Category Archives: Europe

Skills and Stimulus in Europe

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As a former newspaper reporter myself, I like to think I have an eye for what goes on a newspaper story, particularly a really good one like the one this morning in the Times on Europe’s contrasting approach to a stagnant economy.

The reporter obviously knows a lot and has done a lot of work. Less obviously, he has a strong point of view, probably gained from all that work. He weaves it into the story without being too obvious about it. The subtext of this story is the reporter practically screaming,”Jees, these guys system is working a lot better and with more subtlety than ours.”

This point of view comes out a bit more obviously in paragraphs like this:

“Without knowing it, Mr. Koppe’s 25 employees are playing their small part in keeping the German economy afloat. But nearly 70,000 employees of the automaker Daimler have been placed on short-hour status. On the bright side, it means they are able to play with their children, tend to their gardens or — with further government incentives — receive the kind of advanced training that will make them even more skilled when orders pick up again.”

This “On the bright side” line is where the reporter takes a step more obviously into the story.

I’m okay with that. Particularly given that I used to do it myself a lot. It’s a tricky game, because do it too obviously, and an editor will slap you down. “Objective journalists” aren’t supposed to say what they think. Sort of.

Particularly good and unusual is that the reporter, Nicholas Kulish, is getting into competitiveness. The story closes with this laid off worker, or actually worker on half time, using his free time to learn new skills. This implies what I know: Germany remains competitive because its workers are encouraged to go back and learn new skills. The system is set up that way. Ours are encouraged to go home and watch TV.

The Future Of Menial Jobs

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From THE BOSTON GLOBE
Monday, July 10, 2000
BY ALEX MARSHALL

PARIS — If you’re hankering to watch a movie after midnight here, you don’t search for an all-night video store. You walk down the street to the nearest Cinebank, a machine carved into a wall that, similar to an automatic teller machine, dispenses movies instead of cash.

Slip in your credit card, scroll through some movie titles, press a button, and presto: out from a slot emerges the latest Depardieu, Schwarzenegger or Julie Roberts flic.

Such machines haven’t hit the United States yet. And with our low labor costs, they may never. In this country, it may always be cheaper to pay someone to man a late-night video store, rather than pay to set up the machine and develop the technology that makes it possible.

This small example illustrates a big point: Western Europe is probably far more advanced than us technologically on a day to day level, in part because its higher labor costs push employers to innovate more.

Although France, Germany, Sweden lag behind us in computer and Internet use, they are ahead of us in the day-to-day mechanization of life in ways that weed out the more boring and simplistic jobs. Indeed, some Europeans say America appears almost Third-worldish because the continued presence of jobs whose skills consist mostly of standing around.

It isn’t just video clerks that machines are replacing in Paris. Steer your car into a French parking garage, and you will never see a parking lot attendant. A machine handles it all. In one system, a machine dispense a code that will raise the bar for exit after you have paid the cash for the time spent in the garage.

Other types of automation have become ubiquitous in much of Europe. Hand-held credit card processors are standard in many restaurants. Some gas stations are completely automated. The newest subway line in Paris has no operators at all.

Why this greater prevalence of automation in Europe? Because quite simply, they have better things for their people to do than to sit all day in a booth in a parking garage. Employer costs are much higher in most of Western Europe. Wages, health care contributions, pensions, family leave and general taxes all add up. This pushes employers to automate — which in the long run makes economies more productive and efficient.

These high labor costs also push up unemployment. But the relationship is not absolute. Germany had lower unemployment than the United States in much of the 1970s and 80s, even while having far higher labor costs.

In the United States, a healthy dose of social benefits, higher minimum wages and other pro-labor policies might actually improve our nation’s competitiveness, by pushing companies to modernize.

Although we boast of an admirably low-unemployment rate, the Brazilification of our economy continues. We may have already entered a new Gilded age where the Internet millionaires think of ways to spend their money, while the nameless hordes collect the parking payments for their BMWs.

Europe is desperately trying to copy the entrepreneurship and flexibility of the American economy. Here in Paris in government and business circles, the talk is all of privatizing, marketizing and facilitating Europe’s entry into “The New Economy.”

But astute observers recognize that economics are like lapel sizes and hem lines — different flavors go in and out of fashion with the times.

“There is no superior system,” said Robert Boyer, a French analyst in Paris and author of the 1999 paper “The Diversity and Future of Capitalisms.” “Each system has its strength and its weakness. According to the international economy, the strengths or weakness will pop out.”

So while Europe is busy imitating the United States, we might pause in our orgy of self-congratulation and begin imitating Europe, before the next fashion in economics hits and we are out of step. A strong dose of social protection and higher wages would moderate income inequality and boost productivity by discouraging businesses from using low-skill, low-pay jobs as an integral part of their business plans.

Europe will probably never achieve American-style, free-wheeling capitalism, and America will probably never achieve the equality and harmony of European social democracy. But a lean in the direction of the other by each might help each enormously.

———————-

Alex Marshall is the author of How Cities Work: Suburbs, Sprawl and the Roads Not Taken.

In Paris, The Wine Bar Is The Place To Drink Some Wine

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FOR: PORT FOLIO MAGAZINE
BY ALEX MARSHALL

PARIS — It was with some trepidation that I first walked in off the sidewalk into the small establishment on the narrow Rue Daguerre near Montparnasse with the words “Bar A Vin” written across its front glass window. It was 11 p.m. on a Wednesday night, a strange hour. In Paris, it was neither late, nor early. An uncertain hour.

I had been headed home to my nearby hotel bed, having eaten a full dinner down the street and decided I needed a good nigh’s sleep. But I couldn’t resist the pull of this small restaurant. Inside, I could see people huddled around the small bar, talking and laughing while they swirled liquid in glass goblets.

I was about to enter what I would discover was one of the better examples of an institution that still exists in Paris, the wine bar. Ranging from fancy to casual, it’s a place where you can order a variety of carefully-chosen wines by the glass, and talk with both staff and customers about their various merits or lack of them. The environs can range from fancy crystal and tablecloths, to dirt floors. They are a great place to sample a lot of wines, and gain a familiarity with different regions and grape varieties.

My wine bar had bare wooden tables and no formalities. In fact, the “Bar a Vin” seemed a step back in time. The customers, mostly in their 30s and 40s, were dressed without any fashion in particular. It had a tile floor, a pewter metal bar, and an old coat rack in the corner. A soft yellow light spread across the whole restaurant, giving everyone a soft glow.

But it also had the air of a thoroughly neighborhood place. Everyone knew each other, or so it seemed. When I entered, everyone turned and looked at me, a tall, obviously foreign, stranger. They weren’t smiling.

The waitress behind the bar, who was pretty in a kind of timeless Gallic way, with a thin face and aquiline nose, came over and said shortly in French, “What do you want.” I had hardly had time to even glance at the blackboard where the names of ten red and ten white wines were scrawled.

“Give me a minute,” I stammered. She shrugged and walked away. When she came back, I ordered a glass of “Chinon” quickly, thrown off by her bluntness.

Chinon is the region in the Loire Valley named after the city of the same name there. Made with Cabernet Franc, the wine can be like a Bordeaux in its better years, that is austere and flavorful. But this one tasted mostly just austere.

As I sipped the wine, I looked around the restaurant. This was a place for people serious about wine. The half-dozen men and women grouped at the pewter bar were having fun, laughing talking and of course smoking. But they were taking their wine seriously. At each swallow, they would sniff deeply of the glass, tilting it to the side so as to favor one nostril. This seems to help odors penetrate one’s head more deeply. Once the liquid was in their mouths, they would aerate it by sucking air through it, which makes a gargling noise.

After Chinon, I tried something called Vin D’Ardeche. This was a small named region inside the Cote Du Rhone. The wine was marvelous, really special. It had a huge, intense jammy taste, with little tannins. It was similar to an Amarone from Italy, with its raisiny full taste.

I was starting to make inroads with this crowd. The guy behind the counter, who was the manager, recognized I wasn’t a complete slob. He poured me some “Saumur,” the red wine from the Loire valley, and I won points when I noted that it was made with 100 percent Cabernet Franc grape.

The manager seemed classically French. Years of drinking wine had not given him the bulbous nose and layers of flesh sometime typical of wine lovers; instead, it had cured and condensed him. He was lean, with dark hair and a taught face showing a 11 p.m. shadow.

Beside me, an older man, dressed more formally dressed in a tweed sport coat, was talking intensely with the bartender. He turned out to be the owner of the Saumur vineyard that had produced the wine I had just tried. He started talking very animatedly to me about his theories of wines and vineyards.

The Loire Valley has traditionally been considered too cold to produce wines as good as Bordeaux and Burgundy. But global warming, he said, would change this.

Then he started criticizing American wines, particularly those from California. They were, he said, like a woman who used too much perfume. They deliver the “attaque spectaculaire” that unexperienced wine drinkers liked, but which was similar to a woman who wore too much perfume. The odor you were appreciating was more of a created effect, rather than the natural odor, like the natural scent of a beautiful woman.

I was grateful to this Frenchman for conforming to national stereotypes. Not five minutes into a conversation about wine, and he was comparing them to women. Great! I considered running further with this metaphor. Could California wines be considered like their women? Too “easy”? Did French wines require more finesse in their approach, as did their women? I had better stop such thoughts.

I was feeling better. From the tall, awkward, foreign stranger who they looked at suspiciously, I was now the tall awkward foreign stranger who they looked at with some amusement.

The wines the restaurant served said a lot about wine drinking in France. The establishment served almost nothing known to your average American wine drinker. I had noticed this trend in other restaurants and brassieres I had visited. The famous wines were too expensive for daily drinking.

I wrote down the red wines the “Bar a Vin” was serving that night: St. Joseph, Alsace Pinot Noir, Patrimonio, Chinon, Bandol, Cote du Rhone, Cairanne, Vin D’Ardeche, Anjou Village. These were regions, not grape varieties, as is the tradition in France.

I asked the bartender why he didn’t include more well-known regions. “Because Burgundy and Bordeaux are too easy,” he said. “You open a book and there they are.”

In Paris, Hubris and Humility. Both Have Their Merits

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When it comes to urban design, the French have a unique ability to use heavy-handed state authority to produce systems that are technologically and aesthetically advanced. When successful, their state-trained engineers and civil servants produce stunning urban systems, like the TGV high-speed train network, that combine high technology, artistic elegance and coordinated efficiency. This can be seen not only in the TGV system, which has helped keep Paris a center of Europe and thus economically vital, but also in the country’s state-run nuclear power system, and its phone and electrical systems. Even the arching brick tunnels of the city’s 19th century sewer system are elegant.

When unsuccessful, however, the French way can produce grotesque white elephants that seem to emerge unchanged from the heads of their designers, and then lay flat upon the earth, unloved and unlovable. The modern La Defense office district outside the central city illustrates this possibility, an immense complex devoid of urban energy.

A recent visit to Paris confirmed all of this, again. As New York moves forward with the redevelopment of the World Trade Center site, as well as the continual renewal of the city itself, both examples are good to keep in mind.

The new Meteor subway line and the surrounding development districts show French urban design at its best. This number 14 line runs from the heart of old Paris on the Right Bank to the new Bercy office district, then under the Seine to the “Bibliotheque Nationale Francois Mitterrand,” the new national library built on the Left Bank. The French have not only designed a great subway line but have used it as an instrument of urban development.

The Meteor trains are completely automated and operate without drivers, probably one reason the line has the lowest operating costs in the system. The individual cars of a train are linked by rubber gaskets, like the long accordion-style buses in New York. The entire train is open to walk through, which distributes riders more efficiently and provides a feeling of openness. The train whooshes into stations behind a glass wall that protects those on the platform from the open pit of the tracks. Once in the station, the doors and the glass wall magically open in unison to allow riders to enter or exit. The stations are architecturally ambitious. The Gare de Lyon station includes a jungle-like garden that blooms behind glass directly behind the platform. I was impressed by all of this, although not as much as I was three years ago, when I rode the Meteor shortly after it opened. Since then, the New York subway has been improved with new trains and ongoing station renovations, and so the contrast between the systems this time was not as great. Still, the new Meteor line, and the Paris metro system as a whole, has an elegance and verve that New York doesn’t match.

Alan Cayre, supervisor of the Meteor line at the French transportation authority RATP, said his agency gives architects more authority than is typical, and that his office keeps aesthetics in mind from the beginning. Even the pylons on the elevated portion of a new light rail line, he noted, were designed by architects.

The Meteor has two goals, Cayre said: “To ease congestion on the number one line, [the city’s oldest line which runs directly through central Paris], and to be an instrument of development for the new Bercy district and around the Biblioteque Nationale.” I interviewed Cayre in his elegant office in the Bercy district overlooking the Seine river, with the Eiffel Tower and Notre Dame visible in the distance, as well as the new glass-fronted offices beside the Austerlitz train station directly across the river. Like many French officials, Cayre spoke little English and I stretched my uneven French around the subject of urban design.

Cayre’s offices, with their blond wood walls, and the building itself, which is the new home of the RATP, are themselves examples of the French inclination toward bold urban design. I complimented Cayre on his wristwatch, which had a gray face on which simple black strokes marked the hours.

“Oh this,” he said. “This is no big thing. It was done by one of the designer of the Meteor line, someone who has unfortunately passed away.”

Clearly, Cayre cared about design. I felt like I could draw a line from his watch to the sleek hallways of the building, to the high-tech glass walls of the Meteor line which his office supervised and constructed. It was hard not to compare Cayre’s offices with some of those of the New York City Transit I had seen, which were standard, uninspired office cubicles.

The French have poured billions of dollars into the districts connected by the new transit line, in addition to what was spent on the Meteor itself. It is their effort to jump-start development in the areas that their planners believe are ideally suited for Paris’ future growth.
Contemplating these development districts, I wondered how New York would change if it conducted urban design in the French manner.

Consider Long Island City in Queens. For decades, the state and city have talked about developing this district that lies directly across the East River from Midtown Manhattan. But apart from some modest design improvements, the authorities have done little more than rezone property, which in itself took years. Under the French model, the state and the city would have already poured billions into designing and implementing a master plan.

Of course all this costs tax money. In fact, the French could only build the new Meteor line because there is a payroll tax that funds transportation, as well as national financial support for the regional entity that runs the metro system.

The pitfalls of French urban design can be seen in the rapidly aging La Defense office complex on the outskirts of Paris. Completed in the late 1980s under Mitterrand, the complex is a stunning example of architectural purity and efficient urban design. The complex’s imaginative hollow-cored, rectangular office tower, the Grande Arche, lines up with the axis of the Arc de Triomphe and the Champs Elysees. Every aspect of the French transportation system, from highways to subway to bus to intercity rail, connects underground beneath this complex.

Above ground, ambitiously-conceived office towers sprout from a wide plaza, as well as new residential towers. Its development was a 40-year story, and its roots are in the Le Corbusier inspired ideal of towers on a park or plaza. As a watercolor drawing, or a model in Styrofoam, the complex is breathtaking, its ambition laudable.

But in person, this complex is stunningly dead.

“I come here only to work,” said Claude, a welldressed man I talked with as he walked across the plaza. “To get together with friends, I go to Central Paris. This is only to work.” Ant-like people make their way across vast plazas. Below ground, people listlessly shop at a central shopping mall. “Feels like Albany,” to paraphrase a remark about the initial WTC site designs, could not be more accurate. Where is the “energized crowding” that defines great urbanism?

Traditionally, this has taken the form of great restaurants, stores and cafes along sidewalks on traditional streets. I have no problem with abandoning these old forms, as long as some successful new forms can be found to take their place. Are there any?

With about 20 million square feet of office space, 140,000 workers and 33,000 residents, the La Defense district is larger in size than the former World Trade Center complex, but in the same ball park. The French claim it is the largest office district in Europe.

It’s difficult not to see La Defense as a giant warning sign to the designers sketching visions for the WTC site. If built, would any of the designs presented at the Winter Garden in December produce “energized crowding?” It is hard to keep this in mind as one reacts viscerally to the imaginative forms seen in the scale models now on display. I instinctively loved Daniel Libeskind’s proposal. But what would it feel like to walk across his plaza built below grade as part of a memorial complex? Would it not swallow up any single person or even groups of people? The Corbusier ideal of towers in the park has supposedly been discredited, but most designs for the WTC site have their roots there. The one exception, the Peterson/Littenberg plan that reinstalls the old streets on the site, may be condemned as “traditional.” But does any other plan address the site on the finer-grained level necessary to produce vital urban space, as well as a great skyline? The old World Trade Center, despite having some merit as a pair of skyscrapers, lacked energy as an urban space. We appear to be on our way to building a new one that may be equally antithetical to vibrant city life.
Given the financial resources being made available to the WTC redevelopment, New York should be able to emulate French urban design at its best, rather than its worst. I see a great new transportation hub, architecturally ambitious, that links to vital new urban spaces featuring the best of contemporary architecture. Can anyone get us there?

–Alex Marshall, Senior Editor, Regional Plan Association
First Published Jan. 6, 2003 in Spotlight on the Region, RPA newsletter.

A New City Rises From Berlin’s No-Man’s Land

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By Alex Marshall and Sally Young
Globe Correspondents
11/5/2000

BERLIN – The guard tower and wooden sign over the street warning ”You Are Now Leaving The American Sector!” were still there, as was the narrow bridge over a ravine, where prisoners, dissidents, and spies were exchanged. But beyond these carefully preserved memorials to another time and era, it was difficult to distinguish the famous Checkpoint Charlie from any other intersection in this bustling city. Now, what was once a bleak no-man’s land has been recarved into streets and blocks. And on these streets, new buildings have risen up, many of them designed by the best, or at least the most famous, architects on the planet. Within a two-block radius of Checkpoint Charlie, Aldo Rossi, Philip Johnson, Rem Koolhaas, and Peter Eisenman have all tried their hand. Widen that circle further, and you encounter buildings by Frank Gehry, Renzo Piano, Norman Foster, Rafael Moneo, and Richard Rogers. We had traveled to the new Berlin to see this new city being remade, the choices its leaders faced, the ones they made correctly, the ones that might be regretted in future years. We were the Loeb Fellowship, all 13 of us, from Harvard’s Graduate School of Design.

For a week we examined this city from the inside out, often with personal tours by top planners and architects. We saw a new city coming out of the ground, spurred on by the torrents of money, both public and private, rushing in to fill the blank spaces now that the dikes of communism and the Cold War have been broken and breached. For a traveler, Berlin is a great place to spend a weekend or a week, particularly if you like contemporary architecture. But it’s also a great place to eat spicy German sausage from street vendors, drink great beer, shop for high fashion, and people watch.

What’s more, with the dollar at an all-time high, it’s surprisingly affordable. Eating at a nice restaurant, staying in a hotel, is much less expensive than in Boston or New York. How to get across the reality of the New Berlin? It’s as if 50 blocks of mid-town Manhattan had been forcibly cleared, and left vacant for 50 years. Then one day, development rushed back in. Signs still remain of this city’s remarkably violent past. Walk in almost any older section of the city, past the domed Reichstag or on the elegant Friedrichstrasse, for example, and you’ll see pockmarks, dents, and chips, left over from the bullets and shrapnel that shattered this city.

They are evidence of when a mustachioed-man in this city started, and then lost, a war that consumed more lives than any other in history. It left this city destroyed, and divided. It is finally reuniting, physically, culturally, politically, and socially. Even so, divisions remain. A local architect told us that few West Berliners would go to a restaurant in East Berlin, and vice versa. West Germans, raised under a capitalist democracy, say East Germans are lazy. East Germans, raised under communism and now suffering high unemployment, say they are treated like second-class citizens. But these divisions should blur as this city takes on its new role not only as the political capital of a united Germany, but as one of the commercial and cultural capitals of the European Union.

A wonderful place to begin a tour is a gentle cruise down the river that bisects the city. You can take in the highlights of the city in just an hour or two. Do it on the first day you arrive, while you are still jet-lagged. It’s a nice, undemanding activity. There are several boat companies and itineraries. A good one leaves from the Haus der Kulturen der Welt (House of World Cultures), conveniently located in the city’s central park, the Tiergarten, on John Foster Dulles Alle 10. The Number 100 bus stops there. This Number 100 bus, a double-decker, is another easy way to see the city. A regular city bus, it winds through the Tiergarten, around the Brandenburg Gate, and down to Alexanderplatz in the heart of East Berlin. Alexanderplatz, a stark modernist plaza reminiscent of Boston’s City Hall plaza, once had banners draped from its surrounding tall apartment towers proclaiming the triumph of socialism. Now, neon signs for Sony and other multinationals adorn them.

At Alexanderplatz, you can take an elevator to the top of the ornate radio tower, the Berliner Fernsehturnc, visible throughout the city. It gives you a 360-degree view of Berlin and its environs. After you take in the view, buy the brochure, Berlin: A Panoraminc View, at the Ferneshturm gift shop. It is a great guide to what to see when you are back on the ground.

In general when traveling throughout the city, be sure to use the great public transport system. It is a four-part system: the S-Bahn (Bahn means train) or aboveground trains are great for sightseeing, the U-Bahn or underground trains, the yellow local trams that are only in the former East Berlin, and the buses. You can buy passes good for a day, several days, or a week. The system is extensive.

Herbert Muschamp, the architecture critic for The New York Times, recently observed that the nation’s largest city lacks much ambitious contemporary architecture. The same holds true for every American city, including Boston. It’s hard to realize how true this is, until one sees the shapes, colors, and materials used in Berlin. And they are used not just for fancy museums, as is the case here, but for offices, apartments, embassies, public buildings, and department stores. Pretty much any place is a good place to start. Directly across from our hotel, the Savoy, for example, was the Ludwig-Erhard-Haus, the home of the Berlin Stock Exchange. This dramatic building, designed by British architect Nicholas Grimshaw, has floors that are not erected, but suspended from two giant steel arches. But there are some architectural must-sees, including the areas around Checkpoint Charlie, the Brandenburg Gate, and Potzdamer Platz. All three are places of enormous new construction. The Brandenburg Gate is the giant ceremonial arch, similar to Napoleon’s Arc de Triomphe in Paris. During the Cold War, it stood naked, stripped of its urban context. With the reunification, the city has reconstructed the elegant Pariser Platz that fronts on the Gate. Being rebuilt on and around this classic public square are the American Embassy, the Hotel Adlon, the Academy of Arts and other buildings. To accommodate the American Embassy’s security concerns, the city had to alter its setback rules.

Frank Gehry, currently the country’s, and perhaps the world’s, most famous architect, designed the DG Bank on the square. From the outside, it meets the city’s design guidelines that new buildings have stone facades, rows of exterior windows, and height and massing similar to the historic buildings that once occupied the square. But inside, Gehry has stuffed the building with an amoeba-like auditorium, that is vaguely like a fish, covered with steel and glass. It is a definitively weird structure. It’s as if a glass and chrome tumor erupted in the middle of a bank’s grand lobby. A beautiful tumor.

The Potzdamer Platz, until destroyed in World War II, was a Parisian-style meeting of six major boulevards in a star-shaped intersection. After the war, it stood vacant for 45 years, a monument to cold-war tensions. Today, it is being built anew. Mostly finished now are the huge agglomerations built by Sony and DaimlerChrysler. Architecturally, these complexes are stunning. The Sony complex by Chicago-based architect Helmut Jahn features a double glass wall building that merges into a huge plaza under a high-tech canopy. The Daimler complex includes a brick-clad skyscraper, a shopping mall, the Daimler headquarters, apartments, general offices, an IMAX cinema, a Broadway-style theater, a hotel and other functions. In all, the Daimler complex, whose master plan was by Renzo Piano, takes up 19 blocks, with buildings by Piano, Rafael Moneo, and Sir Richard Rogers. The diversity of the materials and shapes is stunning. But the overall feel is corporate, bland and controlled.

The two corporations own and maintain many of the ostensibly public streets and spaces. At the Sony Center’s central plaza, we asked our guide what would happen if one of us passed out political leaflets for, say, a local city council race. We would carry you out, came the quick reply from a security guard at the guide’s elbow. This somewhat Orwellian interchange indicated the degree of control exercised over these public spaces. One public architect associated with the projects called them a high level of failure.

As part of the Potsdamer Platz reconstruction, the state is building a new regional railway station at the Platz, all underground, where three types of rail service, basically local, regional, and national and international, will meet on three levels. Its gleaming structures, which we saw under construction, were a testimony to German planning and design.

For any architecture lover in Berlin, an indispensable guide book is ”Berlin: Open City, The City as an Exhibit,” available in English and German in most bookstores and news kiosks. Its skinny, blue covers are stuffed with information, including maps and architectural details on every major building.

Of course, one can look at architecture while strolling, shopping, and eating, all of which can be done aplenty in Berlin. You can check out the fancy shops on the grand boulevard Friedrichstrasse, the gardens and fancy shops around Savignyplatz in West Berlin, or the Soho-like charm, galleries, and fancy shops of Hackescher Market.

Savignyplatz is a small park through which pass many of the central streets of West Berlin’s downtown. Some of the fanciest shops in the city are here. Eating is good too. The Paris Bar (on Kanstrasse between Fasanenstrasse and Uhlandstrasse) is a famous Berlin institution that has been in existence for about 40 years. The owner is a serious art collector and the place is filled with art, much of it from the regular patrons. This is a good place for people watching.

Be sure to check out Depot at Bleibtreustrasse 48 for cosmopolitan European home and garden furnishings. Mechtild Stange, the proprietor, has a well-trained eye for good design, and the prices are affordable. Also check out Art and Industry, at Bleibtreustrasse 40, which specializes in furnishings, jewelry, and pottery from the ’50s.

Another favored haunt is Literaturcafe on Fasanenstrasse just off Kurfurstendam next door to the Kathe Kollwitz Museum. The spacious garden is a perfect spot to spend an afternoon reading or sketching. There is a good bookstore below the cafe, and there are frequent book and poetry readings in the cafe.

Under communism, the Friedrichstrasse in East Berlin was a shadow of its former self as the premier shopping street of the city. Now, rundown buildings are being renovated and new ones built. The new ones include an almost block-long Galeries Lafayette, the French Department store. This grand center is worth seeing as much for its architecture as its superior shopping. It features a hollow-glass core, shaped like two ice-cream cones placed mouth to mouth, around which one can stand and peer into the building’s multiple floors.

Hachescher Markt, just over the river from the Friedrichstrasse, has more old stone buildings that have yet to be renovated. This district of narrow streets and crumbling buildings has a Soho-like flavor, with its mixture of galleries, shops, and restaurants.

A bit further out is the Kathe Kollwitz Platz in Prenzlauerberg, a classic European square with mixed low-rise residential buildings, restaurants and bistros with outdoor cafes, galleries, and antique shops. Fewer tourists have discovered this area, so you can feel smug about having done so. This is an in place for students, and is on the S-Bahn.

Although strolling is nice, pedaling is great too. Bicycling is a wonderful way to see Berlin, and the inhabitants do it a lot. You can rent bikes behind the Zoogarten Station at the entrance to the Tiergarten and bike around this lovely central park with a stop at the biergarten at the Neuer See (Lichtensteinalle).

Eating is perhaps the purest expression of German culture, and one of the most intimidating to outsiders. At lunch one day, we watched as one of the more adventuresome of our group was served an enormous pink football of what appeared to be pure fat. But she sliced into it, peeled back the inch-thick layer of fat – and revealed a glistening center of moist roast pork. Ahhh, German food at its best. Course, meaty, and intimidating. This dish was called Schinken-Eisben. It was the butt of a pig, shrouded in its own fat, and cooked with sauerkraut and potatoes. It was being eaten at the Wirthaus Moorlake (Moorlakeweg 1, tel. 805-58-09), a lovely old timber-framed lodge overlooking a peaceful lagoon. It is a few miles outside Berlin, in a major public park well off the tourist track, but actually accessible by bus.

If you aren’t ready for Schinken-Eisben, eat some wurst at the glorified hotdog stands that abound on the street. The vendors serve their sausages not on a roll, but cut up with toothpicks on a paper plate, with just a smidgen of bread on the side.

If one is not into German food, though, you can do as Germans do, and eat Italian, Asian, or French food. There is plenty of it. Germany is more like America, in this regard, in that many natives disdain their own cuisine and reach for those of other countries.

What else can be said about this lovely city? That it’s still inventing itself. In another decade, the giant cranes that fill much of the skyline will be gone. The residents will settle into using their new train lines, parks, and buildings. And the world will see in what fashion this city resumes its place as one of Europe’s great capital cities.

Alex Marshall is a freelance journalist and author of ”How Cities Work: Suburbs, Sprawl and The Roads Not Taken.” Sally Young is the coordinator of Harvard’s Loeb Fellowship at the Graduate School of Design. This story ran on page M1 of the Boston Globe on 11/5/2000. Copyright 2000

The above is a story that ran on the front of the Travel Section in today’s (Sunday) Boston Globe. My friend Sally and I wrote it, based around our trip there last May.

Eurosprawl

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METROPOLIS MAGAZINE
JANUARY/FEBRUARY ISSUE, 1995
BY ALEX MARSHALL

[Editor’s note: This version of the article “Eurosprawl” is slightly different than what ran in Metropolis Magazine in January 1995.]

The cheese selection was enormous. Giant wheels of Gruyere, tiny pucks of Chevre and every other sized cheese in between were stacked on refrigerated shelves that ran half the width of the store. The wine, separated by region of course, took up one-and-a-half aisles. This nod to French cuisine in this discount supermarket the size of a football field was one of the few indications you were in Lyon, France, and not say, Connecticut.

The supermarket anchors the Auchan mall, a low-slung rectangular concrete box that sits off the A43 freeway heading into Lyon. It’s a typical mall in most respects, surrounded by parking lots and various European mega-stores like Toys R Us and Ikea.

Nicole Depardon, Veronique Tassa and her mother Michelle, ages 35, 33, and 56, come to Auchan about twice a month. On this sunny weekday, the three women sit on a backless bench in the mall’s low-ceilinged central hallway. While the three women chat, the three toddlers with them each sit in the top drawer of a shopping cart, legs dangling, munching French fries.

“We love it here,” says Depardon. “It has everything we need under one roof. The prices are low.”

“And you’ve got free parking,” Veronique Tassa says.

On another mall bench sit Catterine Christine, 21, and Castaldi Bruno, 28. They are munching pizza from cardboard boxes held in their lap. The two behave exactly like the classic inhabitant of an American suburban office park. They not only come to the mall for lunch, but they drive here as well. The two make the 10-km trek in Bruno’s Citroen “almost every day,” they say cheerfully.

“We come here to eat, to look at the shops, it’s relaxing,” Bruno says.

About midway in the mall sits, Jaque Martin, a balding man in his 50s. Martin is at a bar called “L’Absinthe.” It is essentially a mall version of a sidewalk cafe, with customers sitting at small chairs and round cafe tables pushed out into the mall aisle. Matin is reading the morning paper, “Lyon Matin.”

“I come here about once a week to shop, and to relax,” Martin says.

These mall dwellers have the same relationship with the center city of Lyon that most Americans have with theirs – they don’t go there. None of these people frequent the peninsula of ornate buildings laced with expensive shops and museums five miles up the highway, much less live there.

“We never go to the center,” says Depardon. “It’s another world.” “It’s too difficult to park,” says Veronique. “We only go to the center when work requires it,” Bruno says. “Or maybe once in a while to stroll. About two or three times a year.” “I go less and less,” Martin says of the place where he was born and raised. “The traffic is too bad.”

Americans have long idealized European cities. But it’s taken on a new twist since World War II when the form and character of our metropolitan areas began changing so dramatically. Like workers in the field dreaming of the next life, Americans, harried on the freeways or sick of the mall have held a soothing pie-in-the-sky vision of places without the troubles and tribulations of our cities. Europe, most people believe, doesn’t have suburban sprawl, it doesn’t have vacuous shopping centers, it doesn’t have crime- and poverty-ridden inner cities, it doesn’t have the isolation of home, work, play and social life that seems to define American life. Architects and urban-planners have egged the masses on in this veneration. Like a parent lecturing their children about the perfect kid next door, virtually every book on the ills of American suburbia is sprinkled with asides about how Europeans still care about community, still value public spaces, still value lives built around the rhythms of a street built as much for feet as for tires.

Well they don’t. At least not as much as we think.

I must confess that I too, held such a mytholized image. As a reporter for the Virginian-Pilot in Norfolk and Virginia Beach, I’ve made a living out of covering one of the biggest stretches of suburban sprawl on the East Coast. I had become an expert on the vagaries of shopping malls and the subcultures of the cul-de-sac. But I lived in one of the few remaining urban neighborhoods in Norfolk not leveled in urban renewal. There, I dreamed of a better way that I believed still existed on the opposite shores of the Atlantic.

What I found was that the Europe we see on the postcards, the shop-lined streets we pay to stroll on, is no longer the real Europe. It is Europe in a box, kept there to remind the natives of their pasts, to look pretty, to reap tourism dollars, while the life of the city goes on outside it. The real Europe is this Auchan mall, its nearby business parks and homes. The economic engines of the city are here, the commercial centers, the principal residential areas.

Viewed from an ocean away, European center cities look great. They have full shopping streets, functioning subways and bus systems, fewer muggers and murderers. And it’s true their problems still do not match those of American cities. Nor has the physical or spiritual distance between the center cities and the suburbs lengthened as much as in the States. But when cities in Europe are examined closely, you find, once you veer from the guidebook recommended streets, neighborhoods falling into disrepair and the city oozing outward in great quantities in a form that can only be called suburban.

The center cities that offer an opposite lifestyle are now isolated pockets of urbanism increasingly inhabited only by a marginal bunch of oddballs who hanker to such an existence or those who have no other choice – artists, a few rich people, students, junkies, immigrants, poor people. The rest of Europe is going for what Americans go for – the biggest house or apartment, as far away from anyone else as possible.

Eurosprawl takes many forms. It can be the unplanned bag of building blocks that ring Italian cities, or the well mapped out hierarchy of apartments, offices, train lines and bike paths in Scandinavia. In can be the La-Defense style mass of plazas and office buildings courtesy of central French planning, or the battalions of tall tower apartment buildings that guard the outposts of virtually every European city. But there are some common themes. Malls are one. They are the lingua franca of European shopping. Mainly it is separating living from shopping, working or virtually anything else – the very definition of suburbia.

As the European middle class discovers the suburbs, their center cities are quietly slipping into an American style decay. Their tax bases are weakening, their crime and unemployment rates rising, their populations shrinking.

Lyon is a good example of the real Europe. The second largest city in France, Lyon is a go-getter, something of an Atlanta or Houston in personality, (if Atlanta or Houston had 2,000 years of history.) It is ambitious and insecure at the same time, always looking for ways to point how it’s better than Paris. The city has drawn into its orbit various European headquarters, including Euronews, (Europe’s answer to CNN,) and Ikea’s European distribution center. The TGV high-speed rail line from Paris to Lyon is now more than a decade old, and the city opened this summer, with great fanfare, a gulled-winged high speed train station at the city’s Satolas airport, designed by Catalan architect Santiago Calatrava. It’s the first combination air and high-speed rail center in Europe.

It’s center city reminded me of a mini-Paris. The historic section is mostly located on a long peninsula of land which has been carved into streets and parks, with rows of Beaux-art style apartments buildings. Seine-like bridges, complete with walkways underneath by the river, stretch across the water to the medieval sections of the city on the left bank. As in Paris, people talk of the right and left banks. One could spend a few weeks in this area, strolling its shopping streets, visiting museums, eating at its fine restaurants, quite content you were seeing Lyon.

But the region’s bustling economic activity virtually all takes place outside the historic city, or outside any area that could be called urban. Many company headquarters and important consulting firms are located in the city’s Part-Dieu, a La-Defense style collection of office buildings and a mall set on a sweeping concrete plaza, surrounded by suburban style boulevards and parking garages, and connected to the metro line. Others are in office parks like Porte Sud, Porte Du Rhone and Porte Des Alpes that are perched around the city’s freeway system. The center city is ringed with shopping malls – “hypermarches.”

Population figures give some ideas of the limits of urbanity. The Lyon metropolitan area has 2.5 million people. A smaller political entity called Greater Lyon has 1.2 million. The city proper has 420,000. Of these, only about 150,000 live in the urban areas of the center city. So of the region’s 2.5 million, less than 10 percent live in the urban core. Of the other 90 percent, only a fraction live in an urban style.

The city’s economic literature notes that the number of small neighborhood stores, defined as those with less than 400 square meters, has dropped from 14,000 in 1973 to 12,700 in 1990. At the same time, the number of stores with large floor areas tripled, to 448 from 147.

“There has been a general decrease in the number of local neighborhood stores,” the literature states, and “a trend towards large and medium-size supermarkets.”

The smaller towns that ring Lyon, once with independent economies, have blended together to form Greater Lyon. Their old town squares, while not abandoned, have been sucked of much of their life. Townspeople live in apartments or private homes outside the old towns and use the surrounding supermarkets and malls.

One evening I cruised through an exclusive suburb named La Terre Des Lievres set into a hillside 7 kilometers from Lyon. The winding streets wound around in a confusing fashion similar to American suburbs, yet different. The winding streets were narrow and lined with trees that formed a canopy overhead. Lots of speed bumps. Hedges hided tasteful split-level homes set into the hillside. It was deathly quiet. Not a soul in sight. A typically suburb. The neighborhood owned and maintained the streets, just like in some locked-gate Florida enclave. I was surprised a security guard didn’t kick me out. Lawyers, engineers and college professors lived there, said the people on whose doors I knocked.

“We like it here,” said a Madame A. Thomasse, a middle-aged woman wearing a crisp white T-shirt, heavy gold earrings and perfume, who stood in the doorway of her brick home. “If we need to go to the center, we have the metro nearby.”

And the hypermarche is right outside the subdivision entrance.

It’s true that European sprawl is not American sprawl. The European suburb remains tied to the center by some form of mass transit. At least a bus line, and often train, subway and bike lanes as well. This means that the overall stain of suburbia on the landscape is less than in the United States. In Lyon, you can travel from the Baroque City Hall to open farm fields in 15 minutes on a good day.

Europeans pay a price for this. In exchange for tighter more cohesive cities, they in general live in smaller, meaner spaces than Americans. They pay more for their washing machines and appliances, because there is less elbow room for a Wal-mart to elbow its way in beside the nearest freeway. Americans, with their uncontrolled development, have bought themselves the biggest living rooms and cheapest appliances in the world. Of course, they have also bought themselves monochromatic cities so dependent on the car that you might as well put yourself on an iceflow to die should you lose your ability to drive.

In looking for the perfect European urban city, I held high hopes for Northern countries like Holland, Denmark or Sweden. These homogenous, progressive, well-planned societies would certainly achieve the urbanity we in America had lost through our unplanned sprawl.

In some respects, the societies worked as advertised. Around Amsterdam, Rotterdam and Copenhagen, I saw how cities and central governments laid down train, tram and bus lines, and only then allowed developers to move in and build houses. The cities or central governments decided the form, density and style of new neighborhoods. Bike paths were everywhere.

But what they achieved by doing this was a more efficient suburb, not anything remotely urban.

In an area called Lyngby outside Copenhagen, the suburban boulevard I drove on had a wide bike lane, plus bus stops and a nearby train line. But it also had gas stations with slab-like roofs and the attached quickie-mart, McDonald’s with the mile-high sign, and box-in-a-lot office buildings. The neighborhoods off this main highways were cloistered groups of homes, protected by speed bumps and few through-streets.

The “Lyngby Storcenter” was a typical mall except that it was capped with a nine-story hotel. Like other malls in Europe, it seemed curiously retrograde in its design, with low, claustrophobic ceilings, stark lighting and unimaginative storefronts.

Shoppers though loved it. They had the familiar comments.

“I like it here,” said Brigitte Hajmark, 26, a cheerful blond holding a package of “Ricola” tea, who was in the mall atrium. “There are a lot of shops, you have everything here. I never go to the center. You can’t park there.”

Meanwhile, center city Copenhagen struggles with an armload of problems. The main one is that the middle class want to live elsewhere. Jens de Nielsun, assistant urban planning director, was candid about the city’s challenges.

“We have the oldest and the poorest housing,” De Nielsun said. “We have the students, the poor and the unemployed. The suburbs have the rich. We have the problems.”

The city has twice the percentage of unemployed as the rest of the metropolitan area, De Nielsun said. Since 1960, the number of jobs in the city have dropped from 460,000 to 310,000. The population had dropped dramatically, in part because of a planned program to de-densify the center city. In 1950, De Nielsun said, 770,000 of the region’s 1.4 million people lived in Copenhagen proper. Today, the city’s population has dropped to 470,000 while the region’s population has risen to 1.7 million. The city’s mix of old to young is exactly opposite the surrounding suburbs. In Copenhagen, 12 percent of the population are children under 16, and 20 percent of the population are over 66. Outside Copenhagen, 20 percent of the population is under 16, and 12 percent over 66 years of age.

“It is very difficult to make this a family oriented place,” Nielsun said. “It may take 50 years.

All these problems aren’t readily apparent when one is walking Copenhagen’s main shopping street. This all-pedestrian street, which snakes from the 19th century brick City Hall to the opera house, is crammed with tourists and overheated luxury shops. The side streets are full of trendy night clubs and Danish design stores. But outside this immediate ring of hipness one comes to long rows of warehouse-like brick apartment buildings. Despite a century of age, these long buildings with small windows and stark facades have acquired only a smattering of charm with time. They still look like what they first were – worker housing. The best are still working class neighborhoods, not trendy, but getting by. Others have plazas where drunks sleep, and are considered dangerous by the Danish.

This is becoming the standard pattern in many European cities. A city will often have an elegant shopping street that tourists visit. Nearby are noted museums, a cathedral. But around these bright lights are marginal neighborhoods that remain invisible to the average visitor.

European policy makers recognize this trend.

“Most of us do not need to be reminded again that our cities are in disarray,” said commissioning editor Suzanne Keatinge, in the introduction to the first issue of European Urban Management, published out of London in 1994. “We do not need more pages about urban blight, poor housing, poor education, inadequate health services, security and transport systems and a thousand-and-one other issues.”

This kind of talk is quite a contrast to the starry eyed wonder that many Americans view European cities. The standard diagnosis within Europe, says Catherine Stevens, executive director of Eurocities in Brussels, (European Association of Metropolitan Cities), is that Europeans cities could become as diseased as American cities if action is not taken.

Frankly, I doubt that. For many reasons European cities are unlikely to drop as hard or as far as American central cities. Super high gas taxes, bigger investment in mass transit, greater historical loyalty to the center, more tourism dollars per square foot and societies kept more united by stronger social systems are a few of the reasons. But they are heading in the same direction. A July 30 Economist article stated that Europe was on the edge of acquiring an American-style “underclass.” It noted that neighborhoods in cities like Frankfurt are now being judged as “dangerous” and places to avoid. The increase in immigrants and the rise in unemployment are polarizing many cities. A 20ish Copenhagener told me he loved the central city now but when he married, he expected to move out because he didn’t want his children going to schools where classes would have so many children from North Africa.

Despite the burden they bring in social services, it seems likely that immigrants are for the moment the last true urbanists, and the likely saviors of city of retaining any role other than that of specialized cultural and ceremonial centers. As in New York and other American cities, immigrants are often the last people who actually inhabit city neighborhoods, shop and work in the stores, and live there with their families.

I saw this in particularly close detail in La Chasse, a working-class neighborhood in Brussels. I had an apartment there, which served as a home base during my travels in Europe. These streets, which had lovely Art Nouveau apartments, were gradually being taken over by North Africans. The neighborhood was a short walk from the headquarters of the European Commission. But most of the Eurocrats chose to live outside Brussels, I was told. In La Chasse, the North Africans were gradually taking over the small grocery stores and cafes. In these places, they drank the good Belgium beer, but also served mint tea out of silver pots. Some of the bars retained a loyal Belgian clientele. But these folk, who worked with their hands in various trades, told me they were in effect the last of a breed. Most of their friends and family who could, they said, were moving to the suburbs.

Of course, the balance of urban to suburban changes from place to place. A key to the more urban metropolitan areas, I believe, is that they retain more manufacturing and dirty-hands type of industry within the central city. Despite its present status of an in-city, the central city of Barcelona is still a living, working city. The city’s lovely Eixample, the soft-cornered grid of largely Art Nouveau buildings laid out in the 19th and early 20th centuries, remains studded with small machine shops and purveyors of industrial goods. Next to a trendy, designer-conscious bar, you’ll find a welding shop. Even the city’s gothic quarter, which in other cities have become solely tourism-based, is a working-class neighborhood with small stores and businesses.

Walking on the western side of the Eixample off the Granvia de les Corts Catalanes, I entered what I thought might be a central courtyard inside a city block. Instead, I found myself in the middle of a printing factory. “Fotolitografia Juan Barguno Fotograbado” was etched in scrolly letters on smoked glass on an inner doorway. The factory was a typical Barcelona enterprise, family owned and in the same spot since 1925. The company had 36 workers, and a press that ran 24 hours a day. As I stood there, small forklifts carried stacks of materials on pallets ready for shipment on heavy trucks. All this was invisible from the street, where one saw only a lovely line of 19th century apartments.

The director, Ramon Barguno Bassols, a 3rd generation family member, though, gave me a reality check. Far from extolling the merits of running a center city factory, he told me they were planning to move out of town as soon as the economy improved. The city restricted the hours he could use his trucks, for example, and make it difficult for him to expand.

“A city is no place for a factory,” Barguno said. “It’s a place for offices, museums and residences. Factories should be in an industrial park.”

And even in Barcelona, it was easy to find people who dreamed of a life outside town, or already lived it.

Jose Maria Raig, 24, a stockbroker, works in a firm on the avenue “Diagonal”, one of Barcelona’s principal thoroughfares. He lives with his parents but when he marries he would like to move to the suburbs.

“I have a brother who lives in a smaller town with his wife and two children,” outside Barcelona, said Maria, who sat behind a desk wearing a short sleeve shirt with no tie. Down the hall, other men stood in a big room and shouted as stock prices flashed on a screen on one wall. “Life is better there. There are supermarkets, sporting centers, movie theaters, everything that before was only in the center. There are even discotecs. People like to live outside the center city. There is less noise, less pollution and bigger apartments. An apartment here can cost $200,000 to $250,000. Further out, you can buy a home for that.”

But it’s true that in Barcelona, I met more average people who lived in the center and intended to stay there.

“It’s a city of the middle class,” said Hermenegild Cabamillo, 34, a wholesale pastry seller, who lived with his wife and two children in an apartment in the Eixample.

“Even if you don’t have a lot of money, you can go to the beach or the park. There is the metro and the bus. You can get around. There isn’t a lot of crime.”

Jaume Moreno, the city’s urban affairs publicist, insisted the populace retained “a Mediterranean lifestyle” which still included habits like daily shopping and the mixing of work, home, commerce and play. Even so, Moreno still acknowledged that Barcelona has lost 150,000 people in the last decade. The Barcelona region now stands at 3 million, the city proper 1.6 million.

Whether the suburbanizing of Europe has reached some sort of plateau is difficult to predict. What seems likely is that cities will be less places to raise families and more places for a limited, rarefied set of population and activities. High commerce, art, intellectual trades will happen in them. Cities will likely always retain their role as the ceremonial centers of their cultures, even if they are no longer economic and living centers. It counts for something that, after decades of consciously trying to de-centralize and de-urbanize their cities, all the urban planners of the cities I visited had decidedly urban visions for their cities and regions.

Michel Ide, director of public spaces in Lyon’s urban planning department, basically dismissed the region’s tall towers, the Part-Dieu office district, the malls, as very large mistakes.

“There will be no more malls,” said Ide, with a wave of his hand. Instead of malls, Lyon is focusing on rejuvenating public spaces. Like Barcelona, Lyon is sprinkling statues and parks in neighborhoods. Again like Barcelona, Lyon deserves credit for spending money not only on the fancy tourist areas but on neighborhoods of tall towers and other unsexy spots where few people visit.

Copenhagen has plans to keep its neighborhood shopping streets, which cut through a variety of areas around the city, still functioning. Rather than prohibit malls, they are trying to funnel them onto or besides traditional shopping streets. It also has a multi-million dollar plan to renovate a seedy, but funky area of the city behind the train station called Vesterbrogade. The historic facades of the buildings will be kept, while the interiors will be gutted and renovated. In the past, the director said, the city would simply demolish such old neighborhoods, and rebuild at much lower densities.

Barcelona has a variety of ambitious, far-reaching plans. Most revolve around making the city more hospitable to families, and keeping jobs and industries sprinkled throughout the city. In its Gothic quarter, the city has selectively blown up blocks of thousand-year old buildings to create new public squares and open up the network of tiny dark streets to sunlight. It is a program that might set a preservationists teeth on edge, but it is an admirable example of an effort to keep a historic section of a city livable and not just a museum. It falls within the definition of “constructive urban surgery” advocated by the early 20th century urban theorist, Patrick Geddes. In the Eixample, the city has begun converting the interior of some block to neighborhood parks, which essentially was the original plan of architect Ildefons Cerda i Sunyer, who laid out the Eixample in 1859. In older industrial areas of the city, close to the Olympic village, the city plans to extend streets to reshape street systems back to Cerda’s original soft-cornered grid. All these plans are ambitious and purely urban in their vision.

But some plans may only accentuate a trend for the center cities to become largely ornamental in nature. Lyon illuminates historic buildings, streets and bridges at night with spotlights. It makes the city a wonderful place to stroll. The city is also requiring owners of historic buildings to paint them various soft shades of color, to give the street line a more harmonious feel. These are all very nice programs but there is a sense that as the center city becomes prettier, it becomes less relevant. I wondered, for example, how someone living in these spotlit buildings like all the light outside his windows.

Urbanism means more than just a style of building; it means a style of living. The notion of urbanity, to me at least, means a greater commingling of people and the ideas, activities and emotions that come with them. It’s implicit in the whole idea of a mixing homes, stores, restaurants, a school and a church in one city block. So far, no one has successfully found a pattern of contemporary development that replaces the street as a common ground for people. The mall is the one attempt. But its private space dedicated to commerce is a long step down from the public realm of the street, as many writers have already commented upon.

Writers like Joel Garreau, of Edge City fame, say suburbs are just an example of cities doing what they always do – forming around the dominant form of transportation. In contemporary times, that’s the car. I agree with Garreau. But even if suburbs are somehow inevitable, that doesn’t diminish their very real drawbacks. Suburbs really do isolate people. A mall is no adequate substitute for a public street, even if people are gathering in the malls. It’s not just nostalgia that has pushed architects like Andres Duany and Peter Calthorpe to fame. People really are searching for someway to make the suburbs human. We may not have found it yet. So far, no on has found a way to replace the public street as a social gathering space. Maybe public squares and meeting places are as necessary to a functioning society as running water and flush toilets. So far, no one has figured out a way to conquer the peculiar economics of suburbia, which, even in Europe, favor the big over the little, the bland over the refined, quantity over quality. The economics of the places produces Wal-marts, McDonalds and IKEA, and not neighborhood hardware store and corner delis. It’s the greatest amount of stuff for the lowest possible price.

European cities are not dead. Even in a worst-case scenario, Europe’s center cities are not going to follow American ones down to the bottom of the behavioral sink of urban ills. But what does seem likely is that a much thinner and more rarefied set of activities will occupy them. The question is how or whether the printing factory should be kept in Barcelona. How or whether should the family that yearns for the cheaper, larger apartment outside town be kept in the center city? Even in Lyon, the center city retained a role as a cultural, social and intellectual capital of the region. Even it is only a pretty place to visit, it gives a nucleus to the region. The tragedy of most American cities is that they cannot fulfill even this limited role. Many central European cities are beginning to occupy a role similar to that of the French quarter in New Orleans. It’s a quaint, much loved district, vibrant on the basis of tourism, inhabited by a few subgroups like gays or yuppies, but otherwise not part of the city’s mainstream economy or life.

In general the health of center cities have become accurate thermometers as to the health of societies as a whole. The pleasures and the pains of urban life revolve around closer proximity to other human beings. A good city brings us corner stores, cafes, art and friendships. A bad city gives us crime, noise and dirt. When people cannot live together under a common social code, when inequities between rich and poor grow, when people rob and murder, the suburbs are more appealing.

Next time you visit Europe walk any classic city, say Copenhagen, Lyon or Barcelona, from the center out. You’ll start in the medieval section, with narrow tiny streets built for the foot. You’ll move into the Renaissance, where the streets widen for carriages and horses. Then you’ll arrive at the 19th and early 20th century, which gives you wide, tree-lined boulevards built for carriages and cars. Then you arrive at the latter half of the 20th century, where the streets. . . fall apart, lose themselves, become patternless. Streets defined cities, and streets, in the urban sense, are no longer being built. Cities may be like cathedrals. They can only be preserved, not expanded. It is possible that the age of streets, and so the age of urbanism, is over.

Alex Marshall examined the suburbs and cities of Western Europe over 10 weeks in the summer of 1994. His research was funded by a fellowship awarded by the German-Marshall Fund of the United States.