Owen Hatherley: Trans-Europe Express: Tours of a Lost Continent

by Hatherly, Owen

ISBN: 9780141988320

Published: 2018-09-25

'A scathing, lively and timely look at the "European city", from one of our most provocative voices on culture and architecture today' Owen Jones A searching, timely account of the condition of contemporary Europe, told through the landscapes of its cities Over the past twenty years European cities have become the envy of the world: a Kraftwerk Utopia of historic centres, supermodernist concert halls, imaginative public spaces and futuristic egalitarian housing estates which, interconnected by high-speed trains traversing open borders, have a combination of order and pleasure which is exceptionally unusual elsewhere. In Trans-Europe Express, Owen Hatherley sets out to explore the European city across the entire continent, to see what exactly makes it so different to the Anglo-Saxon norm - the unplanned, car-centred, developer-oriented spaces common to the US, Ireland, UK and Australia. Attempting to define the European city, Hatherley finds a continent divided both within the EU...