Ildefons Cerdà said that “the culture of peoples is inscribed by the construction of their homes, or what is the same, that civilization and urbanization run in parallel, they are the same thing”. That is why Anne Frank's house, Steinbeck's family farm in Oklahoma, or Bachelard's attic say many more things about the homes and the moments they lived through than the plans do. I am from the last analog generation, like Llucia Ramis, and I have also lived in many houses. Like her nephews, my daughters have moved around a lot until we finally got a mortgage, outside of Barcelona. But I wouldn't know how to explain shared flats, moving, and conversations with friends and loves with so much cunning. One square meter is a delight because in painful situations you have to face them with a bit of humor and sensitivity. For an architect like me, reading about life experiences in houses and burdens is material of incalculable value.If the Mary Beard of the future, two thousand years from now, reads Ramis' writings, this reading of over twenty-five years of Barcelona trajectory will constitute a very precise source of what the city means for young people without patrimony or the elderly who have lived by renting. It is very symptomatic that in the midst of the 21st century, nomadism returns to an urban world full of cities that were invented precisely to provide stability. It is one thing to change homes because you need more space or because you find work 100 km from home, and another is to have to change homes because the market always needs to extract more income and more money from it.It all runs through my head and I wonder what we've done wrong as a profession, we who studied the legacy of municipal architect Aldo Van Eyck in Amsterdam, the manifestos of GATCPAC, the revolutionary ideas of the International Congresses of Modern Architecture, the shared projects of Team X, and we made industrialized housing projects to dream that it was possible to reduce costs.

I'm writing this column while listening to a hellish noise. In my building, two renovations are happening at the same time, one on the first floor and the other on the third. I live on the second. I work while imagining I'm the filling in a construction sandwich, and indeed, the din often forces me to hang out in bars or libraries. Today, however, I'm staying home, because the noise of drills and hammers, or the shrill whistle of the bricklayer who comes and goes from the building and sings dubious tunes on the stairs, is most suitable for the book I've been reading for a few days: Un metro cuadrado, by Llucia Ramis (Anagrama, 2026).

The writer Llucia Ramis says she is “acollonada” because despite having been able to afford a mortgage for an apartment, after years of going from one rental to another, who knows if one day she won't be able to pay the installment. We thank the writer and the interviewer, Laura Serra, for having contributed to popularizing this Mallorcan way of being “acollonida” in Catalonia and, at the same time, we regret that this opportunity to enrich vocabulary arises from the harsh reality of real estate. Because if anyone wants to read a very well-explained summary of the great contemporary unease that affording a place to live has become, they should read the interview.

Llucia Ramis (Palma, 1977) arrived in Barcelona to study at university and here she has built her life, relationships, jobs, friendships. For years, until after she turned 40, she lived distressed by the ever-increasing rental contracts (she went from paying 240 to 750 euros) which meant she had to share a flat and move areas. Thirty years and ten moves later, she publishes Un metro cuadrado (non-fiction prize from Libros del Asteroide; in Catalan published by Anagrama), where she analyzes the housing crisis from her experience as a tenant in Barcelona. The essay incorporates journalistic headlines, figures, and expert positions that have addressed the issue in recent years, but also the intimate and emotional impact that the city's transformation has on its inhabitants.