[D66] Trans-Europe Express, Tours of a Lost Continent

[A.O.]

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/jun/07/trans-europe-express-owen-hatherley-review

Trans-Europe Express by Owen Hatherley review – the architectural case
for Remain

    By Lynsey Hanley, www.theguardian.com
    View Original
    June 7th, 2018

Thessaloniki: Owen Hatherley demolishes the idea that Europe’s cities
are historically monocultural. Photograph: Walter Bibikow/Getty
Images/AWL Images RM

A few days after the EU referendum, Owen Hatherley visited his home city
of Southampton and got into a blazing row with his mother about the
result. He had voted to remain, and she to leave. Hatherley’s mum was
not a red-faced patriot but a Lexiter: a leftwing activist who wanted
Britain out of the bosses’ club. For his part, “irrational” though it
seemed, “the reason I wanted to stay in the European Union was
architectural”.

In the last two years Hatherley has visited dozens of cities in what he
loosely terms “the European subcontinent” – not all of them in EU
countries – in an attempt to figure out why he associates most of Europe
strongly with “good architecture”, and Britain with measly, cynical
buildings that speak less of human achievement than capitulation to the
bottom line. Brexit provided a timely way for this thoughtful and
refreshingly idiosyncratic writer to blend his two preoccupations,
politics and buildings.

Hatherley’s theory, which this book not so much tests as pummels
furiously for signs of weakness, is that for all its evident problems,
belonging to Europe means – or meant – committing to an idea that
everyday life can be made better for the vast majority of people with
planning, humility and a good measure of collective provision. Europe,
he reckons at the outset, reminds him of fast, comprehensive public
transport, generous and affordable rented housing and public spaces that
you want to spend hours in rather than hurry through.
University of Skopje, Macedonia. Photograph: Owen Hatherley for the Guardian

Deep down he knows that any time you find yourself getting close to a
definition of Europe that includes “being more civilised” than other
continents, it’s a good idea to step away. As a critic and historian
Hatherley has made his name by taking apart, with humanity and wit, our
casual assumptions about the built environment: in his own words, by
treating “architecture and city planning as a deeply loaded subject, one
from which it is easy to read the complexities of European history”.

Trans-Europe Express begins by detailing, among other things, the
construction of the modern state of Greece and the barely imaginable
violence of King Leopold’s domination of the Congo, which, Hatherley
records, was pillaged primarily in order to make “the shabby mercantile
city” of Brussels look nicer. “Europe” looks civilised because of its
knack for turning violence into gold.

The reader is invited to read his pithy, graceful dispatches in any
order. Hatherley’s pilgrimages from our shabby mercantile country often
take him to the things he most appreciates: he is drawn to some of the
best examples of public housing you’re likely to find anywhere in the
world, such as the “awe-inspiring” Split 3 district in the Croatian
capital, and the “forest fragments” landscaped into Berlin’s
Waldsiedlung and Stockholm’s Husby district.

It’s in Husby that he comes up against some of the social friction that
hints at the stickier reality of frictionless Eutopia. A group of
residents of Husby, with its metro station and pretty housing, rioted
for 10 days in 2013. The reason you get riots in Sweden, as a Stockholm
resident tells Hatherley, is segregation by race and class: “Stockholm
is the most segregated capital city in Europe ...” One can only wonder
at the level of segregation in Stockholm if it’s worse than Paris, where
Hatherley finds “white boulevards full of solely white people”. and a
transport system divided into “RER for the proles”, condemned to
90-minute commutes, and Métro for the two million posher, whiter
Parisians within the ring road.
The view toward Husby, Stockholm. Photograph: Alamy

In sections on Thessaloniki and Trieste he demolishes the idea that
Europe’s cities are historically monocultural, and that ethnic and
religious diversity is a new “problem” that Europe has to “solve” or
“manage”. Trieste has, he writes, a “multicultural architecture; it does
not – except in the case of very recent migrants, about whom there is an
unseemly panic – have a multicultural present”.

Do Europeans – in EU member states and otherwise – really believe panic
is the best response to the human optimism, ingenuity or desperation
that leads to migration? Do we really think that’s the best way forward?
Visiting Skopje, the Macedonian capital, he contrasts the modernist
achievements of the Museum of Contemporary Art and the Cyril and
Methodius University with the results of a bizarre plan to “antiquitise”
the city centre and therefore make it “more European”.

There is, on the one hand, the Europe that collectively donated
designers and materials to the Macedonian government after the 1963
earthquake that destroyed most of “old” Skopje – which it is trying to
recreate. On the other, there is the Europe that ruthlessly dictates the
economic fortunes of its poorer members, which promoted frictionless
borders in the service of capital, only to create new ones in the name
of “stability” and “security”. Hatherley knows which one he’d rather be
living in, as do I.

• Trans-Europe Express: Tours of a Lost Continent is published by Allen
Lane. To order a copy for £14.44 (RRP £16.99) go to guardianbookshop.com
or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone
orders min p&p of £1.99.



https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/305344/trans-europe-express/

Trans-Europe Express

Tours of a Lost Continent
Owen Hatherley

'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 and outside it.

'The latest heir to Ruskin.' - Boyd Tonkin, Independent

'Hatherley is the most informed, opinionated and acerbic guide you could
wish for.' - Hugh Pearman, Sunday Times

'Can one talk yet of vintage Hatherley? Yes, one can. Here are all the
properties that have made him one of the most distinctive writers in
England - not just 'architectural writers', but writers full stop:
acuity, contrariness, observational rigour, frankness and beautifully
wrought prose.' - Jonathan Meades

Read more at
https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/305344/trans-europe-express/#WeEAEHe3XaL4ZyzS.99