The writer and journalist Antonio Baños Boncompain (Barcelona, 1967), lives between Nou Barris and Sant Andreu, two Barcelona districts which are at the same time separated and united by the Meridiana, an avenue which, in contrast to the more-celebrated Diagonal, is the route that connects the working-class neighbourhoods with the city centre. In love with a combative and cantankerous Barcelona, he has just published Barcelona no té solució ("Barcelona has no solution", Viena Edicions, 2023), and, less than two months before the 2023 municipal elections, he reflects on the city and the love-hate relationship that many of its residents have with their hometown, and spins a narrative about a city model that evolves behind the back of the citizens and that runs from Franco-era mayor Porcioles all the way to Ada Colau.
Without explicitly leaping on the bandwagon of any mayoral candidate - not even his former colleagues from the left-wing CUP - Baños has criticisms of all four main candidates in the elections: Xavier Trias, Ada Colau, Ernest Maragall and Jaume Collboni, all four of whom, he says, have failed to put the city in order despite that fact that each of them has played a governing role in it at one time or another. And beyond the electoral context, his book also fires torpedos at the waterline of the Barcelona of mass tourism - you only need to see the T-shirt with which he presents himself at the interview, with the slogan "Tourists, you're not welcome" - arguing that if Barcelona is a brand, its citizens are thus workers and should unionize; as well as taking on the expat bubble, that of foreign residents on high incomes who fail to take root. In the face of all this, he insists on standing up for the city's neighbourhood character, and its sense of being barcelonina and Catalan.
Senyor Baños, in your new book Barcelona has no solution, you make a series of critical reflections on the city. What does this book respond to? In other words, has there been a turning point, some kind of epiphany?
Epiphany is what we Barcelona people have every day. I believe there is a sense of irritation about the city, and Viena, which is a publishing house that makes books about Barcelona, approached me thinking we could talk about it. This civic frustration that we all have, that Barcelona has no model or reference, that it is uncomfortable, that it is dirty, that it is expensive and that it forces us to leave, collides with a proud narrative about being victims of our own success, about the America's Cup, the talent, the start-ups and the hubs and all those things that mean that this book could appear all by itself.
The book cover grabs your attention: juxtaposing patron saint Santa Eulàlia, the famous city image of the Civil War soldier Marina Ginestà, Molotov cocktails…
It's by Isaac Zamora, who does this thirties type thing and a bit of manga. The idea is a divided Barcelona. On the one hand, revolutionary Barcelona, the Raval, Marina Ginestà, the Orsini anarchist bomb, all this imagery of the radical left Rosa de Foc, and on the other the 5-star hotels, luxury brands and even Santa Eulàlia phoning for a Glovo food delivery, and the battered old Barcelona model. It has these two things about Barcelona and it portrays them very well, that it is a very beautiful city, that it loves its aesthetics, that it loves itself but at the same time it has this urge that would send everything up in flames.
For many years, with the independence process in particular, there has been talk of the figure of the annoyed Catalan. Does the annoyed barceloní or barcelonina exist? Is that you?
More than annoyed, I would say that there is the Barcelona resident who is a complainer or a protester, it is one of the features of the Barcelona character. I am writing about what I think happens to many of us, that the relationship with Barcelona is a "tango or bolero" relationship, that you love her very much but you want to kill her, but you also want to stay with her. And you go out into the street and step on a dog turd and say: 'This is too much! It's impossible to live here!" And you go round the corner and suddenly there is a building from the 1920s, a park, or a wonderful view of the plain of Barcelona and you affirm that this is the best place in the world, there is no place to live other than Barcelona. This mental split is a bit like the one on the cover, between wanting to burn it all down and having an exaggerated sense of satisfaction of being part of Barcelona, perhaps too extreme, this pathetic pride which I think is an essential part of the Barcelonan. This is why I say that Barcelona has no solution because the same Barcelona resident is always divided between a Barcelona that they want, that they dream of, and the real one, the one that can be what it would like to be, the one that Madrid allows us to be, the one that Madrid does not allow us to be. We are always pushed somewhere else, it is a city that does not have enough power to be what it should be.
The thesis of the book is that Barcelona has no solution, but that it struggles. And that if we are a company, we must set up a union.
The idea is that it has no solution but it has a future. And now we will see that in the elections. The title is also linked to the fact that we will all see during the two weeks of the election campaign how they try and offer us definitive solutions. The Olympic model was the solution that seemed to have put an end to the history of Barcelona, the end to the history of the city, that it would be open and cosmopolitan, but no, that is now declining, tensions are rising and people are organizing. And I say that it will never have a solution because there is struggle. Therefore, if they tell us that Barcelona is a company, and a brand, then we are not citizens, we are employees of the brand and if we are workers we must unionize! The idea is that instead of being citizens and living the organization through neighbourhood associations, we do it through unions like the Tenants Union. Living in Barcelona is in itself a job, therefore, unionism is the natural way to organize people.
There are local entities that go beyond the operation of a neighbourhood association, for example, in Sant Andreu the rejection of door-to-door garbage collection was organized outside the neighbourhood association, among other reasons because the president is on the Barcelona en Comú list.
There is an official discourse - for example, in this case about recycling or the green city - that is generic but still imposed. And then something like the door-to-door system, which theoretically everyone should like, imposed in a district like Sant Andreu, which has very particular characteristics, means that the situation of social peace in Barcelona at any time has this capacity for self-organization beyond neighbourhood associations, beyond official speeches. I think that these are the things that make me so proud of the city, that out of nowhere you see people, I don't know how many people, stopping a home eviction or protesting about it, and then they go home.
You are critical of the whole of Maragallism, of Trias, and of Colau. Two months before the election, is there anyone good? How should a candidate convince you to vote for them?
It's too late now. I want to emphasize that in the book I point out that there is a thread from [long-running Barcelona mayor under the Franco regime] José María de Porcioles to [current mayor] Ada Colau, Barcelona is the city that Porcioles dreamed about and now it seems that the city has created a new model, but no, everything that Porcioles dreamed about is what we are living through now. And this is important to emphasize. That said, there is one problem with all four main candidates. A serious problem, which is that they are offering solutions when all of them have already governed and did not provide the solutions they are now offering. In other words, when Trias says 'we will do such and such a thing', why didn't he do it in his [2011-2015] mandate? The same is true with Collboni [deputy mayor for most of the 2015-2023 period] and the same with Maragall [part of the city government in the 90s and of other administrations since] and Colau. I know that everyone has governed at different times and that the reality of now is not the same as before, likewise, it is very difficult to feel "new" when you have been in the municipal government for a long time, because they have all been there for a long time, even Colau from her time in the DESC Observatory, the PAH housing group and all that, she has been in municipal politics for some time. So it is difficult to excite, to surprise.
You say that in Barcelona we don't have either a port or an airport.
This is a city that has no port or airport. The Port of Barcelona headquarters are located on the Avenida Partenón in Madrid, which is where Puertos del Estado [infrastructure management company] is. If you cannot manage either the port or the airport, nor can you manage major buildings or infrastructures, nor can you manage the regulation of things that happen in Barcelona because they are the competence of the state, you get the idea of something I also talk about in the book, that Barcelona has two options and only two, either it is a provincial city of the Kingdom of Spain, bigger than Valencia and bigger than Soria, but one more city and you submit to the limitations and the powers you have. Or else, Barcelona is the capital of a Catalonia with sovereignty, I no longer say independence, but with a certain sovereignty that it can exercise as the capital of a country. If not, Barcelona will continue to be a great potentiality that is constantly castrated because it does not have the power it needs.
Is Barcelona less and less Catalan?
I think that this is a problem, because cosmopolitanism is the ideological arm of global capitalism. There is nothing better about being cosmopolitan than being Catalan, the cosmopolitans are not better or smarter people, although basically they are richer than locals. A cosmopolitan city means nothing. Barcelona has always been cosmopolitan, there are records of that, in the book I quote Tudela, an Aragonese Jew who arrived in the 12th century, who said then that it was full of Egyptians, Libyans, Italians, Balkans. Of course everyone lives in Barcelona, but it is either a provincial city, that is to say, in any case, not Catalan, and is lost in the morass of global cities, tourist cities, spa cities and theme park cities, or it commits to being a Catalan city, being the capital of Catalonia, and then you can stand out both in the world and in Catalonia. I believe that the solution for Barcelona is Catalonia. Because where Barcelona's industries are located is in Catalonia, where the real talent of Barcelona is in the people who come down from Vic to study here or from Berguedà to work here, where you have the natural resources, the logistical opportunities, it is in Catalonia where you can stand out because it is your mother culture, it is Catalan. What stands out about you is that you are Catalan. Then I think that the solution in Barcelona would be less Barcelona and more Catalonia. There was that political sense that Barcelona belonged to the Catalan Socialists and the territory beyond belonged to [Catalanista centre-right party] Convergència and a somewhat schizoid split was created. No Barcelona resident could be too Catalan because then you would too close to being "convergent" and Catalanity was always convergent, you couldn't be Catalan and left-wing. So they became divided like East and West Germany, the metropolitan area was red, Spanish, xarnega, cosmopolitan and all that, and the rest, the land, was goats, cows, barretines and gatherings. I have ridiculed it, but not much, it is the map, it is Barcelona's relationship with Catalonia and it must be broken. Economically it is ridiculous, socially and culturally it is pathetic. But it is the split made by the parties that shared power for 40 years.
Where the real talent of Barcelona is in the people who come down from Vic to study here or from Berguedà to work here
You talk about "Marcalona", the theme park, the Barcelona Potemkin, how can all this be fixed?
It's the Barcelona of the facade, everyone knows, the tendency to knock down the building and with a [remaining] modernist facade you create a luxury loft or hotel that architecturally has nothing to do with that, and this is somewhat the spirit of the city, let the facades remain and throw away everything that could be of internal value. For example, Gaudí and modernisme are magnified, but the tradition of workers' struggle is hidden. A chimney is left there standing on its own, but no-one explains who the Noi de la Sucre was, who Layret was. This reduction to the facade, to the bullfighter depicted in trencadís that would be the culmination of this semiotic madness, how can you fix it? Being more Barcelona again, which is a bit like being more Catalan in the Barcelona way. It is not an identity issue. You can call yourself Rashida or Wilson, you can call yourself anything you like and feel deeply Barcelonan and rooted. It is not a question of origin, it is a question of continuity and will. If the city is made to visit and not to live in, if it is a city for passers-by, those of us who live there also pass through. On the other hand, if you give it the idea that Barcelona is for living, for raising a family, for raising children, for raising a business, that if you are born in the same neighbourhood you stay there all your life because you like it, because you have roots, that is the complete opposite of the cosmopolitan who hangs around for five years. If we return to this idea, we will return to a much more authentic Barcelona and this is where talent and businesses are developed. Many ideas are developed that cannot be done in a "facade city".
So the chimney doesn't let us see the neighbourhood?
That's right, the chimney doesn't let us see the neighbourhood. Memory has been preserved, something that is also a very slippery term. Things are preserved, but what is most important is not preserved, which is that you have to be able to live in Barcelona and this has to do with social life. A Barcelona resident must be able to access the Fossar de les Moreres, access the historic centre, as a place that is theirs and not as someone having to do battle with the crowds because he has some administrative matter to deal with. We have lost the places of non-historical memory, symbolic memory. Even Plaça Catalunya, where you used to walk around as a child, the Rambla. The places where a series of initiation rituals were passed from father to son that made you a Barcelonan. Going to the Forn Mistral, going to buy the tortell, the Golondrines, which seems silly but creates a continuity and a kind of rooting and all that is lost and you go to the franchises that are from anywhere. Thus being from Barcelona is not a way of life but rather just a constituency, and thus all the power that a city has is lost. Because the city is not a place where you put things, it is a place where you live.
The cities with lowest income and which are the most difficult to live in are the tourist cities and we are experiencing this now in Barcelona
So what have tourists and expats done to it?
Tourists irritate and one thing I can't stand is how they just wander about and you have to get out of their way. It's a real annoyance, we're talking about one million three hundred thousand residents and twenty-three million overnight stays among tourists and visitors. For every Barcelona resident, we have 23 people who do not pay for services. When you get on the bus, you pay half with the ticket and half with taxes. A tourist who gets on the bus pays half. All these plastics that they throw away, they don't pay for the garbage, they don't pay for the water. Now that we have a drought decree, what about all those rooftop swimming pools, they don't pay, they don't do anything and they extract services from the city of Barcelona. In other words, they are bad business. Tourism is bad business. Tourism ruins the city that it enters. We've seen it in the Balearic Islands, we have seen it on the Catalan coast. The cities with lowest income and which are the most difficult to live in are the tourist cities and we are experiencing this now in Barcelona. And the expats are the diabolical variation, this group who they call talented, and I don't know how they know when someone comes to Barcelona who has talent and who has to go to the CIE [Foreigners' internment centre], because this is the thing, there is a racist and absolutely classist division in the official discourse, even that of Colau, which says that if you are black and poor, you have no talent for anything. Then it is very possible that you will end up at the CIE. If you're black but you're rich and you have a MacBook computer, then you'll be going to a Welcome Barcelona conference. Going to the CIE or going to Welcome Barcelona depends on how much money you have. This is terrible. It's all a big operation, basically with real estate, to bring in numbers of young people, up to 40 years old, who spend an average of five years in the city, who are looking to be there, but not live there. Expats are very good for a politician, because they will never ask you for a place for their dog to piss, they will never ask you to build an old people's home, they will never ask you for a venue for their colla to rehearse, because they don't give a damn about any of that. They won't want to protect a special tree or the house that belonged to an artist or where a writer was born because they won't know anything about that, they just want some trendy cafes and fifteen minutes to the beach and affordable bikes, they don't want a CAP health centre either because they have private health. Neither do they need paediatrics or geriatrics. And besides, they don't protest because they don't form neighbourhood associations, they don't bang pots and pans on the balconies. In addition, they don't speak Catalan and don't want nursery schools, nor do they need Catalan-language insertion programmes for new arrivals in schools. All in English and they don't complain. And if the thing is dirty, they still find it picturesque. And I have imagined the fiction of removing the Barcelona people who are very entrepreneurial and putting in a city of expats - by the way, we are talking about fifty thousand expats, which is the whole of Poblenou. It sounds anecdotal, but it is not, and the real estate movements behind this movement of cosmopolitans are simply huge.
What would be your advice for Barcelona residents who want to leave?
It's a drama. We all have friends, especially with young kids, who have decided to leave, but it breaks their hearts. There are also people who are unable to live in their parents' neighbourhood. Much of the care [of others] is covered by the family, living close to your parents is also a very Barcelona wish. Being able to go and take care of them, having them come to you to take care of the kids. There is a study that says that by 2050 no one will live in Venice, no Venetians will live there. Because they will all live outside the city and go there to work as pizza cooks or gondoliers and at seven in the evening head home. It will be a theme park city. I don't know if Barcelona is on the way to becoming something like that or if I'm exaggerating. In any case, the feeling of being a local resident, that where you live you are at ease, you will be able to make a life there, you will be able to raise kids, make friends, all this is destroyed. If your rent goes up every five years, you can't live in the same place for five years.
There is an optimistic side, I see a clearer public consciousness, after the protests and complaints, that Barcelona can still be saved
The other part of the question is what advice do you have for Barcelona residents who want to stay.
Those of us who want to stay? Organization. There is an optimistic side, I see a clearer public consciousness, after the protests and complaints, that there is more and more awareness that Barcelona can still be saved. The other day Resistim al Gòtic, which is already a very interesting verb, to resist, held a calçotada and occupied Plaça Reial. As it was during the pandemic, children occupying tourist spaces. The recovery of space is part of the recovery of our life in the city. And I am hopeful that this side of Barcelona, the Marina Ginestà side and the organized struggle will soon return. If we have endured 2000 years, it will be a shame if it is our generation that loses the city. It will also be bad if we lose Catalan, and Catalan Barcelona. Those who are organized and those of us who want the city for ourselves have always been in the minority. But this does not mean any kind of purity - with the contamination of people and accents and origins that Barcelona has, I think that the awareness of where we are will indeed recover. And all thanks to the book!