Citizen One S2 E12: Two Blocks from My Apartment

Tom Clancy Imagined 9/11 in 1994

I wrote this one at 35,000 feet, in economy, on a China Eastern A350 somewhere over the darkness between Moscow and St. Petersburg on my way to Shanghai. While everyone around me slept, I was thinking about Shanghai — not the Shanghai of now, but the Shanghai of the 1930s, the one that lived mostly in the heads of people who would never go there. That Shanghai was a genre before it was a place. It was where the competent man operated, where the threat was real and exotic and geopolitical, where the woman in the hotel bar was either an asset or a liability and the wise operative knew which before he finished his drink. That genre still has a name. We call it pulp fiction. Not Tarantino’s — though I’ll note, as a fellow Knoxvillian, that he and I came out of the same city, which may explain a few things about both of us and our relationship to genre and violence. When I say pulp, I mean the thing itself: the wood-pulp magazines, the writers who built narrative machinery inside them, and the machinery that is somehow still running. A river, not a family tree The cleanest way to understand a genre is to stop thinking of it as a family tree and start thinking of it as a river system. Multiple tributaries, shared sediment. The water at the mouth is the water of everywhere it’s been. The globetrotting intelligence thriller — the competent man in foreign terrain, the moral-consequence action narrative — does not begin with Ian Fleming. It begins, for our purposes, with John Buchan and The 39 Steps in 1915: Richard Hannay, a mining engineer who stumbles into a plot, finds a corpse in his flat, and runs for the Scottish countryside chased by police and spies. Buchan gave the form its grammar — the chase, the capable loner, civilization under threat, the landscape as both obstacle and character. His heroes aren’t invulnerable; they’re capable, which is different, because capability admits the possibility of failure, and failure is where stakes and story live. From Buchan the line forks. In Britain it runs through H.C. McNeile (”Sapper”) and Bulldog Drummond — Hannay with the complexity drained out and the violence cranked up, but he sold, and he set a flavor that would resurface in Fleming with better prose attached. In America it runs through the magazines, especially Adventure, and writers like Talbot Mundy, Harold Lamb, and Arthur O. Friel, who understood the world as a system of places, each with its own history and danger. That American current is where F. Van Wyck Mason comes in, with Colonel Hugh North — a G-2 officer working a world of embassies, ballrooms, and backstreets. The North novels ran from 1930 to 1977, nearly five decades, which is not a thing formula alone can do. Mason wasn’t original in the flattering sense of that word. He was working squarely inside an established tradition and producing competent, consistent work within it. What he contributed was longevity and reliability — and that, whatever you make of the prose, is craft. Then Fleming, where the lineage becomes famous, which is both its vindication and its distortion. Fleming read all of these men — Buchan, Sapper, Mundy, Mason, the Mr. Moto novels of John P. Marquand — and synthesized them with three things none of his predecessors had combined: a journalist’s sensory precision (Bond never simply drinks; he drinks a specific thing, prepared a specific way), the Cold War (Buchan’s grammar reloaded with nuclear anxiety, SMERSH and SPECTRE as Fu Manchu scaled up to the hydrogen bomb), and sex handled with a frankness the older tradition had coded or avoided. The components were inherited. The recombination felt new. That’s what good genre synthesis does. Did Fleming plagiarize? Not exactly, and once — Thunderball, built on material developed with Kevin McClory and Jack Whittingham, a dispute he settled in court and that trailed the franchise for the rest of the century. The rest of his debts aren’t plagiarism. They’re genre. Everyone writing in a tradition is downstream of the tradition. The only question is what you do with the water. The genre that runs ahead Which brings me to Tom Clancy, because Amazon just dropped Jack Ryan: Ghost War, John Krasinski back in the role. Clancy’s contribution was technical specificity — where Fleming had luxury brands, Clancy had weapon systems and submarine propulsion and the org chart of the Soviet naval command. The detail was the proof of seriousness. I used to buy his novels from a newsstand near the Pentagon while I worked at the Navy Annex — the American military-intelligence apparatus as protagonist, sold fifty yards from the actual apparatus, and nobody found it strange. That proximity is the whole point. In Debt of Honor (1994), Clancy put a pilot flying a 747 into the Capitol during a joint session of Congress, killing the president and most of the government and leaving Jack Ryan sworn in inside a CNN studio. Seven years later, Condoleezza Rice told Congress that no one could have imagined terrorists using aircraft as weapons. Clancy imagined it, and sold it to millions. This is what the tradition does at its best. It runs slightly ahead of reality — not because the writers are prophets, but because they pay attention to systems: how power works, what the failure modes are, what happens when the machinery breaks down. The genre has always been systems thinking dressed as entertainment. That’s not a bug. That’s the engine. The illustrator’s argument I keep coming back to my great uncle, John Alan Maxwell, one of the significant commercial illustrators of the mid-20th century. He illustrated Steinbeck, Ferber, Huxley, Conan Doyle, Costain, Yerby, Forester — and Van Wyck Mason. He even appears, as himself, inside The Bucharest Ballerina Murders. He illustrated the first edition of Anthony Adverse, the book that knocked Gone with the Wind off the bestseller list; N.C. Wyeth got the second. And he moved between all of it without apparently drawing a distinction or giving much of a damn. Steinbeck on one commission, Mason on the next. The pulp/literary divide was enforced not by quality but by venue and price point — hardcover with a dust jacket and a review in the Times was literature; cheap paper was pulp; the same story by the same writer could cross that line depending on where it landed. My great uncle’s forty-year career is one long argument that the distinction was always a distribution question, never an aesthetic one. The craft was the craft. What “Premium Pulp Fiction” means I named the imprint deliberately. It’s a provocation and a position: we take the pulp tradition seriously as a tradition. We treat genre as a working tool, not a marketing category. We know where the form comes from, and we publish work that knows it too — noir that remembers its debts, historical fiction that treats the past as lived rather than staged, speculative work that understands systems before it imagines their collapse. The catalog reflects it. The Southern Civic Noir trilogy — Defiance, The Darkwater Gospel, Bloodwater — knows its debts to noir, to the Southern Gothic, to the grammar of civic corruption that runs from Faulkner through Ellroy. Ghost Emperor, set in Babylon in 323 BCE, treats ancient politics as a system rather than costume drama. And Maksym Van Shamrai’s Science of the Last Hope comes out of the Eastern European science-fiction tradition, displacement literature, philosophical anthropology. It knows where it comes from. That’s the criterion. Genre fiction was always collaborative in ways literary fiction prefers not to admit — writers, illustrators, and editors working together at speed, each contributing to something none could finish alone, the collaboration carried in the DNA even when one name lands on the cover. That’s the tradition I’m publishing inside, and the lineage I want to carry forward. Now I’m going to finish this coffee and get on a plane to Melbourne — another city with a story it tells about itself — and think about what gets built when people decide the stories worth telling are the ones that know where they come from. If you’ve got a manuscript that knows its debts, send it our way. And join the Substack — there’s more coming. — Douglas Stuart McDaniel, Citizen One: Exploring Our Urban Future This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit multiversethinking.substack.com [https://multiversethinking.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1]

Citizen One S2 E12: Two Blocks from My Apartment

Two blocks from where I live in El Raval, there’s an archaeological excavation underway. I pass it often enough now that it’s become part of my daily geography — a fenced rectangle of disturbed ground, archaeologists at work, construction paused but not stalled. This started as a straightforward public-space upgrade. The Jardins del Doctor Fleming and Plaça de la Gardunya are being renovated — new paving, lighting, benches, a play area. Functional improvements. El Raval needs public space that works, and it needs it without apology. What makes the site interesting isn’t the renovation. It’s the predictability of what emerged once the pavement came up. Barcelona expects archaeology. It plans for it. The ground here is a record, and every infrastructure project knows it may have to read a few pages before proceeding. At Fleming, those pages belong to the hospital city. Burials associated with the Hospital de la Santa Creu, dating to the 17th and 18th centuries — the cemetery known as El Corralet. By July 2025, archaeologists had documented eighteen burial units containing twenty-five individuals: men, women, and children. The older burials were simple — bodies placed without coffins, the unclaimed poor. The later ones showed a certain dignity: wooden coffins, rosaries and medals still present, arms folded properly. Someone had cared enough, even for the abandoned. These were the ones whose relationship to the city was transactional and final — and whose remains now slow the installation of playground equipment, because Barcelona has decided they are worth documenting before the children arrive. A Ship Beneath the Fish Market Ten minutes’ walk from Fleming, at the foot of La Rambla, the Drassanes Reials — the Royal Shipyards, now the Maritime Museum — stands as one of the great medieval industrial buildings in Europe. Sixteen Gothic stone naves, each sixty metres long, built to produce warships for the Crown of Aragon at scale. At its peak in 1423, twelve galleys could be built simultaneously inside those halls. The Drassanes wasn’t a monument to craftsmanship. It was a factory. In April 2025, three kilometres up the coast, construction crews excavating for a new biomedical research complex broke through into a medieval shipwreck. They named it Ciutadella I. Ten metres long, built of thirty curved wooden ribs and at least seven hull planks, mid-15th century. A merchant vessel, most likely — sunk in a storm when that section of the city was still open water. The ship is five metres below current ground level because Barcelona’s coastline moved. After the city built its first artificial docks in 1439, the old sandbar shifted, the sea receded, and the city grew forward over its own port. The ship became sediment. The sediment became a fish market. The fish market became a construction site. What surrounds it makes it extraordinary: that single excavation contains the remains of 18th-century Bourbon fortifications, the 19th-century fish market, a Civil War air-raid shelter built in 1938, and the 15th-century vessel beneath it all. Five centuries of Barcelona, stacked in one pit. The Drassanes built ships for kings. Ciutadella I carried cargo — the freight that actually made the city’s economy run. The museum holds the reproduction of the famous flagship. The ground beneath a future parking structure held the workhorse. A Battle That Remade the West In 218 BCE, Rome fought its first battle on Iberian soil — at an Iberian town called Kissa, in what is now Catalonia. The Roman general Gnaeus Cornelius Scipio defeated the Carthaginian commander Hanno, captured Hannibal’s abandoned baggage, and established the foothold that would eventually become the Roman province of Hispania. Some historians consider it one of the decisive engagements of the ancient Mediterranean world. For two thousand years, no one knew exactly where Kissa was. In 2025, a team from the University of Barcelona confirmed it: Valls, in the Camp de Tarragona, at the Vilar archaeological site. The evidence is unambiguous — Punic coins concentrated in a destruction layer, lead ballista projectiles inside burned houses, a stratigraphic sequence consistent with violent demolition in the fall of 218 BCE. The geography confirms it too: Valls controls the coastal pass toward the interior of Catalonia. Roman troops marching south toward what is now Tarragona would have had to go through here. The city wasn’t abandoned immediately. People kept living in the rubble for another decade or two before finally leaving — still trying to make a life in a place that had become a footnote in someone else’s war. Workers Who Built Their Own Survival In December 2025, construction teams preparing the ground for the new La Sagrera high-speed rail station broke into something not on any map: a Civil War air-raid shelter, built around 1937, absent from the 1938 census of public shelters and from every official record of Barcelona’s wartime civil defense network. Which means it was private. And given the location — directly beneath the former La Sagrera freight station, which the CNT, the anarcho-syndicalist railway workers union, had collectivized in 1936 — it means the workers built it themselves. For themselves. Without asking permission. The structure is unlike any other shelter found in the city. While most of Barcelona’s 1,322 documented wartime shelters were tunnels carved into hillsides or adapted basements, this one was excavated in the open air and built as a poured concrete bunker before being buried under fill. The roof slab is two metres thick, calculated to withstand 100-kilogram bombs. The freight station had already been bombed twice in 1937. The workers knew exactly what was coming. Inside: two main galleries, four large rooms, four latrines, a probable infirmary, and graffiti marking the CNT and the FAI — the Iberian Anarchist Federation. Some of the dates on the walls run as late as 1954. Fifteen years after the war. Six years into Franco’s dictatorship. Someone was still using this space, or still marking it, or perhaps sheltering in it again for different reasons, in a different kind of fear. The high-speed railway to Madrid will eventually run over the exact spot where those workers hid. What the Pattern Means Taken together — the hospital cemetery, the medieval ship, the Iberian battle site, the anarchist bunker — what emerges is not a collection of curiosities. It’s a pattern. What strikes me about each of these sites is how little drama surrounds any of them. Archaeologists work. Sites are documented. Remains are treated properly. Timelines adjust and then resume. No spectacle. No false choice between memory and progress. This is not Barcelona discovering its past. It’s Barcelona managing it well. When the Jardins del Doctor Fleming reopen, children will play there. Neighbors will sit. The space will feel calmer and safer. None of that is undermined by what lay beneath it. Barcelona understands that improvement doesn’t require amnesia — that public space can be both functional and deep. Two blocks from my apartment, that pattern is playing out again. And in Valls, and in the Ciutadella, and under the future AVE platforms of La Sagrera, it’s playing out too. Quietly. Competently. Without self-congratulation. The ground spoke. The city listened just long enough. Then it continued — better informed. Citizen One is a podcast and Substack about the future of cities. Subscribe at citizenone.substack.com. Next week: Part 3 of the Barcelona series. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit multiversethinking.substack.com [https://multiversethinking.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1]

Citizen One S2:E11 – Barcelona: A Field Study in Urban Literacy

Welcome back to Citizen One: Exploring Our Urban Future. I’m Douglas Stuart McDaniel. Today, I want to tell you a bit about my neighborhood in Barcelona. Not the Barcelona of postcards — not Antoni Gaudí’s spires dissolving into sky, not the wide geometry of the Eixample, not the Gothic Quarter all dressed up for tourists. Those places are real, and they matter. **But they are not where cities do their actual work.** The place I want to talk about is El Raval. Specifically, a district of about 1 square kilometer that sits just west of La Rambla and runs from Plaça de Catalunya down toward the port. With a population of 48-50 thousand people, that density is extremely high by European standards and on par with the density of places like Dhaka. Denser than Manhattan and roughly double Paris city average, El Raval is one of the four neighborhoods of the larger district of Ciutat Vella (Old City). It’s more than 55% foreign-born, with many from Pakistan, Bangladesh, the Philippines, Morocco, India, Italy, Colombia, Uruguay, Peru and Honduras. In the early 20th century, it was called Barrio Chino, or Chinatown. Today, it’s sometimes informally called “Little Pakistan” because of the concentration along Carrer de l’Hospital and surrounding streets. Religiously and culturally you’ll find multiple mosques, South Asian groceries and call shops, Filipino Catholic networks, North African cafés, long-time and elderly Catalan and Spanish residents, a heavily transient EU creative class and university population, and growing short-term rental/tourist turnover pressure. It’s not just diverse — it’s vertically layered. Five floors, one building: an elderly Catalan widow, a Pakistani shopkeeper family, students and digital nomads, undocumented laborers, short-term Airbnbs. That stacking creates a rich and wonderful intensity. The district is anchored by a medieval hospital, a market that has been feeding the city since the 13th century, and an opera house that was bombed or burned three times and was rebuilt on the same address both times. Within that corridor, you can trace almost everything a city is actually for — how it absorbs labor, manages illness, performs culture, feeds its people, and quietly catches whoever falls. I live here. On Carrer de les Cabres — the Street of the Goats — which is either charming or accurate depending on your mood. These next three episodes stay close to home. Walking distance. A few blocks in each direction. That’s a deliberate constraint, because I’ve come to believe that cities reveal themselves most clearly at close range — around obscure addresses and modest street corners, not at their monuments. The monuments tell you what a city wants you to think about it. The street corners tell you how it actually functions. This first episode traces the history of this corridor — the market, the hospital, the opera house, and what it means that they ended up in the same few blocks. The second follows what happens when you disturb the ground two blocks from my apartment and the city’s entire biography starts surfacing: medieval ships, Roman battlefields, anarchist bunkers, hospital cemeteries. The third contracts to the most intimate scale of all — the kitchen, and what it means when a city provisions its people well enough that cooking stops being an act of self-defense. Three episodes. One neighborhood. Close range. What connects them is a single question: what does it look like when urban systems actually work? Not when they’re celebrated or curated or marketed to visitors — but when they’re simply functioning, quietly, in the background of daily life, doing the job the people who live inside them need done. Barcelona is not a perfect city. No city is. But it is a legible one. It has layers it doesn’t hide and infrastructure it hasn’t aestheticized beyond recognition. It manages its history without either freezing it behind glass or bulldozing it for the next project. It nurtures its people at human scale. It has, over centuries, developed a particular competence at absorbing pressure — demographic, cultural, economic — and continuing forward without pretending the pressure was never there. That competence is what this miniseries is about. We’re not here for the landmarks. We’re here to read how it functions. Let’s get started. # El Raval – Inside a City’s Pressure Zone I’ve inhabited a lot of cities, and I’ve learned something the hard way: cities rarely reveal themselves at their famous monuments. They reveal themselves around obscure addresses and modest street corners. I live in Barcelona, on Carrer de les Cabres in El Raval — a few steps off La Rambla, near the seam where La Rambla de Sant Josep transitions into La Rambla dels Caputxins. On a map it doesn’t look like much of a distinction from the Gothic Quarter on the other side of La Rambla. But if you look at how cities actually work — how labor, culture, illness, ambition, performance, and survival overlap — this is one of those places where everything compresses. This isn’t a definitive portrait of El Raval. It’s a reading of one corridor through the passage of time. A field study in urban literacy. And none of it erases what El Raval also is: a culturally rich lived neighborhood, with families, loyalties, and daily routines that exist alongside everything I’m about to describe. --- ## El Raval as a System, Not a Reputation _Raval_ derives from the Arabic _rabaḍ_ — used across Al-Andalus and the medieval Iberian south to denote urbanized suburbs beyond a city’s walls. Zones of labor, logistics, care, and circulation. Markets, workshops, travelers, hospitals, ferreterías, and people whose presence was necessary but often inconvenient. That word alone matters, because it reminds us of something easy to forget: Barcelona absorbed Arabic administrative language without ever being governed under Muslim rule. Unlike Valencia or Xàtiva, which fell under Islamic governance for centuries, Barcelona remained north of the frontier. Muslim armies reached the region briefly in the early 8th century, but the Carolingians reclaimed the city in 801 and folded it into the Marca Hispánica — a militarized buffer zone between worlds. That frontier status shaped everything. Barcelona became a fortified city obsessed with walls and thresholds. What didn’t fit inside them — functionally, socially, morally — was pushed outward. The land west of the medieval core became exactly what _rabaḍ_ describes: a necessary exterior. The same etymology runs through La Rambla itself. The name comes from the Arabic _ramla_ — a sandy riverbed, a wadi, seasonal watercourse. Before it was a promenade, La Rambla was a drainage channel, carrying floodwater from the Collserola mountains toward the sea. A soft boundary where water moved, waste flowed, and the city managed what it could not contain. Like _raval_, the word survived because the function it described never stopped being needed. El Raval began as farmland supplying the city with food. By the Middle Ages it had accumulated the institutions cities prefer not to keep too close: hospitals, convents, charitable houses, hostels, slaughterhouses, warehouses. The Hospital de la Santa Creu, founded in the early 15th century, anchored this role physically and symbolically. Care, illness, and death _belonged_ here — not as failure, but as deliberate placement. This was not marginal land in the economic sense. It was central infrastructure held at arm’s length. As Barcelona grew, density increased rather than spreading outward. By the 18th and 19th centuries, El Raval had become one of the most crowded urban districts in Europe. Industrialization didn’t invent the neighborhood’s role — it intensified it. Workshops replaced gardens. Tenements replaced hostels. Labor stacked vertically because proximity mattered more than comfort. El Raval was never a failure. It was an early form of urban planning honest enough to say what it was doing. Modern urban language tends to moralize neighborhoods like this. It describes them as problems to be solved, reputations to be corrected, zones to be cleaned up. That framing misses the point. El Raval wasn’t an aberration in Barcelona’s development. It was the city’s cultural and economic release valve — the place where pressure went so the rest of the city could function as if there were none. Cities survive by externalizing pressure into places designed to absorb it. El Raval did that work for centuries. It housed the arriving, the laboring, the sick, the rehearsing, the failing, and very often, the ascendant. Once you see El Raval as a system rather than a stigma, the map changes. The neighborhood stops being abstract and starts becoming spatial. You can trace its logic block by block. And if you follow where food enters, where illness concentrates, where labor gathers, and where culture performs, you end up in one very specific corridor. --- ## The Liceu / Hospital / Boqueria Axis Cities don’t operate evenly. They operate along corridors. Carrer de les Cabres — the Street of the Goats, a block west of La Rambla — is one of those tiny corridors. Not a grand axis in the Haussmannian sense. A functional one: a tight knot where food, illness, labor, and performance have intersected for centuries. Twenty meters from my door sits La Mercat de la Boqueria, whose origins as an open-air meat market date to at least the early 13th century. Long before it was roofed or aestheticized, this was where livestock entered the city and food was processed at scale. Markets like this demand proximity to labor, transport routes, and waste disposal. They generate noise, smell, and early-morning movement — activities cities historically push to the edges of acceptability. On the opposite corner of my street lies Carrer de l’Hospital, named for the Hospital de la Santa Creu. For centuries it was Barcelona’s primary site for treating the sick, injured, poor, and displaced. Today its former wards house the Biblioteca de Catalunya — a site once dedicated to bodily care now responsible for the city’s memory. The hospital’s admissions registers list laborers, porters, market workers, sailors, actors, dancers, writers, and domestic servants, most giving addresses in the surrounding streets. Hospitals are magnets — not just for patients, but for lodging houses, taverns, informal care networks, and families living one injury away from collapse. Then there is the Gran Teatre del Liceu, opened three blocks down on the Raval side of La Rambla in 1847. Its placement was not cultural happenstance. The Gothic Quarter was already saturated. Opera required what neither it nor the El Born district could offer at scale: space, flexible parcels, late hours, workshops, rehearsal rooms, and a dense labor pool willing to live irregular lives. El Raval already operated on that logic. The Liceu was volatile — crowds, politics, fire risk, constant backstage labor. It burned almost completely in 1861, was rebuilt, then burned again in 1994. In 1893, an anarchist bomb killed 20 audience members during the second act of _Guillaume Tell_ — an opera, not incidentally, about rebellion against authority. The building survived each time. The address never changed. That persistence tells you everything. The Liceu was placed here because this corridor could absorb spectacle and risk without destabilizing the city’s symbolic core. Opera didn’t civilize this district. The district made opera possible. Map these three institutions together — market, hospital, opera — and you see a maximum-throughput zone for food, care, culture, and labor. You could wake before dawn to work at the market, be carried to the hospital when injured, rehearse near the Liceu and walk home after midnight. All without leaving a few blocks. That’s not chaos. That’s logistics. This is why the area generated so much documentation. Police reports. Hospital admissions. Tax rolls. Newspapers. When activity concentrates, paperwork follows. El Raval became legible to the state precisely because it was indispensable. This is not the romantic heart of Barcelona. It’s one of its circulatory systems. Living here means living inside the flow rather than observing it from a distance. --- ## Who Passed Through Here Streets like these don’t collect famous people after success. They collect people before outcomes are decided. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the streets radiating off lower La Rambla — Carrer de l’Hospital, Carrer Nou de la Rambla, Carrer de Joaquín Costa, Carrer de Sant Pau — formed a dense lattice of lodging houses, rented rooms, workshops, cafés, and informal studios. These were not permanent addresses for people with options. They were temporary footholds for lives still in motion. Municipal padrón records from this period show high turnover: residents staying months or a few years rather than decades. Occupations repeat more reliably than names. Birthplaces range widely, reflecting internal migration from rural Catalonia, Valencia, Aragón, and later southern Spain. Stability, in the modern sense, was rare. Proximity was everything. This is the environment Pablo Picasso entered when he arrived in Barcelona at the turn of the 20th century. His best-documented residences were elsewhere, but his daily working geography extended directly into this corridor — early, cheap studios, cafés, and lodgings clustered around Carrer de l’Hospital, dense with artists’ workshops and informal exhibition spaces. This ecosystem fed what became his Blue Period: an artistic phase shaped less by inspiration than by proximity to poverty, illness, and transient lives. But Picasso was not exceptional. He was typical. This lower-Rambla edge was a magnet not because it was romantic but because it was _workable_. Artists and performers came here before they had outcomes — when they needed cheap rooms, late hours, flexible arrangements, and a network that didn’t ask too many questions. If the Eixample promised stability and clean geometry, this corridor offered something more useful: access. To audiences, to labor, to cafés, to rehearsal space, to the city’s raw material. Just a short walk down Carrer Nou de la Rambla stands Palau Güell, designed by Gaudí and completed in 1888. Commissioned by the industrialist Eusebi Güell, it was placed deliberately at the edge of El Raval rather than in the orderly Eixample. Güell was wealthy enough to withdraw into cleaner streets. He chose proximity instead — placing elite patronage inside the city’s densest circulation zone, steps from the Liceu, the market, and the labor that sustained both. This was not charity or eccentricity. It was an acknowledgment that culture and risk don’t thrive at a distance from each other. Within a few blocks: industrial wealth being translated into architectural experimentation, high culture staged nightly at the opera, artists living cheaply within walking distance of rehearsal rooms, and an invisible layer of labor sustaining the entire system from below. These were not separate worlds arranged neatly across the city. They were stacked tightly together, each dependent on the others, sharing the same streets and the same constraints. Most residents left behind no celebrated work. They appear briefly in the archive — a census line, a hospital ledger, a rental record — and then disappear. But every so often, the pressure in a place like this concentrates so intensely that the city fixes on a single figure and lets her stand in for everything it doesn’t want to examine structurally. El Raval had one of those figures. --- ## Enriqueta Martí: A Mirror of the City Every neighborhood that sits long enough at the intersection of fear and necessity eventually produces figures who become shorthand for the city’s anxieties. In El Raval, one of these figures was Enriqueta Martí — a woman history remembers as _La Vampira del Raval_. The nickname stuck because it was useful. It allowed the city to condense anxiety, poverty, child mortality, gender transgression, and class guilt into a single monstrous shape. The reality is more unsettling, and more urban. Martí lived and operated within the same tight corridor — streets like Carrer de Joaquín Costa and Carrer de l’Hospital, dense with boarding houses, informal labor, sex work, childcare arrangements, and women surviving outside formal employment structures. Also streets under heavy surveillance, because proximity to markets, hospitals, and vice economies attracts institutional attention long before it attracts understanding. She was arrested in 1912 after neighbors reported suspicious activity involving children. Police searches uncovered disturbing materials. The press transformed this quickly into a narrative of ritual murder, child trafficking, and occult practices. Newspapers amplified the story with enthusiasm. The public responded with horror and relief. A monster had been captured. But here’s the part that matters for understanding El Raval. Much of what Martí was accused of was never proven in court. She died in custody in 1913, before trial, reportedly beaten by other inmates. What survives is not a verdict but an archive: police reports, hospital records, sensationalist journalism, and a mythology that grew precisely because the city needed a container for something it refused to face directly. Early 20th-century Barcelona had staggering child mortality. Informal adoption, child labor, wet-nursing, and exploitation existed in gray zones created by poverty and migration. Women without husbands or institutional protection survived through combinations of caregiving, sex work, begging, and informal medicine. Some crossed lines. Many were blamed for systems they did not create. Martí became infamous not simply because of what she may have done, but because she was _visible_. El Raval’s density ensured visibility. Hospitals generated records. Police patrolled aggressively. Journalists mined the neighborhood for stories confirming middle-class fears about the district west of La Rambla. The same surveillance that makes this area legible to historians also made it vulnerable to moral panic. Calling Martí a vampire solved several problems at once. It turned structural urban failure into individual evil. It transformed class anxiety into gothic theater. It reassured respectable Barcelona that the danger had a face — and that it did not look like the city itself. But from an urbanist’s perspective, Martí is not an anomaly. She is an artifact — produced at the intersection of extreme density, informal economies, gendered survival, aggressive surveillance, and a press eager to simplify complexity. Remove any one of those factors and the story collapses. This is why she still haunts El Raval. Not because she was unique, but because she forces a question cities rarely ask honestly: what kinds of lives do we make inevitable, and who do we blame when they become unbearable? El Raval didn’t create a monster. It exposed systemic failure. The city converted structural strain into individual evil, then preserved the story because it was easier to remember than responsibility. That asymmetry still shapes how the area is remembered. But it also points toward something else — a moment when the mythology worked in reverse, when the city’s most celebrated figure passed through the same infrastructure it reserved for everyone else, and nobody recognized him. --- ## Antoni Gaudí, Unidentified In June of 1926, Barcelona failed to recognize one of its most celebrated figure. Antoni Gaudí — by then the most famous architect in the city, the mind behind buildings that would define Barcelona’s global identity — was struck by a tram while crossing the Gran Via. He was 73 years old. He was walking alone. He was dressed plainly. He carried no identification. Witnesses assumed he was a beggar. Passersby hesitated. Some ignored him entirely. A policeman eventually intervened and had him transported to a hospital. And here is the detail that matters: he was taken to the Hospital de la Santa Creu — the same medieval institution that had served laborers, migrants, the poor, and the injured of El Raval for centuries. Gaudí was admitted as an unidentified man. Not as Barcelona’s great architect. Not as the designer of Palau Güell, just blocks away. Not as the builder of La Sagrada Familia, the new cathedral rising above the city. Just another body. He remained there three days before friends and colleagues identified him. By then it was too late. He died on June 10, 1926, in the hospital that had quietly absorbed the city’s invisible lives for generations. This is not trivia. It’s a precise illustration of how cities work. In moments of crisis, identity collapses into physical appearance. Systems respond not to legacy but to legibility. Gaudí, stripped of every marker of class and recognition, passed instantly into the same institutional channel as dockworkers and market laborers. The same hospital. The same beds. The same bureaucratic logic. For decades, critics have framed El Raval as a place of disorder and moral failure. But when the city’s most celebrated architect was reduced to anonymity, this is where he landed. Not in a private clinic. Not in a bourgeois enclave. In the city’s oldest public hospital, embedded in the very district it spent so long surveilling and disavowing. Gaudí’s death doesn’t reveal an irony. It reveals a consistency. El Raval was never the city’s outside. It was its safety net. When systems fail, when identities blur, when lives fall suddenly out of narrative, cities rely on places like this to catch the consequences. The city built monuments elsewhere and told cleaner stories. But the record remains. Gaudí entered the archive the same way thousands of others did: through injury, anonymity, and care administered without ceremony. Cities remember their icons. They depend on their margins. And when the distinction collapses, the margins often tell the truer story. --- ## Living Inside the System Living in El Raval today doesn’t feel like inhabiting a ruin or a revival. It feels like inhabiting a system that never stopped running. From my balcony on Carrer de les Cabres, the same circulation that has defined this area for centuries continues. Deliveries before dawn. Market workers moving with purpose. Night life dissolving into morning routines. Catalan lovers shouting at each other and loving each other. Tourists drifting through without understanding what they’re passing over. Residents who know exactly where they are and why. The aesthetics have changed. The function hasn’t. This is still a place where proximity matters more than polish. Where people live close to work because time is a constraint. Where anonymity remains a form of insulation. Where the city’s cultural performance — now globalized and monetized — rests on labor that stays largely invisible. What’s different now is not the role of the neighborhood, but the language used to describe it. Urban renewal frames places like this as problems to be solved. Gentrification reframes them as “authentic” once the risk has been partially mitigated. Both narratives miss the point. El Raval is not a transitional phase on the way to something better. It is a permanent urban function. The same forces that once routed farmers, porters, performers, and the sick through these streets now route service workers, migrants, artists, and gig labor of a global digital economy. The names change. The paperwork changes. The surveillance continues. The logic holds. Living here sharpens perception. Noise stops reading as disorder and starts reading as signal. Density stops feeling like congestion and starts feeling like compression. Turnover stops suggesting instability and starts suggesting circulation. Cities like to celebrate their monuments and sanitize their margins. But when something breaks — when someone falls, when identity collapses, when systems overload — it’s places like this that absorb the shock. That was true when the city failed to recognize Gaudí. It was true when Enriqueta Martí became the container for collective fear. It is still true now, in quieter, more bureaucratic ways. El Raval is not Barcelona’s shadow district. It’s one of its load-bearing structures. Urbanism fails when it treats neighborhoods like this as anomalies. One day, I’ll pull every record tied to this address — reconstruct the households, the trades, the injuries, the departures. But I don’t need that data yet to understand what this place is doing. The city is already telling the story. You just have to live close enough to listen to them. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit multiversethinking.substack.com [https://multiversethinking.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1]

Premium Pulp Fiction S1:E4 Ukrainian Philosophy and Poetry Put on a Spacesuit

In this episode of the Premium Pulp Fiction podcast, my guest is Maksym Van Shamrai [http://www.mvanshamrai.com/] — millennial novelist, cultural theorist, and Ukrainian expat. In 2010, Maks had just finished his doctoral studies in Kyiv. His thesis examined something called cultural anthropocentrism — the idea that humans are both the authors of culture and the products of it. Heavy stuff. The kind of thing you wrap in abstract philosophical language until nobody understands it anymore. Then he attended a lecture on the role of poetry in forming personality. At the end, confused by the jargon, he asked the speaker to explain it simply. She smiled and said: “Poetry helps the heart think when the brain is tired.” That sentence cracked something open. Maks realized his ideas about humanity, memory, power, and meaning didn’t want to stay inside academic language anymore. They wanted characters. Danger. Conflict. Emotion. “2010 became the moment,” Maks told me on this week’s podcast, “when my philosophy quietly put on a spacesuit and stepped into fiction.” A Book That Lived Several Lives Scions of the Last Hope began in Ukraine under a different title — The Last Crew — written first in Russian, the everyday language of southern Ukraine at the time. By 2011, Maks had moved to Spain, diving deeper into art and culture, meeting the love of his life, learning Spanish at the government language school in Vigo. The manuscript paused at chapter seven. He was absorbing rather than creating. Then came 2022. When the sirens sounded in Kyiv, Maks was working on chapter eleven. Something opened inside him. The book wasn’t just philosophical anymore — it became deeply emotional. He finished the manuscript in Ukrainian, then translated the entire novel into Spanish himself. Not with Google Translate. With dictionaries, with his Spanish family, with random guys at the calisthenics park who could tell him how young people actually spoke. “It was quite a challenge,” he said. “Asking people, asking my family, my friends — which was quite a nice journey.” He wanted to publish first in Ukraine, his home. But Ukrainian publishers had been hit by missiles. The infrastructure was gone. So Spain became the path forward. The Spanish edition, Vástagos de la Última Esperanza, was released in 2025 by Caligrama, an imprint of Penguin Random House. And now Premium Pulp Fiction has acquired the English-language rights. What Survives When a Story Crosses Borders One of the things I pushed Maks on during our conversation was voice. How do you carry an Eastern European literary sensibility — with its space for silence, moral tension, slow philosophical moments — into English, a language that often rewards acceleration? His answer was precise: “I didn’t want to sound very Spanish or German or whatever. I wanted to sound Ukrainian. Eastern European.” That’s not about being different for its own sake. It’s about protecting the philosophical heart of the book. Scions of the Last Hope isn’t just a space adventure with explosions and heroes. It explores what Maks calls “biopolitical science fiction” — questions about power over human life itself. Who is allowed to live? Whose memory is preserved? Which version of humanity gets a future? These questions need space. They need reflection, not just fast action. “If I remove that deeper, quieter layer,” he said, “the story would lose part of its meaning.” The Seed of the Novel When I asked Maks what the book is really about, he offered two questions that haunt the entire narrative: Can you build a new future without carrying the ghosts of the past? When systems of power and survival define humanity, what remains of the human? His answer to the second: Choice. Fragile, constrained, often punished — but not entirely erasable. That’s the seed. Set in 2136, after planetary cataclysm has plunged humanity into collapse, the story follows scientists racing to understand a distant exoplanet that might become humanity’s new home — while navigating corporate intrigue, government conspiracies, and a mystery encoded in a single prehistoric word. It’s dystopian science fiction, yes. But it’s also a reflection on identity, memory, and what it means to remain human when technology and power structures are trying to decide that for you. Eastern European Roots Maks cites Stanisław Lem, the Strugatsky Brothers, Isaac Asimov, and Arthur C. Clarke as influences — but also Ukrainian writer Volodymyr Arenev and Polish author Andrzej Sapkowski (yes, The Witcher). And films: Star Wars, Alien, Prometheus. What unites them? “Humanity facing the big questions,” he said. “I’m always looking for the philosophical point in every single book or movie. Even if there is no philosophical point.” He grew up in a household in Mykolaiv where his father — a professor of physics and mathematics — also played guitar, piano, and accordion, and wrote poetry that he never published. His mother taught primary school. His grandmother taught math and geometry for decades. That combination of science, art, and education runs through everything Maks writes. What It Means to Become a PPF Author At Premium Pulp Fiction, we don’t acquire books because they’re easy. We acquire them because they’re worth the work. Maks didn’t just hand over a manuscript. He entered into a rigorous editorial process — one that asks hard questions about language, identity, rhythm, and what survives translation. We’ve had uncomfortable conversations about pacing. We’ve killed darlings while protecting voice. We’ve worked through what he calls “digestion” — the slow process of adapting tone, idiom, and emotional nuance for a new audience without losing the story’s soul. “It’s like being an actor in the same film, but with a different director,” he said. “The story is the same, the scenes are the same, the characters are the same. But you have to pause, think, process.” That’s what real editing looks like. A Message to Young Ukrainian Writers I asked Maks what he would say to young Ukrainian writers and thinkers during these dark times — with his home city of Mykolaiv under near-constant bombardment, with blackouts lasting 22 hours a day, with even his webmaster in Kyiv apologizing for missed deadlines because there’s no electricity. His answer: “We have to keep being human. Think about imagination, which is very important to create things. Preserve the culture, the identity. Because we are facing challenging times — someone wants to erase our identity. Even when we can speak their language, it doesn’t mean we have to erase our own culture and our own language. It’s a beautiful language.” Then he paused. “Just don’t let imagination slip away from your mind. Keep it inside. Try to develop something interesting, something new, something unknown to the rest of the world.” As his father would say: More poetry. The Dedication At the end of our conversation, Maks read the dedication of Scions of the Last Hope — first in Ukrainian, then in English. It’s a dedication to his country and his people facing dark times. I won’t reproduce it here. You’ll have to read the book. But I will say this: the imagery, the pain, the journey of Maks, his family, and his people — it’s all there on the page. This isn’t a book that happened in spite of history. It’s a book that happened because of it. The Spanish edition, Vástagos de la Última Esperanza, is available now on Amazon and everywhere books are sold. The English edition from Premium Pulp Fiction is coming later this year. Stay tuned for more updates — and listen to the full conversation on the Premium Pulp Fiction Podcast. Douglas Stuart McDaniel is the founder of Premium Pulp Fiction and host of the Premium Pulp Fiction Podcast. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit multiversethinking.substack.com [https://multiversethinking.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1]

Redlining Didn’t Disappear. It Learned New Software

In this episode of Citizen One: Exploring Our Urban Future, I sit down with Derek Lumpkins to talk about cities and neighborhoods—but not in the way cities usually get discussed. We didn’t start with master plans or policy language. We started with Roxbury. With lived memory and 150 years of Black history. With what it means to grow up inside a neighborhood that is always being talked about, rarely talked with, and almost never trusted to define itself. Roxbury matters because it exposes something cities prefer to hide: the way stereotypes quietly stand in for governance. How assumptions about race, class, and behavior become shorthand for decisions about investment, policing, education, and opportunity. Not announced. Just understood. Embedded in tone. In posture. In who gets listened to. This is also why Derek’s work in DEI—diversity, equity, and inclusion—matters now more than ever, precisely because the field is under strain. What’s happening to DEI today isn’t subtle. The language remains, but the commitment is thinning. Roles are being eliminated, renamed, or buried inside HR. Expectations remain impossibly high, while power contracts. Derek describes a familiar pattern: organizations say they want honesty, but recoil when that honesty threatens comfort, hierarchy, or control. DEI has become an easy target because it forces proximity. It asks institutions to look at who benefits, who bears risk, and who has historically been excluded from decision-making. And in moments of uncertainty—economic, political, cultural—institutions tend to protect stability over introspection. What gets lost in the backlash is that DEI, at its best, was never about optics. It was about stakeholders. About whether people who live with the consequences of decisions have any real say in how those decisions are made. About whether cities, companies, and governments can move beyond symbolic inclusion toward shared accountability. In this episode, we don’t talk about DEI as a slogan or a checklist. We talk about it as a profession that has been asked to absorb institutional failure while being stripped of real authority. A field that was invited into rooms at the height of moral urgency—and is now being quietly sidelined as political winds shift and budgets tighten. Derek is candid about the toll this takes on practitioners. Many are asked to be translators, buffers, and shock absorbers—expected to carry the emotional weight of structural problems they did not create and are not empowered to fix. Burnout isn’t a failure of commitment. It’s a predictable outcome of being positioned between institutional inertia and lived reality. This is why the current moment matters more than ever. As cities face widening inequality, displacement, and distrust, retreating from equity work doesn’t make those tensions disappear. It simply removes the people trained to name them early, before they harden into crisis. When DEI is reduced to compliance or eliminated entirely, what follows isn’t neutrality—it’s silence. And silence, in cities, commonly benefits the already insulated. What Derek makes clear is that the question isn’t whether DEI “worked.” The question is whether institutions have ever been willing to let it work. Whether they are prepared to move beyond listening toward recognizing the existing agency of a plurality of stakeholders. Whether they are ready to treat marginalized communities not as problems to be managed, but as partners with legitimate claims on the future. That question doesn’t go away just because an acronym falls out of favor. From there, the conversation moved—literally and metaphorically—across borders. We talked about El Raval, my neighborhood here in Barcelona. A neighborhood that tourists experience as “gritty” or “authentic,” that inmobiliarios, or realtors here, talk about its dangers on their clickbait TikTok reels. Residents of El Raval, however, experience this district as layered, culturally rich, both vibrant and fragile, and under constant negotiation. Raval is not broken. It’s over-observed and under-protected. Like Roxbury, it’s a place where outside narratives arrive faster than local agency. That’s where travel enters the frame. One of the sharpest throughlines in this episode is how wealth functions as mobility—not just physical movement, but cognitive freedom. The ability to leave. To compare. To see that the way power operates in one city is not inevitable, just familiar. Travel exposes the lie that “this is just how things are.” For people without that mobility, stereotypes harden into destiny. We talked about Tulsa—not as a historical abstraction, but as an example of how cities remember selectively. How Black prosperity is tolerated until it isn’t. How destruction is framed as tragedy rather than policy. And how the long tail of that violence still shapes who is considered a legitimate stakeholder today. Derek is clear-eyed about this: cities are full of people who care deeply, who want to make things better, who are invited into rooms precisely because they bring credibility or conscience. But too often, they are invited without agency. Asked to absorb risk. Asked to translate harm. Asked to make systems feel humane without being allowed to change how they actually work. That’s not inclusion. That’s extraction. A recurring tension in this conversation is the difference between being a stakeholder and being a symbol. Stakeholders have leverage. They shape outcomes. Symbols are displayed, consulted, thanked—and ignored. Many institutions confuse the two, then act surprised when trust erodes. What makes this episode resonate is that it refuses easy villains. The problem isn’t individual bad actors. It’s structural insulation. The distance between decision-makers and consequences. Between those who benefit from stability and those who pay for it when systems fail. Cities don’t just distribute resources. They distribute exposure. Who is allowed to fail quietly. Who has to fail publicly. Who gets second chances. Who is never supposed to leave. By the end of the conversation, what emerges isn’t a prescription so much as a warning: if cities want legitimacy, they have to relinquish some control. They have to trust people who live with the outcomes. They have to stop treating neighborhoods as problems to be managed and start treating them as partners with memory, intelligence, and agency. Roxbury. Raval. Tulsa. Different geographies. Same fault lines. Cities don’t suffer from a lack of vision. They suffer from a lack of shared power. And until that changes, no amount of rhetoric—no matter how well intentioned—is going to close the distance between those who decide and those who live with the results. That distance is the real line cities keep drawing. And everyone knows who it’s drawn around. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit multiversethinking.substack.com [https://multiversethinking.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1]