Two Cities

Something mattered to you. So you drove across town. You found a place to park. You sat in a hard chair for two hours. For forty-five minutes, people talked about things that had nothing to do with you. Then it was your turn. You got three minutes to speak.

You spoke. Maybe your voice shook a little. It is hard to stand up and talk in a room like that. You said something true. You used your three minutes well.

Then you went home.

The decision went ahead. They had already planned it that way.

Your effort was real. So what came of it? Maybe your honest words changed what they chose. Maybe they did not. But one thing your words did make, every time: they made the choice look fair.

Looking fair is the one thing the institution cannot make on its own. A choice made in public, with people giving input, is harder to fight. It has armor. The armor is made from your help.

You made the armor. You handed it to them. You even risked a parking ticket. The system did not lie to you. It ran the steps the right way and gave you your three minutes. But under all the talking and rules, the system's job is not to reach the right answer. Its job is to make any answer look fair.

The word for this is capture. Not cheating. Capture. The city did not steal your help. It soaked it up. Good soil does the same with fallen leaves. It takes in the energy and turns it into the institution's armor.

Atlantic City was capture at full force. Most days, it looks like the meeting you just sat through.

A neighborhood board is a machine. It turns the energy of the community into something that makes the institution look fair. When you show up and speak, you give it three things: your effort, what you know, and your yes. That is the raw stuff that makes it look like people took part. The board is where you plug in. Your words go in, and the machine turns them into a form it can use.

What comes back out is usually much less than what went in.

This does not happen only in Norfolk. It does not happen only in neighborhood groups. It is how many processes work. They are built to soak up what you do. They are not built to turn it into power. You sign a petition, and it just gets added to an email list. You speak at a public meeting, and your words go into the record but change nothing. A community meeting makes a report. The report leads to another meeting. The same steps happen over and over. They start to feel normal. But they never make real change.

It is not that the look of democracy took the place of the real thing. It is that we can no longer tell the two apart. Is it real wealth, or is it debt? Is it real connection, or is it just showing off? Is it real work getting done, or just a show of work? The signs of the real thing and the signs of the show look the same.

If you think all you have is your voice, you are missing something. It is called leverage. A tenant group can call a rent strike. That is leverage. A community land trust uses land it owns to push back against the market that drives prices up. That is leverage. A neighborhood that is organized can take up the city's time and money for a long time. It can aim them at the problems it needs solved. That is leverage turning into power to act.

You signed the petition because you cared. You came to the hearing because you meant it. But the thing you took part in was built to soak up that energy. It was not built to turn it into change.

Ask this about everything. Does this build relationships that last? Does it build skills that last? Does it build knowledge that lasts? Does it leave something the next person can use? When the action is over, do we walk away with something we share and can build on?

The Atlantic City neighborhood was torn down in 1957. The campus that was built in its place is still there. In 2021, a federal Fair Housing lawsuit was going on. At the same time, the city was tearing down Tidewater Gardens. It was a different community, but the same machine. And the city promised that this time, things would be different.

"When I hear, 'This time things will be different,' I think it's malarkey," said Zenobia Wilson. She was forced out of Tidewater Gardens in 2022. Her grandmother had been forced out of Huntersville many years before. "They're saying it's for us, but really they're just sprinkling us in there to make us feel welcome." She understands how the system works. She learned it from her grandmother and from her own life. She cannot stop the demolition. But she can refuse to give it the approval it needs. She does this by not pretending the promises are real. That refusal — naming it, seeing it clearly, refusing to call the loss progress — is not nothing. It is where the work begins.

Three years later, I was in a different city. A fish market had just closed. The vendors were still cleaning up. They hosed down the stalls. They boxed what was left. The smell of the sea faded slowly from the ground. It was early evening in the Gothic quarter.

A man was already there, setting up. It was not a cargo bike or a van. It was a custom rig. Everything was built in. The speakers sat low. The battery was tucked in. The mixer was fixed to the handlebars. He had no truck. He had no generator. He probably did not need a permit. He set up in the street outside the market in the time it takes to unpack a bag.

Then he played salsa.

It was not a show. It was a class. Or it was something between a class and a party. The line between them blurred fast. People of all ages were there. There were couples and groups of friends. There was laughter. A few people stood alone at the edges and bobbed along. They were already getting pulled in. The covered stalls along the street sold something cold and sweet. An hour before, the street had been about fish. Now it was about dancing. No one had really planned this. Someone had brought a bike, a sound system, and an idea. The city had made the rest possible. The music turned the street into a shared space. It called that space up. It did not organize it. This is the oldest magic. You feel it before you understand it.

Barcelona has been changing its intersections for years. Back in the 1960s and 1970s, the city gave this space to cars. Now the city is taking it back. It is giving it to the people who live on the streets the cars cut through. The city calls them superilles. These are groups of streets where cars are no longer the priority. The space is freed up for walking, cycling, planting, sitting, and dancing. This is a break with the old rule, done at the city level. The car's rule on the street is broken. The street is turned back toward the people who share it. The plan caused arguments when it started.

The streets had been changed. The space had been given back. And people did just what you would expect. Give people a street and an evening, and they make something together. None of them could have made it alone. This was a Tuesday-night practice. The new world danced as if it had always been here.

This was on a Tuesday. In January.

I watched from the edge. I am a DJ. I noticed the rig. The music had started before I got there. It was not waiting for me. It was not waiting for anyone. There was a kind of ease in that. It is the ease of knowing that life goes on even when yours does not.

Barcelona has also been running out of water. The reservoirs that supply the city have been at critical levels. Some years they fell below twenty percent of full. The drought is built into the system now. The Mediterranean is warming. The rain patterns are shifting. The snowpack that feeds the rivers gets thinner each decade. This city has figured out how to give streets back to people. But it is also learning a hard lesson under pressure. It belongs to a shared world bigger than any city government can rule. That world is the planet's water cycle, the air, and the climate. No one owns these. Everyone depends on them.

The party in the street and the water crisis are the same story. Who governs the things we share? Who decides what the street is for? Who decides how the water is used? Who pays for the choices, and who gets the gains? It is one question, asked at different sizes. Barcelona is getting better at asking it. Most cities are not asking it at all.

We spent three days there. We did not take the metro once. The city gave itself to walking.

Why Barcelona? There are reasons.

The deep memory has a name: the CNT. The full name is the Confederación Nacional del Trabajo. It was anarcho-syndicalist. It was federated. It was based on assemblies. In the 1930s, at its peak, it had over a million members in Catalonia. The CNT-FAI ran Barcelona in 1936. To take it down, it took both fascists and Communists. Franco's army attacked from outside the Republic. Inside the Republic, forces tied to Stalin attacked the anarchist and POUM positions in Barcelona. This was in the May Days of 1937. They wore different uniforms, but they had the same goal. By the time the war ended, the CNT was almost gone. What was left was driven underground, killed off, or scattered into exile. But the form lived on. Murray Bookchin learned from it. He called the practice libertarian municipalism. The Barcelona coalitions of the twenty-first century learned from the same place. The CNT was Spain's part of a wider European left in the 1920s and 1930s. Gramsci was writing in one of Mussolini's prisons. Reich was in Berlin, naming how fascism of that era lived in the body. The CNT was the part of that group that built the most real power. They lost because they were defeated, not because they were wrong.

Catalonia has outlasted most of the empires it has been part of. It did so by not being an empire itself.

The Crown of Aragon did spread its power across the Mediterranean long ago. For a while it held Sicily, Sardinia, and even Naples for a few decades under Alfonso V. But the way of thinking that lived on into modern times grew around something else. This was true above all after 1714, when the Bourbons wiped out Catalan self-rule. It grew around a region, a language, a working-class city life, and a tradition of joining together as equals. It was never an empire. It was a part of empires, never their center.

The empires that held it have fallen. The Holy Roman Empire is gone. The Habsburg-Spanish empire is gone. By 1978, the Bourbon central rule was undone. What lasts is the city, the language, the practices, and the way people relate to the land and to each other.

Barcelona's groups of today stand on this. They have a city, not an empire's capital. They have a region, not an empire. That has been enough.

Franco died in 1975. What came next was not a revolution. It was a new plan for how the country would be run.

In 1978, Spain voted for a new constitution. It set up a parliament with a king. It also split power among seventeen regions. Each region got its own rules, its own parliament, and its own jobs to do. In 1979, Catalonia got its own deal. Catalonia would run its schools, its language, its health care, its city planning, and much of its police and culture. Spain had become almost like a country of many small states.

This was the opening. For forty years the city had been held down. Now it had a regional government. It could stand up to Madrid and argue for itself. The Catalan language came back to schools, to signs, and to television. The old Catalan government was called the Generalitat. Franco had shut it down in 1939. Now it was brought back.

The change was not perfect. It kept much of the old system Franco had built. It kept the king the old rulers had picked. It let officials who had done terrible things go free. Spanish democracy still carries that deal. But the region system is real. And Barcelona's later teamwork could only happen in the room this opened.

This was also the time of three thinkers: Negri, Deleuze, and Guattari. They came after 1968. They were thinking past parties. They thought about power spread out among many people. Franco died in this moment. Spain wrote its new rules in a time that was already dreaming up new ways for people to act together.

Participatory budgeting deserves its own name. The Brazilian city of Porto Alegre made it in 1989. Here is how it works. The people of a neighborhood decide for themselves how part of the city's money gets spent. The money is spent by the people who will live with the results. This is not a meeting where people talk and then officials choose. The people's choice is real. The city must follow it.

The idea spread. People studied what Porto Alegre did. Dozens of cities around the world copied it and changed it to fit. By the early 2000s it was a known practice. It worked. There was less corruption. Money for roads and buildings was shared more fairly. More people took part. The tool was there. It was waiting.

When Barcelona's coalition took power, it had this tool ready. In 2017, the city built a website called Decidim. The city gave it away for free. Any city could use it and change it. Decidim let participatory budgeting work online, for many people at once. Every neighborhood could talk, suggest, and vote. Even small choices changed something. When you do a thing, you become a person for whom that thing is normal.

By 2014, Barcelona had something the rest of Spain did not yet have. It had a group ready to govern.

In 2011, the 15M movement filled the public squares. Millions of Spaniards came out. They said no to the cuts that came after the 2008 crash. The movement did not make a party. It made something stranger. It made a way of meeting and deciding together. Like a living culture in a jar, it was alive. It was its own thing. It was useless with nothing to work on.

Occupy Wall Street started the same year, from the same urge. It made the same thing. But in the United States, that way of meeting faded with nothing left behind. The police cleared Zuccotti Park. In Spain, most of the meetings faded too. But in a few places they hardened into something that lasted. The reason was not the will of the people in the squares. It was the ground the squares sat on. The same starter, poured onto different ground. You can smell the difference in soil before you can name it. Fresh or rotten. Ripe or dry. One ground had been fed for many years. Every group that lived in it had worked it and seeded it. The other ground had been paved over.

Barcelona en Comú means Barcelona in Common. It grew from that hardening. It was not a party. It grew up from below, from neighborhood meetings, sending shoots up wherever the ground was good. It drew in PAH activists, Podemos members, green groups, neighborhood groups, the green left, and people who had never run for anything. The group asked its meetings what the plan should be. The meetings decided.

This is what years of building can do. When the opening came, the group was already there. The memory of the CNT, the region system, and the practice of shared deciding had not just been waiting. They had been getting ready. The past was acting in the present, called up by the opening.

For a big European city, Barcelona's money works in an odd way. It has almost no stock market of its own. The old Bolsa de Barcelona was folded into the joined-up Spanish exchanges. The real money markets are in Madrid. Barcelona's wealth is in owning things and running businesses. It is in small and mid-sized firms, in family firms, in the port, in factories, in design work, in cooperatives, and in the tourist trade. It is not in stocks and bonds. It is not the kind of money-stripping that built Zurich or Frankfurt or took over Geneva.

This is a different shape of wealth. The money is in the workshops and on the streets, not on trading floors.

What Barcelona has instead is a different kind of value. It has built it on purpose since the 1992 Olympics. It is the value of a good life. Good weather. A city you can walk. Plazas built around old trees. The plane trees over the wide streets. The food. The good name. People want to be in Barcelona. More and more, that means skilled workers, designers, and scientists who can live anywhere. The city draws their attention. That attention turns into money without going through a stock market.

This brings its own danger. Rents rise and push people out. Tourism crowds the city. Short-term rentals squeeze the housing market. But this is not the danger of a money-market city. It is a different power, with a different danger, and a different room to act.

Ada Colau worked on housing before she was a mayor.

She helped start the PAH in 2009. The full name is Plataforma de Afectados por la Hipoteca. It started in the wreck of the 2008 crisis. Spanish banks were kicking families out of their homes. The banks had just sold those families loans with rates that went up. For five years Colau worked to stop evictions. She stood in doorways. She brought cameras. She would not let people be put out of their homes. The work made her a known face for a whole part of Spain that had lost everything.

In 2014, a group formed around her. She ran for mayor. She had never held office. She was just past forty. She had been arrested at protests, and other activists bailed her out. She had no career in politics to protect.

In 2015, she won.

She did not bring the view that politicians have of themselves. She brought the view from the doorways. She was mayor for eight years. She was elected again in 2019. She lost by a little in 2023. She ran the city like a person who had done hands-on work. The shared budgets, the meeting networks, the housing rules were not cold, technical things. They were the work of someone who had spent years refusing to accept the city's cruelty. Now she held the keys to the building.

This kind of group is not made from nothing. Barcelona's working class has been organizing for a long time. And the city remembers.

In 1936, Franco's forces moved against the elected government. Barcelona was the place where the people most fully kept them out. Anarchist unions and antifascist fighters ran the city. The workers took over the factories. The trams kept running. The trains kept running. The bread kept getting baked. The workers ran it all, not the bosses. It was a real social revolution. Franco needed three years to beat it, and he needed the rest of the world to stop helping. The city fell in January 1939.

Then came forty years of one-man rule. There were killings. People were sent away. The Catalan language was banned in schools and the press. Neighborhood groups had to hide. But the memory did not die. It lived on at kitchen tables, in songs, in people still speaking the banned language, and in the slow rebuilding of culture after Franco died in 1975.

When the meetings of Barcelona en Comú began in 2014, they were not making a new form. They were waking up an old one. The neighborhood meetings of today echo the workers' meetings of 1936. They come from the same city, the same memory, the same refusal.

Paris has been doing this too. Anne Hidalgo has been mayor since 2014. That is almost the same span as Colau. She closed the roads by the Seine to cars. She pushed the fifteen-minute city. She removed thousands of parking spaces. She built bike paths where there had been only traffic. On a Sunday in central Paris, things look different now. People walk by the Seine 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 history. But her place is not Colau's place, and the difference is the lesson.

Hidalgo works inside France's strong central government. The mayor of Paris is held in by national rules in ways the mayor of Barcelona is not. Barcelona's mayor works inside the Catalan region. Hidalgo's base is the French Socialist Party, not a citizen group built from meetings. She is a career politician. She pushes a forward-looking plan from inside an old party. She faces pushback from drivers, from the right, and from the right-wing press. Her plan has made real change. But the next mayor can put the parking spaces back. The system that made Hidalgo can also make her opposite.

Colau had something Hidalgo does not. She had a group rooted in the neighborhoods that elected her. She had a culture older than her time in office and able to outlast it. The Barcelona that Colau changed has an immune system. What Hidalgo is building in Paris is a different kind of power. It is weak in a different way.

The clearest contrast is Naples.

Naples is the same kind of place as Barcelona in the ways that matter. It is a Mediterranean port city. It has a working-class core. It has anarchist and socialist traditions. It has a deep food culture. Its people have lived under empires and outlasted them. By the signs that should make a Barcelona, Naples should be one too.

It is not. Naples is the place people leave. For decades, fewer and fewer people live in the metro area. Young Italians from the South flee north, to Milan, Turin, and Rome, for work that is not there at home. Barcelona is the reverse. It is the place people come to. Catalans come back. Spaniards come from inland regions where chances have dried up. Workers come from across Europe.

The contrast goes deeper. Naples is home to the United States Sixth Fleet. This is Naval Support Activity Naples. It is the base for the American military across Europe and Africa, and it has been there since the 1950s. Now picture the United States Navy putting the Sixth Fleet in Barcelona. You cannot. In the world system, the two cities stand as very different kinds of places. One is a place to take from. The other is a place to live.

The reasons are everything this chapter has named. Naples had nothing like the 1979 change in Spain. The Italian state never handed power to its regions the way Spain did. The South of Italy never got the room Catalonia got. Naples has the same deep memory as Barcelona. It did not get the ground to turn that memory into governing.

Same Mediterranean. Same sun. Different fates.

Sounds like another world, doesn't it?

It is not another world. It is a different choice. You can reach it from this one, by paths that are real, named in this chapter. The Zapatistas have a saying that ends, many worlds are possible. They mean it for real. The way we live is a setup, not a law of nature.

A wizard's job is to show you how. To name the conditions. To point at the cracks. To lend you the sight that lets you know a possible world when you walk into one. And to show you how to reach them. The hidden paths. The gathered groups. The slow building of the ground that makes different fates possible.

Barcelona is real. So are Naples and Norfolk. The difference between them is not fate. It is what was done with the conditions each city had.