Trans-Europe Express: Tours of a Lost Continent

Description

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.

Owen Hatherley writes regularly on aesthetics and politics for the Architectural Review, The Calvert Journal, Dezeen, the Guardian, Jacobin and the London Review of Books. He is the author of several books, most recently Landscapes of Communism, The Ministry of Nostalgia and The Chaplin Machine.

A scathing, lively and timely look at the "European city", from one of our most provocative voices on culture and architecture today -- Owen Jones The best book I've read on Europe, blending history, architecture and contemporary politics and written in Owen Hatherley's trademark mixture of scepticism, erudition and humanity. He is a writer of lasting merit who will be read fifty years from now. -- Anna Minton The latest heir to Ruskin. -- Boyd Tonkin * Independent *