Over the past 20 years European cities have become the envy of the
world: a Kraftwerk Utopia of historic centers, 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-centered, 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.