Europe did not start anew in 1945. To the contrary, the legacy of total war made it seem unlikely that a unified, coherent body known as Europe might ever emerge from the urban rubble of the Second World War. Given the catastrophes of the war, it was hard to imagine anything bringing together what had so recently been torn apart. The difficulties in establishing a united Europe out of a fractured and fragmented landscape of nationalisms which had, only a few years earlier, sought each other's annihilation, are nowhere more apparent than in the endless postwar debates concerning the location, design, and symbolic structure of a new European capital, which Carola Hein explores in this provocative and timely essay. Given the recent French and Dutch rejections of the European Constitution, the question of Europe's symbolic unity is more urgent than ever. But symbolic or iconic urban design alone, as Hein shows, cannot unify Europe. A polycentric and truly democratic European capital cannot be bestowed from above by a solitary architectural genius working through the pre-existing channels of corporate capitalism. Just the opposite: a “capital built bottom-up,” as Hein explains, must emerge organically from “a local and citizen initiative.”
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