A few weeks ago I heard a conversation with Jordi Puntí, in which he talked about his novel Confetti, about the life of Xavier Cugat (Proa). At one point, Puntí says that "or"A writer is a liar par excellence," because fiction creates plausible worlds that are not real.

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.

"I just want to see hundred-dollar bills," Jordi Amat hums in one of the verses of his essay The Battles of BarcelonaBecause the book is a collage of authors, music, books, chronicles, conferences, projects, films, and family conflicts that make it very accessible: it's somewhere between a bibliography and a playlist of everything you need to read, see, and hear about Barcelona to understand the city's successes and failures. The book's thesis is well-known and shared by many: "The paradox of Barcelona's global success is that it strips the city bare." But Amat supports this with data and reviews that allow readers to compare the initial intentions of emblematic projects with their actual impact over the years.

From the pacified Consell de Cent street, Jordi Amat explains in his new book The Battles of Barcelona: Cultural Imaginaries of a City in Dispute There is a difficult-to-resolve relationship between the Catalan nation and its capital. In these debates, many pro-independence commentators have participated, and consistently so, although Amat seems to have ignored us (or so he pretends). I would say that, among all of Amat's accurate assertions (Barcelona is indeed a "political body without a head"), the most unfortunate misstep is his obsession with sparing the independence movement. This is a constant in Barcelona's friendly and smiling "social democracy" when faced with the evidence that the Process was the most popular, daring, progressive, participatory, electrifying, creative, and internationalizing event (and even the one with the greatest social consensus) that Barcelona has seen since the Olympic Games. The difference is that no decent pro-independence supporter would ever underestimate the importance of the Olympic Games. They may criticize aspects and consequences, but never treat it condescendingly. As we know, even within the establishment, there are still stratified classes.

A journalist from New York Times He sets foot in Barcelona. It's 1975. In the article he publishes in the American newspaper, he describes a city under construction where there was a fundamental problem: a lack of hotels. And above all, a lack of quality hotels. In 2024, the same publication writes about Barcelona, but it does so through an image: that of Barcelonans firing water pistols at a group of tourists. What happened between those two events? That's what the philologist and writer tries to find out. Jordi Amat in his last essay, The Battles of Barcelona: Imaginaries of a City in Dispute (Edicions 62), a portrait of the last 50 years of the city through its cultural touchstones. From the Olympic flame to water pistols, from Pedro Almodóvar to Woody Allen and Manolo Vital at Casa Orsola, Amat tries to discover at what point the city ceased to belong to the people of Barcelona, and to what extent a city can remain democratic when its citizens can no longer choose to live there.

Doctor, 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.