Citizen One: Exploring Our Urban Future

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.
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## 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.
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## 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.


This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit multiversethinking.substack.com

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.


This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit multiversethinking.substack.com

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.


This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit multiversethinking.substack.com

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.


This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit multiversethinking.substack.com

Cities are a form civilization often takes. They were never its starting condition.
Since my first travels to Türkiye several years ago—through Istanbul, İzmir, and Ephesus—and also across archaeological sites in Egypt, Jordan, Bahrain, Morocco, and Saudi Arabia, Göbekli Tepe has remained on my research radar**. Not as an archaeological revelation or a sudden conversion to deep prehistory, but because, as a narrative architect, I’m drawn to how settlement systems form—especially the ones hiding in plain sight.**
Taş Tepeler has lingered in my mind in precisely this way, not as a city or urban form, but as a system of worldbuilding and story ecology that invites harder questions about how civilizations function beneath their visible forms: coordination, legitimacy, labor, belief, and power.
The logic that structures human worlds long before they crystallize into cities.
Taş Tepeler offers evidence of something more elusive and, in many ways, more instructive: civilization as coordinated life before urbanization. We don’t see clear evidence of dense settlement cores. No large concentration of permanent housing blocks. No streets, markets, or municipal hierarchy. None of the architectural signals we rely on to tell ourselves that “civilization has begun.”
And yet the civic coordination is unmistakable. Across multiple sites, deliberately distributed across the landscape, we see coordination that exceeds kinship or coincidence. A shared symbolic grammar appears again and again, not as local improvisation but as something collectively maintained. Labor is organized at a scale that no single community could sustain alone. People gather repeatedly—on rhythms that imply scheduling, expectation, and return—rather than accident or crisis.
Memory here is not stored in text or archive, but anchored in place.
That anchoring is not passive. It is actively staged.
There is so much exciting work going on now across the Taş Tepeler sites: archaelogical work, paleo-environmental research, cultural heritage management, and ethnoarchaeology. And recent excavations reveal narrative systems embedded directly into architecture: reliefs depicting sequences rather than symbols, animals and humans shown in motion and interaction, vessels and figurines designed to be handled, repositioned, and displayed. These are not static images. They appear to be prompts for retelling.
Some installations appear deliberately constructed to accommodate small groups seated together, facing shared visual fields—spaces where stories could be enacted, repeated, and remembered through gesture and movement as much as through speech. If this is not theatre in the modern sense, it is unmistakably performative.
In societies without writing, narrative is not entertainment. It is governance. Stories encode precedent, obligation, consequence, and identity. They allow rules to survive complexity without law codes, and memory to persist without archives.
Taş Tepeler suggests that long before writing externalized memory onto clay or parchment, humans externalized it into space, sequence, and ritualized performance. Authority does not reside in an office or a law code; it operates across time and distance through participation, repetition, and shared obligation. Nowhere is this clearer than in the way these communities treated their own past.
Structures were not simply abandoned when they fell out of use. They were deliberately backfilled—often with more labor than their original construction required—sealed with care, and preserved as memory rather than erased. Human remains were curated, repositioned, and integrated into walls and floors over generations. New structures were built alongside old ones, not on top of them, maintaining a legible landscape of accumulated history.
This is not disposal. It is archiving—performed spatially rather than textually.
The way human remains appear at Taş Tepeler adds another layer to this memory architecture. Rather than isolated grave fields, fragments of human bones and prepared crania recur in niches, built contexts, and fill deposits. This integration of the human body into the fabric of communal space is not random. It is part of the same durable system of place-based remembrance that we see in architecture, narrative imagery, and the sequencing of built enclosures — a set of conventions that carries memory across generations without text or archive.
What emerges is an early form of memory architecture: a system in which collective history is embedded into the built environment itself, allowing authority, identity, and obligation to persist across centuries without documents, institutions, or states.
Civilization here is not remembered. It is inhabited. These are not private acts or isolated rituals. They are public behaviors, negotiated in common, and sustained across generations.
That is what makes them _civic_—even in the absence of streets, councils, or walls. Settlement is not the outcome of farming. It is the social condition that makes farming useful.
While Taş Tepeler is not a city, it is civilization.
What Taş Tepeler suggests—quietly, almost reluctantly—is that civilization does not emerge first as a centralized object. It emerges as a distributed system: a network of meaning, obligation, and memory that exists before cities, and in some cases actively resists the gravitational pull toward them.
This is where the familiar chicken-and-egg question finally loses its usefulness—not just archaeologically, but conceptually. Did farming produce settlement, or did settlement produce farming?
Such a question assumes a linear sequence that the evidence at Taş Tepeler no longer supports. What appears instead is a feedback system already underway—one that begins with repeated aggregation, not merely subsistence innovation.
Across multiple sites, we now see clear evidence of deliberately constructed domestic space: oval structures carved directly into bedrock, with hearths, storage areas, food-processing installations, and long-term reuse. These are not seasonal shelters. They are houses.
They imply people staying put—day after day, year after year—well before domesticated agriculture enters the picture.
What sustains that settlement is not farming, but managed abundance. Wild cereals, legumes, nuts, and game are exploited systematically, supported by water infrastructure carved into bedrock at a scale that allows year-round habitation. In other words, people are not settling because they farm. They are reorganizing subsistence because they have chosen to settle.
Agriculture, in this light, is not the spark of civilization. It is one of several stabilizing responses to the pressures created when social life becomes durably collective.
This matters enormously for Citizen One—and for how we think about cities more broadly—because the project has never been about equating cities with civilization. It has been about understanding how humans coordinate at scale—how they hold together shared purpose, legitimacy, and restraint—and what happens when those systems harden into infrastructure, bureaucracy, and power.
Taş Tepeler reminds us that before civilization was something you could map, administer, or govern, it was something you had to sustain. Together.
I seem to arrive at most things this way now—not through epiphany, but through brief conversations that refuse to let go.
One of those conversations came by way of Irving Finkel, speaking casually on Lex Fridman’s podcast. Finkel is a senior curator at the British Museum, one of the world’s leading Assyriologists, and someone who has spent decades reading the residue of ancient bureaucracies line by line—cuneiform tablets, seals, inventories, contracts—the administrative afterlife of early civilizations. Fridman, a researcher and long-form interviewer known for giving specialists room to think aloud rather than perform certainty, let the moment pass without interruption.
Perhaps without realizing he was lighting a fuse, Finkel mentioned a small object from Göbekli Tepe: a green stone, seal-like, easily overlooked in a plate of excavation photographs. To him, it wasn’t just an oddity. It was a clue. **A raindrop.**
And from that raindrop, he suggested, you might reasonably infer a much larger, now-missing system—something like notation, something like administrative marking, something that begins to look uncomfortably close to writing, thousands of years earlier than we are usually prepared to allow.
He was careful not to claim proof. He wasn’t rewriting history. He was doing something far more dangerous and far more interesting: asking whether our categories are too small for the evidence we already have.
Even if no true writing existed here, the myriad administrative problems that writing later solves may already have been visible here.
That question has stayed with me.
Years of traveling through places like Istanbul—where time doesn’t move forward so much as stack vertically—and Ephesus, where public life, ritual practice, trade, and power were never separate systems but overlapping expressions of the same social logic, have trained me to be suspicious of clean origin stories. Cities don’t begin when textbooks say they do. They accrete. They remember. They metabolize earlier forms and pretend they invented themselves.
Working with Alex McDowell—one of the pioneers of systems-based worldbuilding across film, design, and urban futures—sharpened that instinct. Our collaborations focus on applying narrative worldbuilding methods to real-world future city projects and strategic urban systems, using story not as ornament, but as a tool for systems thinking: a way to test how social behavior, governance, infrastructure, and technology intersect under pressure.
In that context, imagining future cities is never about spectacle or prediction. It is about systems literacy. You begin by asking what must already exist—socially, psychologically, infrastructurally—for a place to function at all, and how those conditions evolve long before they become visible in buildings or policy.
That kind of work trains you to see futures not as inventions, but as extrapolations of present systems under strain. You don’t design them by guessing. You design them by interrogating the present until its hidden assumptions surface.
Once you learn to think that way, it becomes almost impossible to look at the past through clean origin stories. You start asking different questions: not when something appears, but what problem it was already solving.
Which is why Taş Tepeler matters—not as a mystery, not as a provocation for fringe speculation, but as a stress test.
We tend to like our civilizational beginnings clean and linear. Writing begins in Sumer. Cities follow. Religion formalizes. States emerge. History starts. It’s orderly. It’s teachable. It fits nicely into timelines and museum galleries.
Göbekli Tepe, and now the wider Taş Tepeler constellation, doesn’t so much argue with that sequence as quietly render it insufficient to explain one early history of human civilization.
Because once you accept what is already firmly established—that people in the 9th and 10th millennia BCE were capable of organizing large labor forces, planning and executing monumental architecture, carving complex symbolic and narrative imagery, and sustaining shared practices across generations—a position broadly supported by the ongoing Taş Tepeler research program in southeastern Türkiye²—then the sequence starts to feel less like a law of progress and more like a story we told ourselves because it was convenient.
And once that sequence breaks, a more uncomfortable question surfaces.
If humans were already capable of monumentality, coordination, narrative symbolism, and long-term planning before writing, before agriculture, before cities in any recognizable sense—or more precisely, before fully institutionalized agriculture and urbanism as we later define them³—then what else about “progress” have we misunderstood? What capacities did we assume had to be learned slowly, when in fact they may have been present all along?
This isn’t a fringe argument. It’s not an attempt to smuggle a Cappadocian Atlantis into the conversation through the back door. It’s what happens when material evidence accumulates faster than the conceptual frameworks we use to organize it.
Before any speculation, before any discussion of proto-writing or seals or perishable media, it’s worth being precise about what the evidence already tells us.
Taş Tepeler refers to a network of early Neolithic sites in what is now southeastern Türkiye, centered in the Şanlıurfa region and including Göbekli Tepe, Karahantepe, Sayburç, and several others. These sites are not isolated anomalies. They form a connected landscape—geographically, symbolically, and almost certainly socially—a characterization now explicitly adopted by the Taş Tepeler research initiative itself².
They date primarily to the 9th and 10th millennia BCE, within the Pre-Pottery Neolithic period, long before the appearance of urban centers, formal states, or known writing systems as conventionally defined in the Mesopotamian record⁴.
What they contain is in its broad contours increasingly well-established. Large, intentionally planned communal structures. Finely carved stone pillars and reliefs produced with remarkable technical consistency. Repeated symbolic motifs that recur across multiple sites, suggesting shared meaning rather than local improvisation. And, perhaps most strikingly, evidence of coordinated labor at a scale once thought impossible for societies without agriculture or hierarchical governance.
At Sayburç, in particular, we see something even more revealing: not just symbols, but scenes. Humans and animals depicted in relation to one another, caught in moments of interaction and tension. These are not abstract marks. They are narrative gestures—fragments of stories fixed in stone—widely discussed in the literature as some of the earliest known narrative relief scenes to date⁵.
Taken together, this evidence forces a revision that doesn’t require speculation at all.
Complex social organization does not depend on cities.
It does not depend on kings.
It does not depend on writing.
What it depends on is shared meaning, reliable mechanisms of coordination, and durable ways of carrying memory forward in time.
Everything else—writing, bureaucracy, formal institutions—comes later, when those earlier systems begin to strain under their own success.
Taş Tepeler doesn’t tell us where civilization began.
It tells us what civilization already looked like, long before we decided to start the clock.
Administration Before Writing, Memory Before Text
Once you accept that Taş Tepeler represents coordinated social systems rather than isolated ritual curiosities, a different question begins to matter more than the one we usually rush toward.
Not did they have writing?
But how did they manage complexity over time?
This is where Irving Finkel’s provocation becomes useful—not as a conclusion, but as a diagnostic tool.
In the modern imagination, writing is often treated as a binary threshold: either a society has it or it doesn’t, and once it appears, everything else conveniently falls into place. Cities, laws, contracts, states. But that framing confuses the tool with the problem it was invented to solve.
Writing doesn’t appear because humans suddenly become smarter.
It appears because existing systems begin to exceed the limits of human memory, voice, and ritual repetition—a dynamic well documented in the emergence of administrative writing in late fourth-millennium Mesopotamia⁶.
And Taş Tepeler already shows us social and administrative systems brushing up against those limits.
To build, maintain, and reuse monumental communal spaces over generations requires more than inspiration. It requires continuity. Decisions remembered. Roles recognized. Permissions granted. Obligations honored. Authority made legible beyond the lifespan of any one individual.
In later periods, we see exactly how societies solve that problem. They externalize memory. They invent administrative technologies: tallies, tokens, seals, ledgers, and eventually writing. Finkel’s career has been spent inside those systems, reading the residue of ancient bureaucracies line by line. When he looks at a seal-like object at Göbekli Tepe and raises an eyebrow, he’s not chasing mysticism. He’s recognizing a familiar logic.
Seals, after all, are not art objects. They are instruments of trust.
They exist to say: this action is authorized, this exchange is legitimate, this person has standing. Long before writing records poetry or theology, it records accountability—a pattern evident across early Mesopotamian administrative archives⁶.
The uncomfortable implication is not that Göbekli Tepe had scribes quietly tallying grain in clay tablets nine thousand years ago. It’s that some form of administrative reasoning—some way of stabilizing social reality across time and distance—may have existed without leaving behind the kinds of artifacts we’ve trained ourselves to look for.
This is where archaeology’s material bias matters. Stone survives. Fired clay survives. Leaves, wood, fiber, skin, and bark do not. Entire systems of notation could vanish without leaving a trace, especially if their primary function was temporary: marking permission, recording contribution, ratifying ritual status, then being discarded once the event passed.
Even without writing, Taş Tepeler shows signs of administrative thinking. Repeated architectural grammar across sites. Standardized pillar forms. Consistent symbolic repertoires. Shared spatial logic. These are not improvisations. They are conventions. And conventions require enforcement.
Which raises a quieter but more revealing possibility.
What if Taş Tepeler didn’t need writing because it solved the same problem differently?
Instead of abstract text, it used space.
Instead of documents, it used monuments.
Instead of archives, it used ritual repetition embedded in stone.
In that model, authority doesn’t live in a ledger. It lives in place. Memory isn’t stored in text. It’s rehearsed seasonally, physically, communally. The enclosure itself becomes a kind of administrative device—a durable reference point against which behavior, obligation, and identity are measured.
This doesn’t make writing inevitable or early. It makes it unnecessary—until scale, density, and speed overwhelm those older systems.
And that, ultimately, is why the question of writing at Taş Tepeler is less important than it first appears.
Whether or not any form of proto-notation existed in 9000 BCE, the social logic that eventually produces writing is already present. Humans are coordinating large groups. They are managing surplus and labor. They are stabilizing meaning across generations. They are negotiating authority without kings, law codes, or formal states.
Writing, when it eventually arrives, will not invent civilization.
It will bureaucratize something that already exists.
Taş Tepeler doesn’t challenge the history of writing so much as it reframes it. Writing becomes not the spark of civilization, but the paperwork that follows once the fire is already burning.
And that reframing matters—not only for how we understand the deep past, but for how we imagine the future.
Because if civilization can operate—briefly, brilliantly, and at scale—without the tools we assume are indispensable, then the real question is not what technologies we add next.
It’s which systems of meaning, coordination, and memory we are quietly eroding as we add them.
Religion as Jurisdiction, Visual Narratives in Stone as Social Code
Once you stop asking whether Taş Tepeler had writing and start asking how it governed itself, the role of religion shifts almost immediately.
Not upward, toward belief.
But inward, toward function.
Modern language gets in the way here. When we hear “religion,” we tend to imagine doctrine, faith, metaphysics, gods demanding belief. But in early societies—especially societies on the cusp of sedentism—religion is less about what people believe and more about how they behave. It is not theology in the abstract sense. It is jurisdiction—or more precisely, one of several overlapping social technologies through which rules, limits, and legitimacy are made visible and enforceable⁷.
At Taş Tepeler, the evidence suggests a world where religion provided the rules for living close together before formal law existed. These were communities navigating new pressures: repeated aggregation, resource concentration, emerging inequalities, disputes over labor and status, and the growing challenge of keeping violence contained within tolerable bounds—pressures widely recognized in Neolithic transition research⁸.
In that context, religion doesn’t sit apart from politics or economics. It is one of the mechanisms that makes them possible.
The communal enclosures are not simply sacred spaces. They are stages where authority is performed and renewed. They are places where people learn—through repetition, spectacle, and shared risk—what is permitted, what is forbidden, and what carries consequences. The carvings are not decorative. They are reminders.
This becomes especially clear when you look closely at the iconography across Taş Tepeler. Predatory animals dominate the visual field. Leopards, boars, snakes, birds of prey. These are not gentle symbols. They are dangerous, unpredictable, and familiar to people who lived close to them. The message is not subtle: the world outside the enclosure is violent, and survival requires discipline—a reading consistent with prevailing interpretations of Göbekli Tepe iconography⁹.
But the violence is not glorified. It is contained.
The enclosures take the chaos of the wild and pin it into stone. They bring fear inside the social space, where it can be named, rehearsed, and controlled. This is not superstition. It is psychological technology: a means of shaping behavior, expectation, and restraint through shared symbolic experience⁷.
At Sayburç, this logic sharpens even further. The relief there does something unusual for its time. It depicts not just animals, but interaction—humans and animals locked in relational scenes. Tension is implied. Agency is distributed. The figures are not symbols floating in abstraction; they are actors in a moment.
That matters.
Narrative scenes are not art for art’s sake. They encode precedent. They say: this happened, this is how it went, this is what it means. In societies without writing, narrative is how rules survive complexity. Stories are remembered because they are embodied, visual, and emotionally charged—a function widely discussed in cognitive and archaeological approaches to early narrative⁵.
In this sense, Taş Tepeler may represent an early experiment in externalized moral memory. Not laws written down, but situations carved into stone. Not commandments, but scenarios. If you do this, this follows. If you cross that line, this is the cost.
Religion here functions less like belief and more like an operating system—while still accommodating cosmology, identity, and meaning alongside regulation rather than reducing them to a single cause⁸. It stabilizes behavior in a world where old hunter-gatherer norms are no longer sufficient, but formal institutions have not yet emerged.
This is also where status enters the picture.
Monumental building does not happen in egalitarian societies without differentiation. Some people organize. Some carve. Some provision. Some officiate. The enclosures formalize those differences without fully hardening them into class. Prestige is earned, displayed, and reaffirmed through participation rather than inherited through title—a pattern observed in multiple early sedentary contexts¹⁰.
But prestige is fragile. It requires constant renewal.
Archaeological work at Göbekli Tepe has documented modified human cranial fragments that strongly support deliberate post-mortem treatment rather than casual discard. In a peer-reviewed study, Gresky, Haelm, and Clare describe three skull fragments bearing intentionally produced deep grooves, cut marks, and at least one drilled perforation—evidence interpreted as a previously undocumented variant of Early Neolithic “skull cult” practice at the site.¹⁵
Beyond those modified crania, Göbekli Tepe has also produced a larger scatter of human bone fragments recovered largely from fill contexts—material that is archaeologically real, but contextually messy. It does not map neatly onto later cemetery logic, and it should not be treated as proof of a single standardized funerary program. The more defensible claim is narrower: the dead appear inside the same architectural and depositional systems that organize the living, and in at least some cases the human body was curated, altered, and reintroduced into communal space.
For the broader Taş Tepeler region, reports of skulls and human remains appearing in architectural contexts exist, but the evidentiary standard varies by site and by publication status. A conservative way to state it—without importing hype—is this: across the Şanlıurfa Pre-Pottery Neolithic landscape, there is credible evidence that human remains sometimes occur in built contexts (niches, deposits, fills), and that this pattern is best understood as part of place-based memory practice rather than “burial” in the later institutional sense.
None of these contexts, however, are conventional burials in the later sense; they are architectural depositions that seem tied to symbolic memory, spatial continuity, and communal identity rather than individual interment. This reinforces the view that memory, obligation, and social coherence were encoded in place long before formal funerary institutions emerged.
Religion provides that renewal mechanism. It turns coordination into obligation and obligation into meaning. You don’t just help build the enclosure because you were told to. You do it because it situates you within a story that outlasts you.
Seen this way, Taş Tepeler is not an early temple complex. It is a social laboratory.
Before Classes, Before States — Specialization, Inequality, and a Fragile Balance
Once religion is understood as a stabilizing system rather than a belief structure, the next pressure point comes into focus almost immediately.
Labor.
Taş Tepeler did not build itself. The stone was quarried, transported, shaped, erected, and maintained by human bodies over long stretches of time. That alone tells us something uncomfortable: these communities were already negotiating uneven contributions—a point widely acknowledged in discussions of monumentality and labor organization in the Pre-Pottery Neolithic¹¹.
This is where discussions of “class” often go wrong, because we reach for categories that arrive much later and apply them too early. There are no kings here. No palaces. No tax rolls. No written law codes enforcing permanent hierarchy.
But there is differentiation.
Skill differentiates. Time differentiates. Access differentiates. And once people begin to gather regularly in the same places, differentiation does not disappear—it compounds—a dynamic familiar from anthropological studies of early specialization¹⁰.
Stone carving at Taş Tepeler is not casual. The precision, scale, and consistency imply learned expertise passed across generations. That means apprenticeship. Which means time not spent hunting or gathering. Which means provisioning. Which means trust and obligation flowing in particular directions.
Specialists do not emerge in isolation. They emerge because a society decides—explicitly or implicitly—that some people will be supported to do things others cannot or will not. That decision is never neutral.
What’s striking about Taş Tepeler is how carefully that differentiation seems to have been managed. Prestige is visible, but it is not yet locked in. Authority exists, but it must be renewed through performance. No one appears to rule by fiat—an inference consistent with the absence of centralized elite architecture or burial differentiation at these sites¹¹.
This is an unstable equilibrium.
Too much inequality, and the coalition fractures.
Too little differentiation, and the system cannot scale.
Taş Tepeler appears to be navigating that narrow corridor with remarkable sophistication. The communal enclosures absorb surplus labor and convert it into shared meaning. Feasting redistributes calories. Ritual redistributes prestige. Narrative redistributes legitimacy—a pattern widely discussed in anthropological models of feasting economies¹².
But none of this is permanent.
The very success of these systems contains the seeds of their transformation. As gatherings grow larger and more frequent, as specialists become indispensable, as obligations stretch across wider networks, the old methods of regulation begin to strain.
This is where later societies will turn to writing, formal law, standing authority, and eventually the state—not because these are superior forms of organization, but because they are more scalable under pressure—an argument advanced by multiple comparative studies of early state formation¹³.
Taş Tepeler as Mirror — Why Ancient Story Ecologies Still Matter
At some point, Taş Tepeler stops being an archaeological subject and starts behaving like a mirror.
Not because it offers answers we can copy, but because it exposes how narrow our assumptions about civilization have become.
We are used to thinking of cities as machines: infrastructure layered on infrastructure, governed by law, optimized by technology, stabilized by administration. When those systems fail, our instinct is always to add more structure—more data, more enforcement, more abstraction.
But Taş Tepeler reminds us that the deepest work of civilization happens before any of that.
It happens at the level of shared meaning.
Long before humans formalized power into states or memory into text, they built places where stories could be held collectively—places where behavior was shaped not by enforcement alone, but by participation, repetition, and consequence.
What made them work was not technology, but narrative coherence.
This is where narrative architecture becomes more than metaphor.
Working with Alex McDowell has reinforced this lesson again and again: worlds do not fail because they lack innovation. They fail because their stories fracture—a principle McDowell has articulated repeatedly in systems-based worldbuilding practice¹⁴.
Taş Tepeler shows us a society grappling with that exact problem at the moment it first appears. Humans settling down. Aggregating. Specializing. Pushing beyond the limits of face-to-face trust. And instead of immediately inventing hierarchy or bureaucracy, they doubled down on shared narrative, embodied ritual, and visible memory.
They built civilization out of story first, and only later out of administration.
That inversion matters.
Because Taş Tepeler does not tell us to abandon writing, states, or cities. It tells us something far more unsettling: that these are secondary technologies, layered on top of older, more fragile systems of coordination that we barely understand anymore.
Civilization did not begin when humans learned to write things down. It began when they learned how to live with one another at scale without tearing themselves apart.
That experiment did not end in 9000 BCE.
It is still ongoing.
Footnotes
1. Finkel, Irving. Interview with Lex Fridman. _Lex Fridman Podcast_, YouTube, accessed Dec 13, 2025.
2. Turkish Ministry of Culture and Tourism. Taş Tepeler Project Overview. Şanlıurfa Archaeological Research Program, ongoing.
3. Özdoğan, Mehmet. “Neolithic Cultures at the Crossroads: Early Sedentism and Subsistence Strategies in Anatolia.” Antiquity 85, no. 328 (2011): 495–508.
4. Englund, Robert K. “The State of Decipherment of Proto-Cuneiform.” In The Origins of Writing, edited by Stephen Houston, 237–270. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004.
5. Özdoğan, Mehmet, and Necmi Karul. “A New Early Neolithic Narrative Relief from Sayburç.” Antiquity 96, no. 389 (2022): 1–15.
6. Nissen, Hans J., Peter Damerow, and Robert K. Englund. Archaic Bookkeeping: Early Writing and Techniques of Economic Administration in the Ancient Near East. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993.
7. Bellah, Robert N. Religion in Human Evolution. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011.
8. Hodder, Ian. The Leopard’s Tale: Revealing the Mysteries of Çatalhöyük. London: Thames & Hudson, 2006.
9. Schmidt, Klaus. Göbekli Tepe: A Stone Age Sanctuary in South-Eastern Anatolia. Berlin: Ex Oriente, 2010.
10. Hayden, Brian. “Feasting Theory and the Emergence of Inequality.” Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 20, no. 3 (2001): 299–339.
11. Dietrich, Oliver et al. “The Role of Cult and Feasting in the Emergence of Neolithic Communities.” Antiquity 86, no. 333 (2012): 674–695.
12. Dietler, Michael. “Feasts and Commensal Politics.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 7, no. 1 (2001): 65–114.
13. Scott, James C. Against the Grain. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017.
14. McDowell, Alex. “Worldbuilding as a Design Process.” Journal of Design and Science, MIT Media Lab, 2019.
15. Gresky, Julia, Juliane Haelm, and Lee Clare. “Modified human crania from Göbekli Tepe provide evidence for a new form of Neolithic skull cult.” Science Advances 3, no. 6 (2017): e1700564. (PubMed record: 28782013).
16. Anadolu Agency. “Neolithic burial traditions / skull modifications reported from Şanlıurfa PPNA/PPNB sites.”


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