Baldham, Germany. Browsing through a box of books from my early childhood, I realized that quite a few of them were written for children in order to get by with the experience of living in the newly built suburbs of the 1970s. “Wir ziehen vor die Stadt” (We are Moving into a Suburb) is one of them. It summed up all the advantages of not having to live in a city anymore, and how much better it was to live in a world of high-rise towers and slabs. Only “Der Maulwurf Grabowski” was more critical, and told about the problems of a mole who had to flee from the expanding city.
These books quite accurately described the place in which I spent my early childhood years, Baldham. In this suburb, some 30 kilometres outside of Munich, life was predictable. We lived in row houses, arranged such that no cars could drive into the settlement. The surrounding apartments buildings were pre-fab concrete constructions, distinguished from each other by such innovative colour schemes as using blue, red, or green. A controlled, neatly ordered world.
That it was also a world without street life, without offices nearby, without working fathers during the days, without corner shops, without people from other income groups than ours, was something I discovered only much later. Even in the early 1990s when I started to study architecture there was still a remnant of this time and thinking at the faculty. There was no chair for urban design yet, only one for “Siedlungsplanung” (planning suburbias). It took another decade to finally revert to focussing on building cities and not their antithesis.
Our children love looking at Ali Mitgutsch’s books, for example “Rundherum in meiner Stadt” (Out and About in my city), or ” Unsere grosse Stadt” (Our big city). There is so much going on in these drawings, that they are called “Wimmelbücher” (Hustle-and-bustle-books). They are truly urban. And, other than the books from my early childhood, they are full of uncontrolled, contradictory, pulsing city life.