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Citizen One: Exploring Our Urban Future

Citizen One: Exploring Our Urban Future

By: Douglas Stuart McDaniel
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Welcome to Citizen One: Exploring Our Urban Future. I’m Douglas Stuart McDaniel—author, innovation veteran, and accidental urbanist—exploring the forces shaping the cities of tomorrow. It’s not just a conversation—it’s a call to action. Here, we challenge assumptions, explore bold ideas, and rethink what cities can be—both now and in the future.

multiversethinking.substack.comDouglas Stuart McDaniel Science
Episodes
  • Tom Clancy Imagined 9/11 in 1994

    Tom Clancy Imagined 9/11 in 1994
    Jun 15 2026
    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 treeThe 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 aheadWhich 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 ...
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    24 mins
  • Citizen One S2 E12: Two Blocks from My Apartment

    Citizen One S2 E12: Two Blocks from My Apartment
    Mar 20 2026
    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 MarketTen 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 WestIn 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 SurvivalIn 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 ...
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    19 mins
  • Citizen One S2:E11 – Barcelona: A Field Study in Urban Literacy

    Citizen One S2:E11 – Barcelona: A Field Study in Urban Literacy
    Feb 26 2026
    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 ZoneI’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, ...
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    28 mins
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