A Europe of clean, green cities and resurgent industry is a fantasy – unless we get really creative | Hans Larsson

A Europe of clean, green cities and resurgent industry is a fantasy – unless we get really creative Hans Larsson If we want things to be ‘Made in Europe’ again, we need to be realistic about how grimy and grey our centres of commerce once were “B itterfeld, Bitterfeld, where dirt falls from the sky,” went a popular saying. Located in the intensely industrialised Chemical Triangle of the German Democratic Republic , in the 1980s Bitterfeld became known as the dirtiest town in Europe. Its chemical industry and lignite mines dumped toxic waste in waterways, and the air carried a concentrate of sulphur dioxide some 40 times today’s levels . Europe would soon be rattled out of its postwar reliance on heavy industry, in favour of cheap imports from abroad. In the last days of the GDR, environmental activism brought the coup de grâce. The 1988 release of the undercover film Bitter Things from Bitterfeld shed light on the appalling living conditions in the Chemical Triangle, and the city’s chemical plants were soon decommissioned. Since then, it has become an ingrained idea across Europe that the noise, dirt and smoke of heavy industry is an evolutionary stage to be overcome. Disused factory districts and docks have been reinvented as cultural spaces, while tourists clink glasses in urban plazas that were once car parks . Photogenic European cities consistently figure at the top of global livability rankings, and more than 40% of Unesco world heritage sites are located on the continent . Germany’s Chemical Triangle was reborn as Solar Valley in the early 2000s, given a new lease of life as a photovoltaics hub that, for a time, produced world-leading solar cells. Europe banished much of its industry, but we continue to enjoy its fruits: globalised manufacturing chains provide us with cheap goods that arrive in neat packages. And while our cities are beautified with good intentions, they are being reduced to markets for the consumption of that beauty: streetscapes fill Instag...