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By AITOR HERNÁNDEZ-MORALES
With GIOVANNA COI
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Happy Thursday, city lovers!
Ninety years ago, architects and urbanists fleeing totalitarianism in Europe ended up transforming America’s cities.
This week, we’re looking at how the current U.S. administration’s measures might provoke a similar exodus of visionaries — in the opposite direction.
Further down, we examine the latest data on health care access. Spoiler alert: Living in a city doesn’t necessarily mean you’ve got easy access to a hospital.
METRO BRIEFING
THE IMPACT OF EXILE: The modern-day U.S. metropolis owes much of its current shape to a rather unlikely figure: Adolf Hitler.
During the 1930s, his Nazi regime shut down Germany’s forward-thinking Bauhaus school and persecuted progressive architects and urbanists. Many of them would eventually be forced to flee the Third Reich and ultimately settled in the U.S., where they set about revolutionizing the country’s cities.
One of the most notable émigrés was Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius, who used his safe haven at Harvard to spread the principles of the International Style, inspiring generations of American architectural students. Meanwhile, Bauhaus’ last director, Mies van der Rohe, built some of the most iconic — and copied — buildings of the Jet Age in New York and Chicago, redefining the shape of residential high-rises and office blocks.
Over in California, exiled Austrians who had played an active part in Red Vienna’s progressive urbanism projects spearheaded the design of the prototypical single-family home — a standard of the country’s postwar suburbs. And in a bid to recreate Central Europe’s café culture, émigré Victor Gruen accidentally created the strip-mall.
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Van der Rohe’s 1958 Seagram Building in New York set the standard for the modern-day American office building. | Public Domain |
Here we go again? Nearly a century later, U.S. President Donald Trump’s moves to cancel environmentally sensitive urban development projects, impose an official style for federal buildings and target free speech on college campuses is setting the stage for a new exodus of architects and urbanists.
American academics and professionals told Living Cities the administration’s aggressive measures were leading many to consider leaving and seek opportunities abroad. “Political decisions can significantly influence the global flow of talent,” noted Julie Deutschman, spokesperson for the Architects’ Council of Europe. And that shift could ultimately have a major impact on the future of Europe’s urban landscapes.
As Deutschman pointed out, the EU’s status as a bloc where “innovation, sustainability, and academic openness” is well established, means it’s well-positioned to attract visionaries who could shape the cities of tomorrow.
Read my deep-dive here.
CITY HIGHLIGHTS
TURBO-TIME: Germany’s incoming coalition have big plans for tackling the country’s deficit of 550,000 homes. The conservative Christian Democratic Union and center-left Social Democratic Party have agreed to present a Bauturbo — or “turbo-building” — bill within their first 100 days that aims to dramatically slash red-tape linked to new housing projects. The new government also wants to offer favorable financing conditions for new flats in tight housing markets so they can be built for less than €15 per square-meter, and tax incentives to promote home ownership for families.
PLAYING TO THE TOWNIES? U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s moves to slash immigration and cut foreign aid are popular in Britain’s rural areas — but they’re alienating voters in major cities. Moreover, upwards of 80 Labour MP’s representing metropolitan areas could lose their seats in parliament due to anger over plans to slash welfare benefits. Esther and Annabelle have more here.
BRUSSELS UPDATE: It’s still a mess. Nine months after regional elections, Belgium’s capital has no government in sight, and the problems keep piling up — much like the garbage bags on its streets. Strikes, shootings, petty crime, crippling debt … Read Hanne’s chronicle of the city’s sorry state here.
If that weren’t enough: Ninety residents of a public retirement home in Schaerbeek are set to be evicted. The building in which they live no longer meets regional safety standards and authorities say there’s no cash to finance its renovation. More here.
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Occupied Berlin was governed by these four men in 1949. | Public Domain |
TROUBLING SUGGESTION: Over the weekend, General Keith Kellogg, Trump’s envoy to Kyiv, suggested Ukraine could be split into military zones controlled by foreign troops, “like what happened with Berlin after World War II, when you had a Russian zone, a French zone and a British zone.” He didn’t specify if the proposal would see any of the country’s strategic cities split in the manner that the German and Austrian capitals were after the war.
BORDEL DE M … ETRO: Spanish police is seeking to detain a French tourist who posted a viral video of himself hanging off the back of a Madrid Metro train. There are worries that the train-surfing clip, which has amassed more than 850,000 views on TikTok, will lead to copycat stunts, like the deadly balconing trend. The Metro consortium has also filed suit against the daredevil, who could face considerable fines.
WHAT CAN THE EU DO FOR CITIES? Ahead of the roll-out of a future EU Agenda for Cities, the European Commission wants feedback on how it can better support its urban areas. Share your thoughts through May 26.
CULTURE CLUB
SOUNDS OF THE CITY: Leyla and Paul are back, and this time, it’s all about architecture.
“As we focus on the U.S. brain drain, we put together a selection dedicated to the profession that shapes our cities,” they said. “While we’ve previously highlighted the musical impact of émigrés, this week’s tunes tell the architect’s tale, pay tribute to the Bauhaus, and both lament and embrace the metropolis.”
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URBAN TRENDS
15-MINUTE HOSPITAL ACCESS: Access to health care is a key factor in urban quality of life, and proximity to a hospital can be a decisive factor in a crisis situation. New analysis from Eurostat suggests EU residents are relatively blessed in this regard, with 83 percent of the bloc’s population living in homes located within a 15-minute drive to the nearest hospital. Gio dug into the data to examine which regions are better off and how much the urban-rural divide factors into the numbers.
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The leaders: The EU’s statistics agency found there were 124 regions where the totality of the population was just a short drive away from a hospital, 96 of them in Germany. All of these regions coincide with urban areas or are geographically close to a city, and they include four national capitals — Athens, Valletta, Paris and Amsterdam.
The laggards: But in 97 regions — home to nearly 25 million people in total — less than half of the population was found to live within 15 minutes of their nearest hospital. Among the affected are residents of several Greek islands, where less than 10 percent live close to key health facilities, as well as folks living in most of Romania, Estonia and Ireland, and the more rural parts of Spain and Italy.
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Big picture: The glaring differences between Europe’s regions can’t be explained away by saying cities simply have better access to health care.
In Ireland, for example, city-dwellers living everywhere except Dublin have very limited access to a nearby hospital. Paradoxically, in Finland — a country that’s home to several isolated regions and where the population is a lot more spread out — a majority of residents have access to a hospital within a 15-minute driving radius, regardless of where they live.
So, it’s not just about the good ol’ rural-urban divide — it’s (mainly) about where and how governments choose to invest in local health care facilities.
STATS & THE CITY
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STREET SMARTS
We’re back with our weekly cities-related trivia challenge! Gabriele Gaffuri of Milan was quickest to identify London as the city that stands out for incorporating war materiel into its urban landscape.
There’s a widespread urban legend that the British capital is littered with bollards made from cannons, which were seized from the defeated French fleet following the Battle of Trafalgar. But while historians say the iron barriers are unlikely to have any connection to the naval engagement — as none of the French warships that participated in the battle were brought back to England — tons of artillery pieces from less memorable Napoleonic clashes are, indeed, cemented into the East End’s sidewalks.
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London’s iconic stretcher-railings are relics from the Blitz. | Sarf London / Creative Commons |
The capital also boasts stretcher-railings, or fences, made from some of the over 600,000 metal mesh cots produced in the lead up to World War II. After being used to transport injured Londoners throughout the Blitz, surplus stretchers served to replace missing housing-estate fences and can still be seen throughout the city to this day.
This week’s challenge: Ahead of Sunday’s holiday, we’re looking for the European capital that is home to a giant Easter egg. The first reader to identify it — preferably without using a search engine — gets a shout-out in next week’s newsletter.
LOCAL LIBRARY
— Architect Antoni Gaudí began his path to sainthood this week following Pope Francis’ decision to declare him “venerable,” Barcelona’s Sagrada Familia Basilica reports.
— Pubs are homes away from home in Edinburgh, and this week the Guardian highlights artist Keith Crawley’s efforts to create miniature versions of his favorite locales. Speaking of mini-wonders, check out Spaceplay’s brutalist building series.
— In a bid to explore society’s obsession with keeping company, musician Xavibo is spending two weeks locked inside an empty shop in central Madrid. The public’s interactions with him say a lot about life in the city — especially after dark.
THANKS TO: Hanne Cokelaere, Paul Dallison, Annabelle Dickson, Esther Webber, Dato Parulava, my editor Leyla Aksu and producer Giulia Poloni.
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