Great changes in the cities of Europe will occur within the next decades
By Walter Laqueur
If a friend or a cousin from abroad came to London 30 years ago and asked to see what was new in the British capital, where would we have taken him? Not an easy decision — the Barbican, perhaps, about to become a cultural center, with arts unlimited, galleries, home of the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, as well as countless restaurants, pubs, and bars. Or perhaps to Canary Wharf, once the West India docks and cargo warehouses, but about to become the new business and banking center. “Vibrant” was the term to be used.
If the scene was Paris, we would have shown him the Centre Pompidou, opened in 1977 near the indoor market in the fourth arrondissement, not very fashionable (and the exposed pipes an eyesore), but the place where the action was, with 50,000 works of art (not all on display, needless to say). Or we would have taken him to La Défense, a new business center. In Berlin we could have shown him the Wall, but that was not really new. If our friend was interested in architecture, the choice was clear — the Maerkische Viertel and the buildings designed by Walter Gropius.Today, if our friend really wanted to see the future, a short walk or bus ride would do in order to get a preview of the shape of things to come. An excellent starting point would be Neukölln or Cottbusser Tor in Berlin, or Saint-Denis or Evry in the Paris banlieues. In some ways, moving about European cities has become much easier. There are fewer language difficulties; the argot of the outlying areas of major cities populated by immigrants, the banlieues (verlan), we are told by Le Monde, consists of 400 words. True, in Kreuzberg, a knowledge of Turkish could be more helpful than German. In London, if our visitor had a special interest in Southeast Asia, we would take him to Brent, in the north; if he was interested in things African, we would take a taxi to Peckham.
Those parts offer much of interest, and the guidebooks recommend their gastronomic delights. The sounds of Cairo (minus the architecture) and the sights and smells of Karachi and Dacca can be found. A few of the quarters will strike the visitor as threatening (more perhaps in Paris than in London and Berlin), but many are charmingly exotic, the women in black in their hijab; the halal butchers, the kebab palaces, and the couscous eating places enriching the menus of the local restaurants, the Aladdin cafes and the Marhaba minimarkets. That is a far cry from the 1950s and 60s, when those areas were British or French or German working-class neighborhoods. The locals have mostly moved out. Such quarters are spreading, and within a generation they will cover a much greater area.
Great changes in the cities of Europe will occur within the next decades. Will they be one-sided, affecting only the natives and not the newcomers? Perhaps the Muslim women will opt for colors other than black, and perhaps the hijab will be reduced to something more symbolic. Perhaps mosque attendance will drop just as church attendance has in Western Europe.
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