Barcelona has been transforming its intersections for years. Taking back space that was given to cars in the 1960s and 1970s, returning it to the people who live on the streets that those cars cut through. The city calls them superilles — clusters of streets deprioritized for through traffic, freed up for walking, cycling, planting, sitting, dancing. Rupture, at municipal scale — the car's code broken on the street, the street turned toward the commons. The policy was controversial when it started.
Barcelona has also been running out of water. The reservoirs that supply the city have been at critical levels, some years below twenty percent of capacity. The drought is structural — the Mediterranean is warming, the precipitation patterns are shifting, the snowpack that feeds the rivers is thinner each decade. The city that has figured out how to return streets to people is also a city learning, under pressure, that it belongs to a commons larger than any municipal government can govern: the planet's hydrological cycle, the atmosphere, the climate that no one owns and everyone depends on.
The party in the street and the water crisis are the same story. The question of who governs shared resources — who decides what the street is for, who decides how the water is used, who bears the costs of the decisions and who captures the benefits — is one question, asked at different scales. Barcelona is getting better at asking it. Most cities aren't asking it at all.
The deep memory has a name: the CNT. The Confederación Nacional del Trabajo — anarcho-syndicalist, federated, assembly-based; at its 1930s peak, over a million members in Catalonia. The CNT-FAI ran Barcelona in 1936. Taking it down took fascists and Communists, both — Franco's army from outside the Republic, and inside the Republic the Stalinist-aligned forces attacking the anarchist and POUM positions in Barcelona's May Days of 1937. Different uniforms, same intention. By the time the war ended, what was left of the CNT was driven underground, killed off, scattered into exile.
The form survived. Murray Bookchin took his lessons from it and called the practice libertarian municipalism. The Barcelona coalitions of the twenty-first century take theirs from the same place.
The CNT was Spain's part of a wider European left of the 1920s and 30s — Gramsci writing in a Mussolini prison, Reich in Berlin naming the somatic-political fascism of the era. The CNT was the part of that generation that built the most actual power. They lost by being defeated, not by being wrong.
Catalonia has outlasted most of the empires it has been part of, by not being one itself.
The Crown of Aragon did project Mediterranean power in the late medieval period — briefly controlling Sicily, Sardinia, even Naples for a few decades under Alfonso V. But the political imagination that survived into modernity, especially after the Bourbon erasure of Catalan autonomy in 1714, organized around something else: a region, a language, a working-class urban culture, a confederal tradition. Never an imperial actor. A constituent of empires, never their center.
The empires that contained it have fallen. The Holy Roman Empire, gone. The Habsburg-Spanish empire, gone. The Bourbon centralization undone by 1978. What persists is the city, the language, the practices, the relationship of people to land and to each other.
Barcelona's coalitions of the twenty-first century stand on this. They have a city, not a metropole; a region, not an empire. That has been enough.
Participatory budgeting deserves its own naming. The Brazilian city of Porto Alegre invented the form in 1989: residents of a neighborhood decide directly what portion of the municipal budget gets spent on what. Money allocated by the people who will live with the consequences. Not a town hall meeting where people speak and then officials decide — a real allocation, binding on the city.
The form spread. Porto Alegre's experiment was studied, copied, adapted across dozens of cities globally. By the early 2000s it was a known practice with measurable results: reduced corruption, more equitable infrastructure spending, higher civic participation. The tool existed. It was waiting.
When Barcelona's coalition came to power, it had a tool kit. In 2017, the city built the Decidim platform and released it as open source — federated, modular, available to any city that wanted to use it. The tool turned: built to be given away. Decidim gave participatory budgeting digital scale: every neighborhood could deliberate, propose, vote. Even small allocations changed something. Practice the thing and you become someone for whom the thing is normal.
By 2014, Barcelona had what the rest of Spain did not yet have: a coalition ready to govern.
The 15M movement — the squares movement of 2011, when Spaniards by the millions occupied plazas to refuse the post-2008 austerity consensus — had not produced a party. It produced something stranger: a culture of assembly. Culture in the fermenter’s sense — a living thing, particular to its vessel, useless without a substrate to work on.
Occupy Wall Street erupted in the same year on the same impulse, and produced the same thing. In the United States, the culture of assembly dissolved without leaving an institutional shadow — Zuccotti Park cleared by police. In Spain, most of the assemblies also dissolved. But in a few places they crystallized into something durable. The difference was not the will of the people in the parks. It was the ground the parks sat on. The same starter, poured onto different ground. You can smell the difference in soil before you can say it — freshness or rot, ripeness or desiccation. One ground had been fed for decades: turned, inoculated by every generation of practice that survived in it. The other had been paved.
Barcelona en Comú — Barcelona in Common — was born from that crystallization. It was not a party. It was a rhizome — a citizen platform built bottom-up from neighborhood assemblies, sending shoots up wherever the soil was good: PAH activists, Podemos cadres, ecologist groups, neighborhood associations, the green-left, independents who had never run for anything. The platform asked its assemblies what the program should be. The assemblies decided.
This is what years of organizing infrastructure make possible: when the political opening came, the coalition was already built. The CNT memory, the autonomous community framework, the participatory practice — these had not been waiting. They had been preparing. The lineage acting in the present, summoned by the opening.
Barcelona has a peculiar financial position for a major European city: there is no stock exchange of its own to speak of. The historical Bolsa de Barcelona was folded into the integrated Spanish exchanges; the real capital markets sit in Madrid. Barcelona's economic substrate is equity and business — ownership of small and medium enterprises, the deep network of family firms, the port, manufacturing, the design industries, the cooperative sector, the tourist economy. Not securities. Not the financial extraction that produced Zurich or Frankfurt or captured Geneva.
This is a different shape of wealth. The capital is in the workshops and on the streets, not in trading floors.
What Barcelona has instead, and has built deliberately since the 1992 Olympics, is biopolitical capital. Quality of life. Climate. The walkable city. The plazas built around old trees. The plane trees over the boulevards. The food. The reputation. People — and increasingly the global pool of mobile knowledge workers, designers, scientists — want to be in Barcelona. The city commands mind share. The mind share converts into capital without going through a stock exchange.
This is its own kind of vulnerability — gentrification, tourism strangulation, the housing market pressed by short-term rentals — but it is not the vulnerability of a financialized city. A different power, attached to a different vulnerability, with different room to act.
Ada Colau was a housing activist before she was a mayor.
She helped found the PAH — the Plataforma de Afectados por la Hipoteca — in 2009, in the wreckage of the 2008 crisis, when Spanish banks were evicting families they had just sold variable-rate loans to. For five years she organized eviction blockades: stood in doorways, brought cameras, refused to let people be put out. The work made her a public face for an entire sector of dispossessed Spain.
In 2014, when the coalition formed around her, she ran for mayor. She had never held office. She was just past forty. She had been arrested at protests and bailed out by other activists. She had no political career to protect.
In 2015, she won.
What she brought to office was not the political class's view of itself. It was the view from the doorways. The eight years of her mayoralty — re-elected 2019, narrowly lost 2023 — were governed in the cadence of a person who had done direct work. The participatory budgets, the assembly networks, the housing reforms — these were not technocratic features. They were the practice of someone who had spent years refusing to make peace with the city's structural cruelty, now with the keys to the building.
This kind of coalition is not generated from nothing. Barcelona's working class has been organizing itself for a long time, and the city remembers.
In 1936, when Franco's forces moved against the elected government, Barcelona was the place where the people most decisively did not let them in. Anarchist unions and antifascist militias ran the city. Factories were collectivized. The trams kept running, the trains kept running, the bread kept getting baked — under workers' councils, not bosses. It was a real social revolution, and Franco needed three years and the collapse of international solidarity to defeat it. The city fell in January 1939.
What followed was forty years of dictatorship: executions, exile, the Catalan language banned in schools and the press, neighborhood organizations driven underground. But the memory did not die. It survived in kitchen tables, in songs, in the persistence of the language under suppression, in the slow rebuilding of cultural infrastructure after Franco's death in 1975.
When the assemblies of Barcelona en Comú began meeting in 2014, they were not inventing a new form. They were activating an old one. The neighborhood assemblies of the twenty-first century rhyme with the workers' assemblies of 1936 because they come out of the same city, the same memory, the same refusal.
Paris has been doing this too. Anne Hidalgo has been mayor since 2014 — almost exactly Colau's tenure. She has closed the Seine quays to cars. She has pushed the fifteen-minute city, removed parking spaces by the thousand, and built bicycle infrastructure where before there was only traffic. Paris on a Sunday in central arrondissements is recognizably different from Paris a decade ago — pedestrians on the Seine quays where the cars used to be.
Hidalgo was born in Spain. Her family came to France from Franco's Spain when she was a child. She knows the lineage. But her position is not Colau's position, and the contrast is the lesson.
Hidalgo governs inside the French centralized state. The mayor of Paris is constrained by national authority in ways the mayor of Barcelona — operating inside the Catalan autonomous community — is not. Her political base is the French Socialist Party, not a citizen platform built from assemblies. She is a career politician advancing a progressive program from inside an existing party, against opposition from drivers and conservatives and the right press, and the program has produced real change. But the next mayor can put the parking spaces back. The structure that produced Hidalgo can also produce her opposite.
What Colau had — what Hidalgo does not — is a coalition rooted in the neighborhoods that elected her, with cultural infrastructure older than her mayoralty and longer-lived than it. The Barcelona that Colau changed has an immune system. What Hidalgo is building in Paris is a different kind of power — vulnerable in a different way.
The clearest contrast is Naples.
Napoli is the same kind of place as Barcelona in the ways that matter: a Mediterranean port city, working-class spine, anarchist and socialist traditions, a deep food culture, a population that has lived under and survived various empires. By the metrics that should produce a Barcelona, Naples should be one too.
It is not. Naples is the place people leave. The population of the metropolitan area has been declining for decades; young Italians from the South flee north — to Milan, Turin, Rome — for work that does not exist at home. Barcelona is the inverse: the place people come to. Returning Catalans, Spaniards from inland regions where opportunity has collapsed, mobile workers from across Europe.
The contrast cuts deeper. Naples hosts the United States Sixth Fleet — Naval Support Activity Naples, operational headquarters for American military presence across Europe and Africa, in place since the 1950s. Imagine the United States Navy basing the Sixth Fleet in Barcelona. You cannot. The two cities are positioned in the global system as fundamentally different kinds of places — one as a site of extraction, the other as a site of life.
The reasons are everything this chapter has named. Naples had no equivalent of the 1979 transition. The Italian state never devolved power to regional governments in the way Spain did, and the Mezzogiorno never got the political space Catalonia got. Naples has the same depth of memory as Barcelona. It did not get the institutional ground to convert that memory into governance.
Same Mediterranean. Same sun. Different fates.
Sounds like another world, doesn't it?
It is not another world. It is an alternative — accessible from this one, by routes that exist, named in this chapter. The Zapatistas have a phrase that ends many worlds are possible. They mean it literally. The arrangements we live under are arrangements, not laws of physics.
A wizard's job is to show you how. To name the conditions. To point at the seams. To lend the seeing that lets you recognize a possible world when you walk into one. And to show you how to reach them — the secret ways, the gathered coalitions, the slow building of the institutional ground that makes different fates possible.
Barcelona is real. So are Naples and Norfolk. The difference between them is not destiny. It is what was done with the conditions each city had.
In July 1936, Francisco Franco launched a fascist military coup against the Spanish Republic. In Catalonia and Aragon, workers and peasants didn't wait for a party directive.
In Barcelona, workers took over the trams and kept them running — under workers' control, with elected management committees, fares reduced to a flat rate anyone could afford. The precision engineering workshops that had made Barcelona one of Europe's industrial centers were collectivized and converted for war production. In the Aragon countryside, hundreds of villages collectivized their land — not under compulsion but by assembly, by the communities that had worked it deciding collectively how it would be governed. The CNT, the anarcho-syndicalist labor union with over a million members, provided the organizational framework.
The Catalan collectives were the Turin councils. Not a rhyme — the same form, the same workers governing the same kind of production, destroyed by the same organization operating under a different national name. Fifteen years and a thousand miles separated them. The logic was identical. The people who built both knew how to govern themselves. The party knew this, which is exactly why it had to stop them. The distributed commons had demonstrated — in Turin, in Barcelona, in the Aragon countryside — that the vanguard was unnecessary. That demonstration was the threat.
There is a street in Barcelona — there are dozens of them now — where the pavement has been removed.
In one of those depaved Barcelona intersections, children are playing where cars were moving. The woman who lives on the corner knows the name of the man three floors above her. Neither of them would have known it when the street was organized around the car's passage. The knowledge is in the soil now. The changed assumption is in the body of everyone who has sat in that plaza on a Tuesday evening and felt what a street can be.
The thread runs from the zanjera farmers of Ilocos rebuilding the dam every morning after the typhoon, to Palmares governing twenty thousand people for a century, to the Valencia tribunal convening in the same plaza since the tenth century — all of it before Gramsci, before Kropotkin, before anyone had written the theory of what they were doing. Then: Gramsci theorizing the factory councils in Turin, Luxemburg writing from Breslau, Kropotkin counting glaciers in Siberia, Graeber building horizontal assemblies at the Quebec City protests, Bookchin watching Moses destroy the Bronx, Jacobs watching from the street, Öcalan reading in a Turkish prison, the Zapatistas building schools in Chiapas, the woman who plants the first tree in the Barcelona intersection before the debate is finished. Not a lineage — an architecture. The same insight about what works, arrived at independently, in different conditions, by different people, because the conditions required it and the alternative kept failing. Necromancy in commons form, even when the practitioners never met: the dead held what the living kept rediscovering. The same reach backward holds the Black radical tradition, and the abolitionists who built before there was a word for it — wherever a commons survives, the dead are keeping the door.