About
Who I am
GUIX BOIRA, Arnau
Political Scientist & Founder of Neo Civitas Lab
I became interested in political science because I wanted to understand how the world works. How power dynamics work? Why are there poor territories? Why do inequalities exist? How can we built a better world? Cities, it turned out, were where that question felt most concrete and most urgent.
I studied political science specializing in international relations and city diplomacy, and worked for 10 years in different public administrations before deciding that the most honest thing I could do with that knowledge was to make it accessible and engaging. Neo Civitas Lab is what came out of that decision.
I travel to the cities I write and make videos about, because I think being there matters. Urban analysis done only from a distance tends to miss the texture of a place, the things that don’t show up in policy documents or academic papers but that anyone walking the streets can feel. I want to contribute to closing the gap between academic research and the conversations that actually shape how we live in cities.
What is Neo Civitas Lab
Neo Civitas Lab is an urban intelligence project. It exists somewhere between journalism, academic analysis, and documentary — written articles and video essays that take cities seriously as subjects, not just backdrops.
I believe that cities are one of the most powerful lenses through which we can understand the world: governance, identity, geopolitics, ecology, security, inequality, memory… all of it plays out on the urban scale, on streets and squares that people actually live in. If we want to understand the world, we need to understand what is happening in front of our own eyes: our cities, towns, villages… in other words, our homes.
The project covers urban policy and governance, local economies, heritage and identity, human ecology, over-tourism, regeneration, and the ways cities respond (or fail to respond) to the pressures of the 21st century.
Neo Civitas Lab started from a simple frustration: urban analysis is often rigorous but inaccessible, buried in academic language and formats that make it hard to engage with even when the ideas are urgent and the stakes are real. We use writing, video, maps, and storytelling to make that work as compelling as it deserves to be. Because good analysis deserves good communication.