“I was only happy once; that was at Hyères;” Robert Louis Stevenson: Letter to Sidney Colvin, March 19, 1891 Growing up, I felt a strong urge to change places, in the hope that this would increase my overall happiness. What I longed for was a “Tapetenwechsel,” a wallpaper change, as we call a change of scenery in German. Leaving my hometown, so I believed, would rid me of the stale air and stuffiness that surrounded […]
Marseille has a record as an ancient city without monuments. The oldest city in France baffles visitors with a glaring lack of remnants from its twenty-six-hundred-year-old history, adding to its bad reputation as uncultured, poverty-stricken, and dangerous. For the longest time, centralist France seemed to have all but abandoned its greatest harbor, once a lifeline supplying the entire Hexagon with colonial riches. And until recently, the age-old trading hub has been unable to sell itself […]
Berlin's Friedrichstrasse was once praised and disdained as a symbol of modern metropolitan life. Today, it might partly regain its former status, as the street is part of an ongoing experiment about revitalizing urban space.