of a marginalized nation. While this is by no means the book's central theme, it clearly shows how Barcelona's creators and intellectuals during the democratic period often experienced and presented this relationship as problematic. It's as if Barcelona doesn't quite fit into the narrative of the Catalan national project, and vice versa. This apparent disconnect has undoubtedly been used politically to challenge the adversary's political project. The caricatures of city and nation have been around for a long time.

It is striking that our intellectuals, both right and left, have failed to see and explain that, historically as well as today, Barcelona's truly problematic relationship is not with the Catalan national project, but with the Spanish one. It is in the name of the Spanish project, not the Catalan one, that the city has been bombarded several times (1714, 1842, and 1938 being the most significant). It is the Spanish government, not the nonexistent Catalan power of the time, that kept the city enclosed within its walls until 1854 to prevent its growth. It is the Spanish governments that chose a railway gauge that impeded connections with Europe, and that still keep Barcelona isolated from Valencia by high-speed rail. It is Spain that decided Barcelona should be a secondary city, to the benefit of a Madrid artificially inflated by decree.

In short, it is within the Spanish national project that Barcelona does not fit and is treated as an anomaly. And it is because of the secondary role it has been relegated to that the city has been competing with one hand tied behind its back for three centuries. Barcelona is the most successful product of Catalan nationalism. Which we continue to problematize and write endlessly about. the problem The conflict between Barcelona and Catalonia is just another example of the neurotic country we are. Read The Battles of Barcelona: fires neurons.