Citizen One: Exploring Our Urban Future

Welcome back to Season Three premiere episode of Citizen One: Exploring Our Urban Future. I’m your host, Douglas Stuart McDaniel. I’m really excited to be back after a long hot summer full of research, consulting work in Australia and New York, and a lot of writing and some exciting book launches. More about that later.

In this episode, I want to start with a sound.

Last year, I was living in a riad in the Bab al-Bahr quarter of Tangier — the Sea Gate quarter, where the medina tilts toward the Strait of Gibraltar — and the riad had a fountain in its courtyard. Andalusian. Maybe sixteenth century. Carried across the strait piece by piece by Moriscos fleeing the final years of the Spanish Inquisition, people who had lost everything and chose, inexplicably, to carry a fountain with them across an inhospitable sea.

It wasn’t running when I arrived.

The khadima — the caretaker, a woman who had tended that house for decades — told me it had gone dry some time ago. She didn’t explain why. She just made tea and looked at me with the patience of someone who had watched conquerors arrive before.

That fountain — dry, cracked basin, dust collecting where water once moved — became the image I couldn’t let go of. And la khadima, standing in a courtyard she’d tended for forty-three years without ever appearing on the deed, became the first character in a novel I didn’t know I was going to write.

This episode is about those six weeks in Tangier. What I left to get there. What I learned from being there. And the book that is coming out of that experience.

I’m calling it Fragments of the Inexhaustible Well. And I’m not sure I’ve written anything that matters more to me.

Let me back up.

As most of you know, for more than four years before Tangier, I was working adjacent to one of the largest construction projects in human history. NEOM. The Line. The cognitive dissonance of that work — the genuine ambition, the genuine human cost, the gap between the renderings and the reality — was something I processed very slowly. You do, when you’re inside it. The pace is relentless. The scale is numbing. And everyone around you is brilliant and committed and moving too fast to ask the questions that will catch up with the project later.

The longer version is that I left carrying questions I couldn’t answer in the context in which I’d been living. Questions about who cities are actually for. About who gets to build them and for whom. About what we lose when we optimize for all of the smart city tech we can imagine without human relationships and everything except continuity — the slow accumulation of meaning that turns spaces, even deserts, into places, and places into something people will cross a desert to reach.

I needed somewhere old. Somewhere that had already been through this — through empires and occupations, through development projects and displacement, through the arrival of people who thought they understood it and the quiet persistence of people who actually did.

I chose Tangier almost arbitrarily. A short flight from my home in Barcelona. A riad someone recommended. Six weeks, no plan, no agenda.

The plan arrived, however, when the fountain stopped working and the city of Tangier became my teacher.

Tangier is not what most people expect. The medina is smaller than the mythology suggests. The cafés, like Cafe Baba, where the Beats dissolved are full of Europeans performing bohemia for each other. The famous literary ghosts — Bowles, Burroughs, Kerouac — are everywhere and nowhere, a legacy of men who used the city as a backdrop for their own dissolution and called it literature.

I say this not to dismiss them — Bowles especially was a serious writer — but because one of the things Tangier taught me is that the most interesting story in any city is rarely the one the foreigners told. It’s the one being lived by the people who stayed.

The khadima stayed. Let’s call her Layla, which is who she is becoming in a novel I am writing. She has tended that riad for forty-three years. She cleans hash pipes and blood and cum and the wreckage of other people’s late night epiphanies. She watches Western writers arrive with their notebooks full of big ideas and leave with their photographs and their metaphors and their stories that never quite get her name right.

“The western writers were always the worst,” she says in the novel. They wanted to understand, to listen, to honor. But they always ended up doing the same thing: twisting the city into metaphors they didn’t understand.

She says that about fictional writers. But she was saying it to me, too. I felt it every day I sat in that courtyard. I could feel the imposter syndrome twisting in me like a strangler fig tree.

The honest question — the one this novel forced me to sit with for six weeks, and then for many more months after — is: what gives any of us the right to tell a place’s story? What’s the difference between witness and extraction? Between documentation and appropriation?

I don’t have a clean answer. I didn’t have one during my four years in Saudi Arabia. The novel doesn’t either. But it insists on asking, which I think is the minimum ethical requirement.

Here’s what I was actually watching during those six weeks.

Velocity.

Tangier is a fulcrum city between continents — Africa facing Europe, Europe glancing back. Capital understands such cities. It arrives early. It arrives confidently. And it speaks the language of inevitability.

Cranes over nearby hillsides. Luxury residential towers stepping toward the Strait. Marketing copy promising Mediterranean light and proximity to authenticity. Port expansions positioned as gateways to continental growth.

You can stand on the edges of the medina and the kasbah and see the cranes of progress all around you. You can stand in a half-finished tower and look down at the tiled roofs and realize exactly what is being monetized.

I’ve seen this pattern before.

In Vancouver, a super-luxury residential tower was pre-sold to global investors at peak pricing — floor after floor marketed as scarcity in the sky. The narrative was simple: park capital in a stable city, ride the appreciation.

Then the market shifted, and some early buyers found they could not resell without taking massive losses against their pre-sale contracts.

When luxury housing becomes a financial instrument first and shelter second, volatility is inevitable. What’s less discussed is who absorbs the ripple effects. Construction labor is already paid. Local services have already scaled. Municipalities have already counted on projected tax flows. Meanwhile, the units sit dark or trade at a discount that destabilizes adjacent markets.

In parts of Dubai, towers rise at extraordinary speed, financed by global capital seeking security and spectacle. Some succeed. Some stall. The skyline becomes a barometer of liquidity. Then a war happens, and all bets are off.

In London, entire clusters of ultra-prime residential units have been marketed to overseas buyers as safe deposit boxes in the sky, while housing affordability for local residents continues to strain policy and politics.

In New York City, Billionaires’ Row is a vertical indictment of progress: astonishing engineering, astonishing vacancy at certain price tiers, and years of owner litigation over the quality of what was actually delivered.

Global capital searches for yield. It prefers regulatory gaps, emerging narratives, places described as “next.” It moves faster than local governance frameworks can evolve. It externalizes risk when possible and securitizes upside when convenient.

And the language is always optimistic.

Regeneration. Revitalization. World-class positioning.

I am not anti-development. I’ve spent years around megaprojects. I believe cities need housing, infrastructure, jobs, ambition. I believe in growth.

What I question is the sequencing.

Who absorbs the early disruption? Who captures the late-stage upside? Who is visible in the pro forma? Who exists only in the footnotes?

In Tangier, the juxtaposition is almost theatrical. A centuries-old neighborhood operating on dense, relational economics below. A hillside of speculative vertical capital above. Two systems layered on the same slope.

I was thinking about cities across the Global South — from West Africa to Southeast Asia — facing demographic pressure, climate volatility, and the gravitational pull of international investment. Many of them are younger in regulatory terms. Their land governance systems are still forming. Their infrastructure is already strained.

There is a narrow window in places like these.

They can replicate the extractive template — build enclaves priced for external buyers, promise trickle-down effects, retrofit equity later — or they can hard-code value retention from the beginning.

Land strategies that limit speculative hoarding. Water systems sized first for existing residents. Mixed-income housing embedded in the capital stack, not appended as a political concession. Public return requirements tied to private gain.

It is accounting. Drinking water before luxury pools, equitable labour contracts before renderings, and recognition of the fact that once value is siphoned out of a place it rarely finds its way back to the people who anchored it.

The cranes were signals. That this city, like Vancouver at peak pre-sale exuberance, like London in its offshore boom years, like Dubai during liquidity surges — is being folded into a global development logic that rewards speed and punishes hesitation.

Tangier will grow. The question is whether it can grow without lifting itself off the ground that gives it strength, whether it can anchor capital to care, and whether it can insist that investment leaves behind durable systems.

That is an inflection point, and not only for Tangier. It is a generation of cities deciding who they are willing to become.

TANGER MED.

There is something else about Tangier I keep returning to.

The real port is no longer in the city.

Forty kilometers east is Tanger Med Port. It is enormous. Concrete, steel, container stacks, rail lines cutting inland. Ships move in and out on tight schedules. Everything there feels calibrated. Efficient. It is Morocco plugged directly into global trade.

It works.

Back in Tangier, the old harbor has been reimagined. The heavy cargo is gone. The fishing fleet is smaller. Cruise ships dock where freighters once idled. Around the basin, new condominiums rise with uninterrupted sea views. Balconies face Spain. The marina is immaculate.

The working port moved east. The image stayed behind.

I walked the edge of the marina one afternoon. It was quiet in that curated way new waterfronts often are. Stone paving. Clean lines. A row of yachts sitting perfectly still in water that used to hold trawlers and rusted hulls.

I lifted my camera.

A security guard appeared beside me almost immediately.

“No photos.”

I asked why.

“Private.”

He wasn’t aggressive. Just certain. His job was to enforce a boundary that did not used to exist.

What struck me was the enclosure. The harbour had become something to look at. The fences were subtle, the access points controlled. The water was still there and the relationship to it had changed.

Ports are usually messy places. They are about movement and labor. They smell like fuel and salt and effort. They belong to the city even when they are state-owned. You can feel the exchange taking place.

Here, the exchange has been relocated to Tanger Med. Out of sight. Out of the urban fabric.

The old waterfront now performs a different role. It signals prosperity. It reassures investors. It photographs well — if you are allowed to take the photograph.

A city of Tangier’s scale needs a port like Tanger Med. The old harbour could not handle that volume forever. Infrastructure evolves.

But when the functional heart of a city is moved away and the historic edge is refitted for capital storage, something shifts in the civic balance.

The waterfront stops being a threshold and becomes a product.

That afternoon, I kept thinking about who gets to occupy that edge without explanation. The yachts were empty. The balconies unlit. The security presence was the most visible sign of activity.

It was quiet, and the quiet felt like the future if cities aren’t careful: engines pushed outward, value concentrated at the centre, public space slowly rewritten as private frontage.

Just a sign that says: no photos.

I need to say something here about the two countries on either side of that water, because I love them both, and this summer they were made to look ridiculous by people who love neither.

Barcelona is where I live. Tangier is where I spent six weeks in a house with a dry fountain. From the roof of that house you can see Spain. It is fourteen kilometres. On a clear evening the lights on the other side come on before the ones on your own street do.

Thirty kilometres east along that same coast is Ceuta. Spanish territory since the seventeenth century, on the African shore, with a fence around it and Morocco on the other side.

On the thirtieth of July, somewhere north of seventy thousand people went into the water and swam for it.

The Spanish government said fifty thousand at first. The press reported sixty. Spanish authorities later revised the figure to around seventy-two thousand, over roughly two days. The mayor of Ceuta, Juan Jesús Vivas, has said at least a hundred people died. The early reports said fifty-seven. It is the largest single arrival of its kind Europe has seen, and the number is still moving.

Now here is why I am telling you about it in an episode about a courtyard in Tangier.

None of those people were lied to by a government. They were lied to by a post.

On the eighth of July, Spain’s Supreme Court ruled on a narrow procedural question: whether the summary return of migrants applies to people who arrive by sea rather than over a physical barrier. The answer was technical and it was mostly about what counts as a border.

Within about two weeks, an Arabic-language version of that ruling was circulating in Morocco saying the Spanish courts had opened the door. The Spanish fact-checking organisation Maldita.es, working inside the European IBERIFIER network, traced how it moved. Facebook groups for recruitment. WhatsApp for the logistics. Some of the groups were already running before any of this, and some of them look connected to people who traffic human beings for money. One of the lines that travelled furthest was a sentence of five words: Ceuta is becoming an open door.

Another said: on the thirtieth of July, we will launch an attack on Ceuta.

A hundred people are dead because of a misreading of an administrative footnote, amplified by accounts that made money on the traffic.

That is the first absurdity. Here is the second.

Spanish Prime Minister Sánchez has accused networks linked to Russia, to Israel, and to the international far right of spreading and amplifying that disinformation. Both Russia and Israel deny it. He has also said his intelligence services found no evidence of direct Moroccan government involvement — which is notable, because the mayor of Ceuta has suggested the opposite, and Spanish officials have been quoted saying the usual Moroccan patrols were not on the other side of that border in the days before it happened. Reporting in the Guardian links that to Moroccan irritation at Spanish conversations with Algeria, which backs self-determination in Western Sahara.

I want to be precise about which of those claims are which. The disinformation is documented by fact-checkers with receipts. The foreign-state attribution is an accusation by a government, denied by the accused, and I have not seen it independently established. Those are different classes of evidence and I am not going to launder one into the other.

And then the third absurdity, which is the one that actually tells you what this was for.

Within twenty-four hours, Italy suspended its Schengen arrangements with Spain. Spain suspended them back a week later. The Czech prime minister called for Spain’s Schengen membership to be suspended outright. Denmark’s prime minister wanted all options on the table. Twenty-two of the twenty-seven EU heads of government signed a joint letter — coordinated by Italy and Denmark — about instrumentalised migration and hybrid threats.

Every one of those governments knew, because the European Commissioner for migration said so publicly on the thirty-first of July, that not a single person had crossed from Ceuta to mainland Europe. Ceuta is not in the Schengen area. It never has been. Spain has kept identity checks on the boats and planes out of it since 1991.

So a country was threatened with expulsion from a zone the incident did not touch, over a border that does not connect to it, on the strength of a lie about a court ruling, while a hundred bodies were still being recovered from the strait.

Sánchez called the response driven by prejudice, fake news, ignorance, or political interest. I would not have been that generous.

Two governments that need each other more than either likes to admit spent August blaming each other, while a third set of actors, some of them European heads of state, monetised the embarrassment for domestic consumption. Nobody involved in that argument was in the water.

And then there was my inbox.

In the ten days after the thirtieth of July, nearly a dozen Americans I know sent me direct messages asking whether Barcelona was safe, whether the city had been overrun, whether I was thinking about coming home. Several sent the same video. One asked in earnest whether I had somewhere to go.

Nobody crossed from Ceuta to mainland Spain. The European Commissioner for migration said so publicly on the thirty-first of July. My street in the Raval that week was what it is every week in August, which is too hot, half-shuttered, and full of people who live here.

The footage did its work anyway, eight thousand kilometres from the water, on people I know who now believe a Spanish invasion is happening.

By the middle of August, the same accounts and a batch of new ones were promoting the fifteenth as the next window. Everything will become clear on this day. Hundreds went to the border anyway.

There is a photograph from the second of August, taken at Bab Ceuta, near the village of fuh nay dek. It is families of missing migrants, standing at the fence, looking through it at the other side.

That is fourteen kilometres of water and two thousand years of crossing it, and this summer we managed to make it a con tent problem.

This is the novel’s central infrastructure argument: development as slow violence. The quiet severing — the aquifer drained, the drainage clogged, the connections cut between a place and the systems that sustained it.

The mythic version comes from my draft Prologue, where the city of Tangier speaks in her own ancient voice — as Tingi, daughter of Atlas, named for the Berber goddess who predates the Greek mythology the colonizers layered on top.

She invokes Antaeus. The Libyan giant who drew his strength from the earth itself, who could not be defeated while his feet touched the ground. Hercules defeated him by lifting him into the air.

That, the novel argues, is what development does to communities. Lifts them from the ground that sustained them. And calls it progress.

A good novel begins with people. Here’s who I was watching.

There was a young man — I call him Youssef in the novel — who lived in Bir Chifa, an informal settlement six kilometers from the medina on roads that went from pavement to gravel to dust. He walked it twice a day when he had work in the old city. He was twenty-three years old, caring for his grandmother who had walked across the Sahara to reach him, managing her insulin on a budget that left nothing for error. He had been approached by men at the port who offered him a way out of that box — if he’d carry things he wasn’t supposed to carry.

The character of Youssef becomes the novel’s argument about persistence made physical. His six-kilometre walk, every day, is the shape of his life. And watching him make it — watching the daily endurance of someone who has no good options and chooses the hard one anyway — taught me more about urban resilience than any report I’ve ever read.

Another character, Margot, is a British journalist who had broken important stories about labor exploitation in Gulf megaprojects, watched nothing change, and come to Tangier to write a book she couldn’t seem to start. The paralysis of the witness who no longer believes witnessing changes anything. I knew this paralysis. I’d felt it. She became the novel’s self-examination — the meta-commentary on its own project.

And there was the American. An infrastructure director who had left a Gulf megaproject carrying a folder of photographs he’d never opened. Seventeen names from a construction accident he’d been senior enough to sit in the room for, not senior enough to prevent. He carried this guilt to Tangier — to a city that had its own accumulation of foreign decisions and their consequences — and he had to figure out what to do with it.

I don’t want to be too transparent about which character carried which fragment of my own experience. Fiction doesn’t work that way. But I will say: all four of the novel’s main characters arrived in Tangier carrying something they couldn’t put down and didn’t know how to carry.

Six weeks is not enough time to understand a city.

It is enough time to begin to understand what you don’t understand.

Tangier taught me several things I’ve been unable to unlearn.

Cities accumulate. The medina contains Roman drainage beneath Andalusian water channels beneath Ottoman additions beneath French modifications beneath Moroccan independence beneath global capital’s current claims. At any given moment, you are standing on all of it. Development that ignores this, that treats a place as a clean site for a new vision, always fails to account for the weight of what it’s building on. The ground remembers.

The second: care is a form of knowledge. Layla knew that riad in ways that no engineer’s survey, no developer’s assessment, no architectural rendering could capture. She knew where the plaster failed in wet winters and where it held. She knew the drainage the city forgot. She knew the crack that had been spreading since the 1960 earthquake and how fast it moved. This knowledge — accumulated through decades of daily tending — is not recorded anywhere. It disappears when the caretaker is displaced. And it cannot be rebuilt. It can only be recognized before it’s lost.

The third, and hardest: persistence is not the same as winning. The novel’s central philosophy — one I’m still working out — is that care without outcome is still meaningful. That you tend the fountain even when you know the aquifer is being drained. That you walk six kilometers even when the job might not be there. That you write the story even when you’re not sure it changes anything.

That is a different definition of what matters. The cities that survive — still there, still lived in, still argued over, still loved — are the ones where people kept going when going made no obvious sense. They refused to stop.

The novel’s closing image is the fountain, running again. Thinly. Uncertainly. On borrowed time. But running.

The khadima knows it’s borrowed time. She tends it anyway.

Fragments of the Inexhaustible Well is a novel about Tangier — specifically the medina, the Bab al-Bahr quarter, the fictional Horizon development project on the hillside, and the approaching Mediterranean storm that forces all its plots toward each other. Four main characters: Layla the khadima, Truman the American infrastructure director, Margot the British journalist, Youssef the young man from Bir Chifa. Plus Aminata, Youssef’s grandmother, who crossed the Sahara and may be the wisest character in the book. Plus the city itself — Tingi, speaking in the Prologue and Epilogue in her own ancient voice, reclaiming her Berber identity from the layers of mythology colonizers deposited on top of it.

It’s a climate fiction novel — a medicane, a rare Mediterranean double hurricane, hits Tangier at the novel’s center and tears everything open. But it’s climate fiction without polemic. The storm is catastrophic and observed. The infrastructure failures are systemic. No one gives a speech about it.

It’s a migration novel — Youssef and Aminata’s journey across the Sahara sits in the background, surfacing in fragments. Truman’s complicity in Gulf construction deaths. Margot’s journalism about labor exploitation. The novel is full of people who have been moved by forces larger than themselves and are trying to find where they belong after.

And it’s an ethics-of-witness novel. Margot’s paralysis — the journalist who broke the story and watched nothing change — is the novel’s most direct examination of what writing can and cannot do. The city’s Epilogue directly addresses the Beats: “They thought they could write me down and carry me away, pressed between pages like a flower dried and preserved. But I am not a flower\... I am not their metaphor. I am my own meaning.”

I wrote that line thinking about myself. About everyone who comes to a place with a notebook and leaves with a manuscript.

This show is called Citizen One. Exploring our cities, ourselves, and our uncertain yet extraordinary future. Here’s what six weeks in Tangier contributed to that project.

We talk a lot about smart cities. About cities of the future. About what urban life will look like when AI and climate change and global migration have fully remade the conditions we thought were permanent.

Tangier is a city that has already been through this. Phoenician, Roman, Vandal, Byzantine, Arab, Portuguese, Spanish, French, British, and finally Moroccan — each wave arriving with its technologies and its certainties, its plans for what this place would become. Each wave eventually receding. The city persisting.

What persisted was the infrastructure of daily care, which is not what anyone planned. The drainage channels. The water systems. The riad’s knowledge of its own plaster. The khadima’s accumulated understanding of what holds and what fails.

When we imagine cities of the future, we tend to imagine new systems. New technology. New forms. What Tangier argues, quietly, through a dry fountain and a tended courtyard, is that the most resilient thing in any city is the knowledge embedded in the people who stayed and kept going when going seemed futile.

That knowledge is not valued in how we build. It is not in the models or the renderings, and it barely appears in the reports.

The novel is, among other things, an argument that it should be.

The fountain was running when I left.

Not strongly. Youssef — the real person who became Youssef — had found the blocked connection, cleared it, and the aquifer was still depleted but enough water was getting through to make the basin move. The khadima stood in the courtyard watching it. She didn’t smile. She just watched.

I asked her whether she thought it would last.

She thought about this for a long time. Then she said something my translator rendered as: “It will last as long as it lasts. And then we’ll tend it again.”

I’ve been thinking about that sentence for fourteen months.

Fragments of the Inexhaustible Well is still a work in progress. If you want to follow the manuscript’s journey toward publication, that story will unfold here on Citizen One as it happens. First drafts. Agent submissions. Rejections, hopefully acceptances, and whatever comes after.

And if anything in this episode connects with your own work on cities, on infrastructure, on the ethics of development and witness — I’d like to hear from you. This is the conversation I came to Tangier to start. It didn’t end when I left.

It’s barely beginning. This has been Citizen One. Exploring Our Urban Future. Welcome to Season Three. I’m Douglas Stuart McDaniel.

There’s a gospel choir on the record I’m releasing this month. Consider this podcast episode the release party. Sixteen voices, brass underneath, a room you can hear the size of. It comes in about two-thirds of the way through a song called “F**k That Family,” which is about the people who chose you back — the ones who aren’t blood and set a place for you anyway.

That choir doesn’t exist.

I typed a description of what I wanted at my kitchen table in Barcelona at four in the morning, and waited about ninety seconds.

I’ve spent years on the other side of the glass, producing music videos for working regional acts. I know what a record costs at that level. A sixteen-piece choir with a horn section is a five-figure day before anyone has mixed anything. No regional act in Europe can afford it. Not one.

I didn’t hire anything.

This week’s episode is about what happens next. And I should say at the top what I say at the top of the episode: I’m not a neutral party in this. Normally on this show I’m at some distance from what I’m covering — somebody built a thing, somebody sold a thing, somebody got displaced, and I go find out what happened and why it matters. Not this time. This time I’m the one who did it.

I’m putting myself on trial here.

What I made

Eight songs. About forty hours. It’s called Suburb City, by 50 Minute Hour.

It’s a concept album — one narrator, multiple voices, one town, eight chapters. It’s heavy on Gen-X angst, anthems, and catharsis. And it is very personal to me, made with love and care — by me and the machine. That’s the contradiction.

There’s a Music Man patter parody about the therapy industry, sung by a huckster selling wounds instead of pool tables. A waltz in three-four where every argument resolves into you misremembered. An orchestral lament about three attempts to leave a marriage, each one interrupted. A gospel showstopper. A rockabilly strut about resigning from the position of designated family failure. Glam rock. Pop punk. And a rock opera anthem set in a tower where everyone who ever damaged you lives on a different floor, and you’re the one paying the heating bill.

Every word is mine. Every arrangement decision is mine. I knew exactly what I wanted each song to do and I iterated until it did it.

And every single performance on that record was generated. All of it. There is not one human being on it besides me, and I don’t sing.

It was made with love, passion, and commitment — and it would not exist otherwise. No budget, no band, no time. I’ve wanted to write music since I was fifteen, which is also the year I won a national poetry prize for a parody of Shakespeare. Act Two, Scene Seven of As You Like It. The one about all the world being a stage.

What it replaced

Here’s the part I haven’t heard anyone in my position say out loud.

That record replaced a session drummer.

It replaced a bass player. A guitarist. A horn section. A sixteen-member gospel choir. A tracking engineer. A mix engineer. A mastering engineer.

Nine or ten paid jobs. Forty hours. Zero pounds, euros, or dollars.

I want to be precise about the verb, because it matters. I didn’t evaluate those people and decide I could do without them. I didn’t audition anyone and find them wanting.

I couldn’t. I skipped them, because skipping them was available.

That’s the real story of the last three years, and almost nobody is telling it straight — least of all people like me.

The wrong question

In November of last year, Deezer and Ipsos ran the biggest study anyone’s run on this. Nine thousand people, eight countries. They played them music and asked whether it was made by a human or a machine.

Ninety-seven percent got it wrong.

That number has been in every article about this for eight months. It’s in open letters. It’s in policy submissions. It gets cited by the people worried about all this as proof of a crisis, and by the people building these tools as proof of arrival.

Both sides love it, which should be your first clue that something’s off.

Because here’s what that study actually measured: detection. Can you tell?

And I’d ask you — when have you ever chosen music that way?

Think about the last song you loved. Did you love it because you correctly identified the production chain? Did you put it on and think, ah yes, session players, analogue desk, human hands? Or was there autotune on it? Pitch correction? Stem separation? AI plug-ins in Logic or Pro Tools or Ableton that plenty of musicians use and nobody discloses?

The questions people actually ask are much older and much simpler. Did you like it. Was it any good. Did whoever made this work hard at it.

Nobody has tested any of those. Not once.

Every blind test that’s been run compares different songs, by different writers, and asks people to spot the machine. Which leaves the biggest variable in music — the writing — completely loose. If a listener prefers the human track, was that the performance? Or did they just prefer the song?

Eight months of argument, thousands of pages of policy, platform bans, lawsuits. And the entire evidentiary basis is a study that answered a question nobody asks.

The books on the shelf

I’ve watched this happen before. Several times.

I started using Photoshop at version one, in 1989, before it had layers. Then PageMaker, QuarkXPress, Freehand, Illustrator, InDesign. I watched nonlinear editing arrive and empty out the flatbed rooms — rooms full of people who cut film with their hands, and then those rooms were storage.

I watched desktop publishing kill typesetting. I used Linotronic typesetters, wax, and brayers in print shops when I was fifteen, doing paste-ups for my high school paper at the Landrum News Leader in Landrum, South Carolina. An entire skilled trade, with apprenticeships and specialists and decades of accumulated knowledge, gone in about ten years.

Nobody voted on that. Nobody consulted the typesetters.

But here’s the part of that history I’ve never heard anyone bring into this argument.

The design annuals.

If you worked in a corporate graphics department any time between about 1975 and 2005, you know exactly what I mean. Every January the department ordered the books. Communication Arts. Print. The Type Directors Club annual. The AIGA annuals. Beautiful, hardbound, ninety dollars a pop, full of the year’s award-winning work.

Nobody bought them to be inspired.

You bought them so that when a client needed a quarterly newsletter by Thursday, your in-house designer could open to page eighty-four, find the layout that won a gold medal in Chicago, and rebuild it with the client’s logo on it.

That was the job. That was how in-house design got made, at scale, across an entire industry, for thirty years. The award-winning designers knew. Everybody knew. The annuals kept selling.

So let’s call it what it was: a training corpus with a spine and a dust jacket and a purchase order attached. And we called it professional development, and nobody in forty years called it theft.

Now — here’s where the analogy breaks, and I don’t skip past it in the episode, because if I did the whole thing would be a cheap shot.

Scale and consent.

The annuals were a transaction. Somebody got paid. The designers submitted their work knowing what the book was and what it was for. Ninety dollars changed hands and everybody understood the arrangement.

What happened with these models is neither of those things. Nobody submitted. Nobody was paid. The scale isn’t a bookshelf — it’s most of recorded human output.

That difference is real and it’s the strongest argument the other side has. I’m not waving it away.

What Bowie saw

In June of 2002, David Bowie told the New York Times that music was about to become like running water, or electricity. A utility. That copyright would no longer exist in ten years, and the only unique situation left would be showing up and playing it in a room. You’d better be prepared, he said, for doing a lot of touring.

That’s four years before Spotify was founded.

Everybody treated it as the eccentric talking.

He was mostly right, and very early. Copyright didn’t die — he got that part wrong, and I’ll own it on his behalf. But the utility, and the touring, and the collapse of the recording as the thing you sell: all of that happened.

And he’d already acted on it. In 1997 he raised fifty-five million dollars against his own future royalties — twenty-five albums, two hundred and eighty-seven songs, everything before 1990. Took the money up front. Used it to buy back his masters from his former manager.

Napster launched two years later. By 2004, Moody’s had cut the rating to one notch above junk.

He wasn’t predicting AI. He was predicting something more useful: that the recording was never going to be the valuable part.

The room was.

The part nobody’s campaigning about

Almost all of the public argument about AI and music is about voices. That’s not an accident — vocals are the part a non-musician can point at, and there’s a real emotional charge to a synthetic person singing to you about their feelings.

But the work that’s actually disappearing is quieter and further down.

It’s the second guitarist who came up with the part that made the chorus work. It’s the drummer who played it four times and the fourth one was the one. It’s the engineer who’s been mixing for twenty years and knows, without thinking about it, that the second chorus needs the snare pulled back four milliseconds or the whole thing sits wrong.

None of that is legible to a listener. All of it is why records sound like records.

There’s no open letter about the person who knew which room to book.

So here’s what I want to do about it

The album is licensed Creative Commons, attribution only. All eight songs. Free.

Any musician, any band, any producer who wants to take one of these songs and rebuild it with human beings — players, singers, tracking, mixing, mastering, the whole chain — it’s yours.

The words are mine and the structure is mine. Everything else is negotiable. Change the melody. Change the tempo. Change the genre entirely. Turn the waltz into a dirge. Turn the gospel number into a punk song. I’m not precious about anything except the words, and honestly I’ll argue about those if you make a good case.

Credit me as the writer and it’s yours. Record it, release it, sell it, play it live. I’m not asking permission back.

Then both versions go up. Same page, same player, level-matched, unlabeled.

And listeners answer one question. Not can you tell.

Which one would you play again?

That’s it. That’s the whole idea. And the reason it’s worth doing is that it controls for the thing every previous test left wide open — same words, same songs, same writer. The only variable that changes is who, or what, performed it.

Whatever difference shows up is the value of human musicianship, measured. Not asserted in an open letter. Measured.

And whatever comes back, I publish. If the human version is better, that goes up. If it isn’t, that goes up too.

Why I actually care

There’s a song on this record about a woman who died. She was my wife for a long time, and then she wasn’t, and then eighteen months after I finally got out, the phone rang.

There’s another song with a spoken passage in the middle of it. It’s a sentence somebody said to me across a kitchen table, more or less word for word, and I put it in because it was true and because I’d never been able to explain it to anyone otherwise.

The machine sings both of those beautifully. Pitch is perfect. Phrasing is right. Every note where it should be.

It doesn’t mean it.

And I honestly don’t know whether that’s a real thing I’m hearing, or whether it’s sentiment — whether I just know what’s underneath those songs and I’m supplying the weight myself.

Nobody knows. That’s the whole point. Nobody has checked.

Bowie said the room was the thing. I don’t have a room.

The songs are yours — Creative Commons, attribution only.

I’d like to hear somebody mean it.

🎧 Listen to the full episode above.

🎵 The album is here: www.citizenone.world/suburbcity

Citizen One — Exploring Our Urban Future.

Friends,

I want to tell you what we just pulled off, because most of you have watched me build toward it for a while and I think it finally matters.

Premium Pulp Fiction, my indie traditional publishing startup within the Citizen One World ecosystem, just brought our first Ukrainian novel into English. The new novel is Scions of the Last Hope by M. Van Shamrai, launching August 1. You can pre-order the book today at www.scionsofthelasthope.com

.

Maks wrote it in the Eastern European literary SF tradition: think Glukhovsky as the near comparison, the Strugatskys and Lem as the ceiling. This is not Anglo-American genre fiction wearing a translation. It’s the real thing, and Kirkus saw it. Their Indie review called it “a vividly imagined multi-dimensional intergalactic romp of a space novel” — and then delivered the line I can’t stop grinning about: “(Van) Shamrai’s characters are a lot more grounded than the menagerie of spacefaring malcontents George Lucas populated the Mos Eisley cantina with.”

More grounded than George Lucas. For an indie debut in translation, that’s the review you hope for and rarely get.

But the review isn’t really the point I want to make to this group. You know how challenging the book world can be. What I want you to see is the next-gen machine I am building within it.

Start with the book itself, because this is where most presses cut corners and where I refuse to compromise. Every PPF author gets the full editorial chain, fully funded: developmental edits, line edits, copyediting, and proofreading, then layout and interior design and original cover design. And here’s what I think is genuinely unique — I’m in it with them while they’re still drafting. Writing coaching and AI-assisted research through the draft and the rewrite, not just cleanup after the manuscript lands on my desk. I’m a creative partner from the blank page forward.

Then the apparatus around the finished book, all of it at no cost to the author: trailers cut in-house. A companion wiki — a full Field Guide wiki companion web site with 150+ illustrated glossary entries, character pages, the works. A training program for launch and ongoing Instagram and TikTok carousel campaigns, nearly a hundred custom slides on a locked visual spec. A blurb operation reaching leading authors in the field. Trade review submissions. Award pathways. A PR and marketing ecosystem a debut novelist could never assemble alone and most small presses simply don’t support.

I built this the hard way — on my own books first. Ghost Emperor was the canary in the coal mine, the first live test of the systems. The Southern civic noir trilogy (Bloodwater, Defiance, and The Dark Water Gospel) stress-tested the rest. I chose to make the mistakes on my own titles, including overpaying for obsolete book marketing programs, so I wouldn’t make them on someone else’s. My AI-powered publishing, PR, marketing and back-end royalty reporting systems are finally in place, proven, and running.

That’s the model: IP-first, adaptation-second, full funding, never charging an author for production or distribution, and staying in it for the long haul with à la carte marketing systems rather than one launch week window. A real alternative to both the Big Five and the pay-to-play hybrids.

Here’s my ask. I have new authors I have yet to announce — in North America, Europe, Asia, and Australia. But I’m always looking for the next one. If you know an emerging writer looking for a publishing partner who will actually build the whole apparatus around their work — and be in the room from the first draft — send them my way.

Always glad to talk it through with any of you directly.

Doug

There are people who fear they’ll never see the world. There are others who see all of it and come home exactly as heavy as they left, counting cities the way you’d count change. And then there are people like me, who somewhere along the way felt hope finally outrun the fear — the belief that the longing you carry out of a place isn’t the cost of leaving it but the evidence that it mattered.

I went to the National Gallery of Victoria on a Sunday afternoon in June expecting a museum of empire — another British Museum, another V&A, the spoils of the world hauled home and hung where the light is good. I expected the Grand Tour paintings on the third floor. What I didn’t expect was to meet their counterargument first, on the ground floor, dressed up as a yellow pumpkin. It took me three hours and three floors to understand that’s what it was.

Reading a city by what it sells and what it buries

I got there the way I always start in a new city: a tram to the market. Melbourne’s trams are the green of a billiard table and the cream of old piano keys, and within the downtown grid they cost nothing — you step on, you step off, no tap, no fare, no questions. A man raised on American cities, where the middle class treats the bus as a sentence the poor are made to serve, stands on Swanston Street watching the free tram stack up and pull away and thinks: so it can be done. They simply chose to do it.

The Queen Victoria Market is one of the oldest arguments Melbourne has with itself, and it doesn’t advertise the fact. I didn’t know, walking the sheds, that I was walking on the dead. Seven hectares of fruit stalls and fish halls sit on top of the city’s first cemetery, closed in 1854 and paved over when Melbourne decided it wanted the land more than the memory. They moved 914 bodies out in the 1920s — give or take what the record admits to — and they did not move all of them. Sir John Monash himself called it a disgrace, and the work went ahead anyway, because the work always goes ahead. What gets paved over gets called progress, then heritage, then it gets a plaque. I’ve written that exact sentence about a dozen towns. It was restful, in a grim way, to find it waiting for me at the bottom of the world.

So I did what the living do: I poked around on top of all of it. Secondhand booksellers, a Turkish woman who sold me a coffee and a borek without looking up, butchers calling out to women they’ve sold to for thirty years. The market does both things at once, openly — the dead under the floorboards, the living haggling over flathead above them.

Then I walked several kilometers down Swanston Street, which runs through Melbourne’s memory in strata: the boom-time bluestone built to look like temples because money prefers to be worshipped indoors; Chinatown, the oldest continuous one in the country, planted square across the city’s central spine rather than tucked off to a margin; St Paul’s and the buttery clocks of Flinders Street Station; and finally the river, brown and patient and in no hurry to explain itself. A street keeps its own minutes. I read buildings the way I read court files. Rivers are the only honest archive — they take everything and keep none of it where you can reach it.

The pumpkin and the thumb

The gallery announces itself low and long, no dome, no columns — Roy Grounds built it in 1968 to look like a fortress that had made peace. Out front, amid the fountains, stands David Shrigley’s Really Good: a bronze thumbs-up the height of a house, the thumb stretched like taffy past any bone that could hold it, approval cranked so far past sincerity it curdles. It greets you the way a city greets a man who’s been gone a long time — too friendly, slightly wrong, the gesture held a beat too long. It’s the most honest thing on the lot, because it admits the performance.

Inside, dead center under the glass roof of Federation Court, stood the pumpkin. Yayoi Kusama’s Dancing Pumpkin — yellow as a caution sign, eleven splayed legs, pocked all over in her graduated black dots. Kusama has painted this same gourd for more than eighty years, since she was a girl on a seed farm in Matsumoto, and the dots are the obliteration she’s spent a lifetime fighting, the pattern that wants to scatter the self into infinity. The pumpkin is the homely anchor she sets against it, painted and repainted so it cannot float away. A woman who stayed mostly in one room her whole life, painting one thing until it filled the universe. I filed it away without yet knowing what it was the answer to.

The painting was never a souvenir. It was a credential.

Upstairs, the Grand Tour. The wall text described it as a charming custom — young aristocrats off and away across Europe and other continents to learn their art and culture. The honest version: a young man of the right family sent abroad to acquire the finish a country house couldn’t supply, returning with a canvas to hang in the hall so visitors would understand, without anyone saying the words, that the boy had seen the world. And not only boys. Women made the same crossing — Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Lady Hester Stanhope, and at least 955 more that a Stanford project has only lately dug out of the registers. The men got the portraits. The women got the footnote, and then not even that.

The paintings are beautiful — Canaletto’s Venice laundered into light, Bellotto the nephew working the same flattering haze, Tiepolo’s silk-wrapped Finding of Moses in the color of money. I want to be honest about the beauty, because my argument doesn’t need them to be ugly. They are very beautiful, and they were painted to be carried home as proof. Both true at once, which is the only register I know how to think in anymore. A gallery, even a royal one, is just a courthouse with better lighting: the pictures on the wall are the minutes, and the meetings are held elsewhere.

I recognized the machinery immediately, because it’s the same machinery — only the freight has changed. They paid to see these places; I get paid to live in them. They had a slow ship and six months to plan a crossing I’d do between a Tuesday and a Wednesday with a carry-on and a Wi-Fi password. And we counted countries the same way. That’s the uncomfortable part. They were the empire. I was the help the empire moved around, billing my crossings to a client the way their footmen once billed their passage to a household. No one was ever going to paint me. I counted anyway.

The inventory the canvases don’t hang

Here’s what doesn’t make it onto a gallery wall. The 152 bus down Avenida Santa Fe in Buenos Aires, learned before the language. The Tangier medina folding in on itself. Cairo’s car horns like a second weather, and a driver named Hani who wouldn’t cheat me and after a while wouldn’t let anyone else. Venice — the real one, not Canaletto’s — drowning quietly under everyone arriving to photograph it before it goes. And four years, no joke, in a construction camp in the Saudi desert, which is the room where the finish gets made and never the room that gets painted. There’s no gilded canvas of a labor camp at the edge of the Empty Quarter, no flattering haze, no Canaletto to place each man exactly where a man should be. I can give you that picture, because few others have: the heat with actual weight, the fine red grit in the keyboard and the bedroll and the back of the throat. The Hejaz was one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever lived, and the most honest — the only stop on the whole itinerary that wasn’t selling me anything.

The Grand Tour shows you the cathedrals and the canals. The worker camps show you the quarry the cathedral came out of. One is the truth and the other is the painting, and you should know at all times which one you’re looking at.

What the pumpkin was arguing against

The grand tourists count the world to prove they mattered. The old woman in the one room repeated a single gourd until it filled the universe — not to prove she’d gone anywhere, but to keep from disappearing where she stood. One art counts; the other holds on. I’d climbed the stairs with the lord’s instinct in my chest and come back down owing her an apology.

So why do we count at all — the tourists with their commissions, me with my stamps and datelines and whatever this is? I think the count is a hedge against the suspicion that none of it stuck, that a man can cross every water there is and come home exactly as heavy as he left, with nothing in the hold but stamps. The paintings were insurance against that fear. So is the passport. So, honestly, is this.

But there’s one credential that can’t be commissioned or hung or paved over — the saudade, the longing, the evidence carried in the body and not the hold, that the going meant something, that I did not merely move. Tourists collect views; I accrued routines and then abandoned every one of them. They have Venice in a frame on a wall, behaving itself forever. I have a tideline on a stone wall and the muscle memory of a bus route in a city I’ll probably never see again.

The aristocrats, then and now, come home with a painting. I came home full of people I will miss until I die.

I will take the ache.

— Douglas Stuart McDaniel, Citizen One: Exploring Our Urban Future

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

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.

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.

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## 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.

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## 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.

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## 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.

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## 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.

In this episode of the Premium Pulp Fiction podcast, my guest is Maksym Van Shamrai — 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.

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.

Welcome back to Citizen One: Exploring Our Urban Future and—I am excited to say—Premium Pulp Fiction. I’m your host, Douglas Stuart McDaniel, and before we go any further, I want to pause for a moment.

We’re recording this at the start of a new year, in a world that feels simultaneously exhausted and overheated. Wars that refuse resolution. Cities under pressure from climate, inequality, and political fracture. Technologies advancing faster than our capacity to govern them. Institutions losing credibility while still holding enormous power. For many people listening, this year didn’t begin with hope so much as vigilance.

That context matters.

Citizen One was never meant to be escapist. It exists because moments like this demand clearer thinking, longer memory, and a willingness to stay present inside complexity rather than retreat from it. The stories we explore here—about cities, systems, culture, and power—are not abstractions. They are the environments we’re already living in, whether we’ve named them yet or not.

So if you’re listening from a place of uncertainty, fatigue, or quiet resolve, you’re not alone. This space is for people who are still paying attention, still asking better questions, and still trying to understand how the future is being shaped in real time—often without our consent, but never without consequence.

With that in mind, let’s step into today’s episode.

Before I begin, I also wanted to share some important context with you. Citizen One is much more than a podcast. It is an emerging media brand where we explore stories at the intersection of innovation, culture, memory, and the past, present and future of cities.

But today, we’re stepping into a slightly different kind of narrative frontier. I want to take a moment to introduce Premium Pulp Fiction, our Citizen One literary imprint and publishing empire.

This episode is also a crossover—one that connects what we do here at Citizen One with a parallel storytelling project rooted in the same curiosity about systems, human complexity, and consequence, but expressed through fiction.

It’s called Premium Pulp — an independent traditional publishing imprint where quality, depth, and risk-bearing imagination come first.

At its core, Premium Pulp Fiction publishes speculative fiction, noir-inflected narratives, historical fiction, and narrative nonfiction concerned with power, memory, technology, and the quieter mechanics of how societies endure, adapt, and fail over time.

Beginning this year, we will be publishing a very small number of carefully selected titles, and unlike many modern indie or hybrid publishers, we fully finance standard book production. Our authors never pay for book production or global distribution; they also receive the resources to leverage an integrated marketing and publicity ecosystem built from a network of preferred, vetted, award-winning suppliers.

Over the last 15–20 years, most small presses have been forced into one of three survival models:

1. Author-funded or cost-sharing models

These include hybrid presses, “assisted publishing,” or thinly disguised vanity presses. Production costs are shifted to the author—sometimes partially, sometimes entirely—and the imprint’s role becomes administrative rather than editorial. Marketing support, when offered, is usually modular, outsourced, or pay-to-upgrade.

2. Grant-subsidized or institutionally anchored presses

University presses, arts-council-backed imprints, or nonprofit literary houses can sometimes fully fund authors, but they rely on external subsidy. Their marketing reach is often limited, conservative, or academically scoped, and publicity ecosystems are modest by design.

3. Micro-indies operating on sweat equity

These presses finance production out of pocket, but at minimal levels—basic editing, templated design, limited print runs—and expect authors to self-market aggressively. Publicity ecosystems are informal at best and nonexistent at worst.

What almost never exists anymore is a small, independent imprint that does all three of the following at once:

* Fully finances production (developmental editing through distribution)

* Retains editorial authority and risk (rather than transferring it to the author)

* Provides an integrated marketing and publicity ecosystem rather than ad-hoc support

That model used to be normal. It was called publishing.

While publishers exist across a wide range of sizes and models, the largest U.S. trade houses—commonly referred to as the Big Five—retain the scale, capital, and specialized editorial, marketing, and publicity infrastructure required to support broad distribution and coordinated campaigns at volume. Most small and independent presses operate with significantly smaller budgets and far fewer specialized departments, and as a result, authors are often expected to source, coordinate, or directly manage much of their promotional and publicity work themselves.

This context is what makes our approach genuinely uncommon. Premium Pulp Fiction is structurally closer to a miniature traditional house than to a contemporary indie press. We’re not simply financing books; we’re absorbing uncertainty so that editorial decisions can be made upstream, slowly, and with coherence.

Within that structure, the inclusion of a fully integrated marketing and publicity ecosystem is the clearest outlier.

Most small presses either:

* hand authors a checklist, or

* provide one or two vendor introductions, or

* rely on goodwill and improvisation

Very few embed authors into a preferred, already-vetted network of publicists, designers, media prep, trailers, and positioning support. Doing so requires long-term relationship capital, not just money.

So the honest framing is this:

Premium Pulp Fiction is not rare because it’s boutique. It’s rare because it reinstates a publishing contract that the market quietly abandoned—one where the imprint assumes risk, curates taste, and provides infrastructure so authors can focus on the work itself.

That isn’t nostalgia. It’s a deliberate structural choice. It’s structural dissent.

That structural choice shapes our focus: books built to last—structurally sound, intellectually grounded, and resistant to fashion. That orientation is not accidental. It reflects the belief that long-term relevance and endurance require more than a launch cycle or a marketing push; they require structural coherence, editorial intention, and depth of engagement that only emerges through sustained collaboration between author and editor.

Premium Pulp Fiction was founded to support work that understands genre as a working tool rather than a marketing label. We are interested in stories that know where they come from — noir that remembers its debts, historical fiction that treats the past as something lived rather than staged, speculative work that understands systems, worlds, and story ecologies before it imagines their collapse.

Handled seriously, genre does more than entertain. When handled carefully — structurally, morally, and contextually — genre becomes a way into complexity rather than a shortcut around it.

Our publishing approach intentionally mirrors that complexity. Premium Pulp Fiction operates as an independent traditional imprint: we fully finance book production for our authors, including editorial development, copyediting, cover design, layout and formatting, distribution setup, media kits, and book trailers. This allows editorial decisions to be made on the basis of quality and coherence rather than speed or scale.

That work extends beyond production. We focus on positioning, framing, and long-term relevance, with attention to how a book will read five or ten years after publication, not just how it launches. That longer view matters because a great story, like a great city, continues to live and change after its initial debut, shaping and reshaping its readership over time.

The kinds of work we seek include:

* Speculative fiction grounded in political, economic, and technological reality

* Dystopian narratives informed by history rather than abstraction

* Noir fiction attentive to power, corruption, and moral compromise

* Historical fiction concerned with memory, survival, and unfinished business

We value narrative control, structural clarity, and voice, and we welcome humor when it emerges from intelligence rather than irony.

Most importantly, we do not offer paid publishing packages. Premium Pulp is not a service press. We seek projects that benefit from close editorial engagement and long-term positioning rather than rapid release cycles.

This publishing philosophy—production financed in full, editorial risk assumed by the imprint, and a limited annual catalog—creates space for seriousness rather than spectacle. It allows fiction to ask big questions rather than announce its genre category before it earns the right. It aligns with the way Citizen One interrogates systems, but through narrative intelligence rather than analytical exposition.

Now, with that foundation in place, I want to introduce the first author signed under this imprint who exemplifies the kind of work Premium Pulp was created to support.

Van Shamrai is a Ukrainian science-fiction novelist whose work is shaped by lived historical pressure rather than speculative distance. His fiction emerges from a close engagement with political systems, social fracture, and the long consequences of collective decisions, drawing on both contemporary Ukrainian experience and broader European intellectual traditions. Rather than treating collapse as a sudden event, his writing traces how societies erode over time—through institutional strain, moral compromise, and the accumulation of unresolved choices.

His characters move through worlds governed by constraint rather than convenience, where survival is inseparable from memory, responsibility, and inherited obligation. The speculative elements in his work are never decorative; they function as extensions of real historical and civic forces, rendered through disciplined worldbuilding and a restrained, unsentimental narrative voice.

We will be publishing the English-language edition of Scions of the Last Hope, scheduled for release in late spring.

Scions of the Last Hope reflects those priorities. It is speculative in a way that respects political and historical gravity, attentive to systems as lived environments rather than convenient backdrops, and resolute in narrative voice and consequence. Its world is not a metaphor. It is an environment shaped by pressure, inheritance, and moral trade-offs that resist simplification.

Premium Pulp Fiction is not here to rescue publishing, nor to compete with high-velocity content engines. It is here to practice a standard of editorial responsibility that treats fiction as intellectual work, moral architecture, and imaginative infrastructure — work capable of carrying complexity without surrendering it for the sake of market clarity.

That is why we exist, why we work the way we work, and why the English release of Scions of the Last Hope matters—not simply as a book, but as a continuation of the narrative practices Citizen One was built to explore.

Thanks for listening.