Künstler*innenhaus Mousonturm

From architecture and city planning to the real estate industry, everyone seems to love evoking the urban city. Every new construction project, every urban initiative uses it for promotion. Even the anti-urban planners call on the leitmotifs of the “European city” and the “city of short distances”, associated with hopes for social inclusion, liveable public spaces and sustainable mobility. The flowery rhetoric contrasts with the reality of the newly built neighbourhoods: be it in Berlin, Munich or Frankfurt – the ability to build cities worth living in, seems to have been lost. Evidently, there is great confusion concerning the term urbanity and the idea of city that it contains. In this lecture of the Böll Analytics series, architecture critic Niklas Maak attempts a rereading.