Carrión would be the strongest additional figure for the specific idea of Barcelona as an archive, network and living text .
Jorge Carrión’s Barcelona. Book of the passages is a hybrid work of urban essay, travel chronicle, autobiography, journalism and archival investigation. Rather than describing Barcelona through its famous monuments or official neighborhoods , Carrión reads the city through its passages : narrow pedestrian routes, covered galleries, internal streets, alleys, industrial corridors and semi-private spaces that connect one urban zone with another. The publisher describes the result as a “nonfiction novel” rather than a conventional history or guidebook.
Barcelona contains roughly four hundred such passages. Carrión walked through them, researched their histories, interviewed residents and connected their physical forms to the people who inhabited or created them. The book includes stories of washerwomen, printers, booksellers, photographers, architects, anarchists, workers, immigrants, artists and shopkeepers—figures often missing from the city’s monumental self-image.
The passage as a method
The central idea is that a city can be read as a text, and that passages function like its footnotes, parentheses or marginalia .
A grand avenue expresses official planning, commerce and civic identity. A passage may preserve something less visible:
- an earlier rural path;
- an industrial or working-class settlement;
- traces of informal housing;
- a bourgeois nineteenth-century gallery;
- an overlooked community;
- a conflict between public and private space;
- a route that survived after the world around it changed.
The passage is therefore both a real architectural structure and a method of thought. It allows Carrión to enter Barcelona indirectly—through its side doors rather than its monumental façade. The book treats these spaces as “back entrances” into the city’s social subconscious, exposing histories of class segregation, industrial labor , migration, Francoism and urban redevelopment that the official “Barcelona model” can obscure.
Walter Benjamin and Italo Calvino
The title consciously recalls Walter Benjamin’s unfinished Arcades Project , which used the nineteenth-century shopping arcades of Paris to investigate capitalism, modernity, commodities, architecture and collective dreams.
Carrión transfers that logic to Barcelona, but broadens the meaning of “passage.” His passages are not only commercial arcades. They include proletarian corridors, garden intersections, hidden courtyards, industrial routes and informal urban spaces.
Italo Calvino is another important presence. Like Invisible Cities , Carrión’s book treats a city as something that can generate many alternative cities within itself. Barcelona enters into dialogue with Paris, Venice, London, Buenos Aires and New York, while personal memory intersects with architecture and world history.
Barcelona as collective intelligence
One of the book’s most interesting propositions is that the city is not a fixed object designed exclusively by architects or governments. It is a form of collective intelligence continuously produced by inhabitants, movements, conflicts, migrations and adaptations.
That means the true scale of the urban map is not simply streets, squares or iconic buildings. It is the individual citizen and the relations among citizens. The city thinks through the accumulated actions of people who build, occupy, abandon, rename, modify and remember its spaces.
This makes Carrión’s Barcelona less like a stable map and more like a living nervous system:
passages connect zones;
memories circulate through them; forgotten histories remain latent; present inhabitants reactivate or transform them.
Its political dimension
The book does not romanticize every old passage as heritage that must be preserved unchanged. Instead, it asks who created particular spaces, who was excluded from them, whose labor sustained them and what political possibilities remain embedded in them.
It moves between nineteenth- and twentieth-century urban history and contemporary issues such as economic crisis, tourism, migration, independence politics and the city’s struggle with its own global image.
The hidden city is therefore not merely picturesque. It contains inequality, displacement, poverty and repression, but also alternative forms of community and urban invention.
Why it relates strongly to CGS
The connection to CGS is not mainly visual. It is structural.
The city as a readable organism
Carrión treats Barcelona as a text composed of visible and hidden layers. CGS similarly reveals Barcelona as a living plate whose streets, buried structures, markets, cemeteries, shelters and thresholds participate in a larger transformational system.
Passage as threshold
In Carrión, a passage is simultaneously:
- a physical route;
- a historical archive;
- a social relationship;
- a transition between urban worlds;
- a method of entering hidden knowledge.
That is very close to the function of a CGS threshold: not merely a doorway, but a relational condition through which one state becomes another.
Monument versus marginal structure
Both projects shift attention away from the obvious image of Barcelona. Carrión looks beyond celebrated monuments toward minor spaces and forgotten workers. CGS moves beneath the recognizable city toward roots, crypts, shelters, ruins, buried roads and symbolic machinery.
The observer activates the map
Carrión’s city becomes intelligible through walking, reading, interviewing and comparing. CGS asks the reader-Alchemist to activate relationships by looking, reading, pairing and returning. In both works, the map is incomplete without an active observer.
Multiple autonomous narratives
Each passage can be read as a relatively autonomous microhistory, yet together the passages create a larger image of the city. That resembles the relationship between the CGS plates and narratives: distinct units that remain separate while contributing to a shared transformational field.
The important difference
Carrión’s method is predominantly documentary and archaeological . He begins with existing places, testimonies, archives and urban histories and assembles them into a literary constellation.
CGS is mythopoetic and operative . It uses symbolic plates and fiction to imagine the city awakening as part of a transformational system.
A useful distinction would be:
Carrión uncovers the symbolic potential already embedded in Barcelona’s physical passages.
The CGS protocols of transmutation and the Book of split ink turn Barcelona itself into an active symbolic passage.
For this project, the book was particularly valuable as a model of how to connect walking, urban archaeology, personal observation and historical research without reducing Barcelona to scenery. It provided a nonfiction counterpart to the idea of the city as the final unwritten plate.
Where do you look next—and what changed because you looked again?
English edition: Vyaas, Shaharee. The Chimera Protocols of Transmutation. 254 pages, standard color. Independently Published, September 15, 2026. ISBN 9798255835324. Price: €29.99.
Edición española: Vyaas, Shaharee. Los protocolos quiméricos de transmutación y El libro de la tinta dividida. 254 páginas, color estándar. Publicación: 15 de septiembre de 2026. ISBN 978-84-09-88086-7. Precio: €29,99.
