I

‘How was your day?’ ‘Good, everything as usual. What's for dinner?’ With this exchange began one evening in the life of the Kuypers, a young family of four living in Amsterdam's Nieuw West in the late 1950s. After eating and putting the children to bed, Mrs Kuyper made coffee while Mr Kuyper had a quick look at the newspaper. She switched on the radio, although neither of the spouses really listened to the voice informing the audience about the current situation in divided Berlin. The Kuypers seemed happy. Furnishing the flat had been expensive, heating costs were high and space was hardly excessive given the Catholic couple's desire for a third child. But the neighbourhood was decent enough, with some shops in the vicinity as well as playmates for their two girls. Nothing indicated dissatisfaction with the clearly assigned gender roles, rather basic marital interaction and limited contact with the outside world. To all intents and purposes and within the usual financial limitations, the Kuypers lived the life they chose. Yet, the magazine Good Living (Goed wonen) which portrayed them in early 1959, seemed unsure whether life in Nieuw West really qualified as ‘good’. While it did not question (and indeed promoted) the picture of quiet domestic bliss, it was more critical of the atmosphere outside the building itself. Such a peripheral, functionally designed area, the anonymous author mused, doubtless allowed many people of modest means to enjoy the privacy of a home. But this came at the cost of almost complete isolation from the rest of Amsterdam as well as an ‘egocentric effect’ that made anyone who did not live there feel excluded. By contrast, in the city centre with its cinemas, pubs, restaurants and billboards ‘the stranger too can feel part of a community’.Footnote ¹⁰

This example serves as a starting point for elucidating the relationship between individuals, couples and families on the one hand and urban societies on the other during the 1950s and 1960s. There is little doubt that most of those Western Europeans who enjoyed access to modern living were as positive about their new situation as the Kuypers. The notion of a couple choosing with whom to interact and who to keep at a distance had been current for some time. For instance, in Berlin during the mid-1930s, single-family homes proliferated in the outer areas of the city, supported by low taxes and mortgage rates and advertised in local newspapers. Some of those readers who were unable to afford such comforts wrote to the editor to complain about noisy neighbours, pointing out that they did not appreciate unannounced evening visits or share their doubts about their mother-in-law's plans to move in.Footnote ¹¹ Of course, the Nazi regime's priorities produced outcomes that were starkly different from the steady expansion of domestic privacy envisioned by these Berliners, both in the German capital and in most parts of Europe. After the war, years of inhabiting small, often insufficiently insulated and heated flats ensued. There were strong pressures to take in extended family members or, worse, billeted strangers. And life on urban streets or squares often seemed fraught with ambiguities, from large and transient crowds through black-market trade to the humiliating presence of American soldiers. But in the course of the 1950s and 1960s the situation changed fundamentally as a result of economic affluence, government support and the absence of violent conflict, so that the dream of choosing one's own surroundings and interactions came increasingly within reach.

Residents of the Grindel high-rises in north-central Hamburg and the Casal Palocco suburb southwest of Rome, studied by Axel Schildt and Bruno Bonomo respectively, are cases in point. Singles, couples and families alike appreciated the option to withdraw into their own private environment and have distant yet friendly relations with their neighbours. Importantly, these neighbours were part of a culturally like-minded middle class, which strongly defined itself through its aspiration for privacy. The tenants in the Grindel high-rises were glad to finally escape the forcible flatshares of the post-war period. The best thing about her studio, one of them later recalled, was ‘that one had a toilet and a stove of one's own, that I could cook when I wanted’. A fellow tenant remarked that ‘we were somehow beaten, you see. One was in a state to kind of say: now leave us alone!’Footnote ¹² In Casal Palocco, a jeweller explained just how glad he was to have left behind ‘the cages of clay brick, inside which you can count the steps of the old lady living upstairs, while from outside exhaust gases from buses and scooters come in, along with screams, the noise of trams, odours, and so forth’. A lawyer shared his preference for more casual, ‘genuine’ social interactions, devoid of ‘the weight of urban formalities’ prevalent in central Rome's bourgeois neighbourhoods.Footnote ¹³

Elective affinities in an age of unprecedented affluence also entailed different relations between residents of flats or houses and the things with which they surrounded themselves. Everyone could be their own interior designer, balancing personal preferences with continuing financial and spatial limitations. In line with the trend toward a full-blown consumer society, books and catalogues advised young couples to buy timeless and flexibly arrangeable rather than old-style, heavy furniture.Footnote ¹⁴ This principle enabled young residents with modest means to appropriate the space they inhabitated. An individualist lifestyle, one advice manual argued, might begin in furnished accommodation, which could be appropriated by adding some tasteful pieces as well as a folding-screen embellished with pictures of film stars or car models. It continued in a married couple's first flat, where the pre-existing furniture was combined with taste and skill, and new armchairs were purchased according to both spouses’ respective needs: ‘For each partner the one that suits them most!’Footnote ¹⁵ Space and finances permitting, flexibility could also result in blends of modern and ‘old’ taste. In Casal Palocco, some residents chose built-in cupboards or ‘so-called Swedish furniture’, while others opted for old-style sofas or even enquired about how to arrange a ‘living room in the nineteenth-century English style’.Footnote ¹⁶

Furthermore, thanks to increasing individual mobility, personal choice began to govern urbanites’ way of moving in urban and suburban space. Mr Kuyper for one would have been unable to afford a car at this stage of his life, but he rode a motorscooter from Nieuw West to his office job in central Amsterdam and presumably could also have taken the bus. What was typical of urbanites in Western Europe was their desire to have both private and public transportation at their disposal.Footnote ¹⁷ The massive expansion of road networks for motorised citizens, now often condemned as an expression of 1960s ‘technocracy’, was widely popular and seen as the logical extension of the principle of choice.Footnote ¹⁸ It was deemed possible to develop smooth traffic systems that would foster rather than stifle the motorists’ individual responsibility.Footnote ¹⁹ Consequently, more families could enjoy a suburban lifestyle while continuing to benefit from the career and consumption opportunities the city offered.Footnote ²⁰ As Jan Logemann has recently demonstrated in a comparative study of West Germany and the United States, the attachment to urban centres, residential neighbourhoods and public transportation systems remained strong, reflecting a societal choice for maintaining cities as vibrant spaces of work, consumption and social life.Footnote ²¹

On the face of it, in the 1950s and 1960s elective affinities seemed a successful and unproblematic principle governing urban spaces and societies. Thanks to capitalist affluence combined with ample public investment (the latter with the important exception of Italy), Western European cities increasingly turned into environments driven by, and conducive to, personal choice. To be sure, class differences persisted, but they appeared far more bearable than in the interwar period, not least because one could now expect to inhabit a place of one's own, furnish it with the things one wanted and decide how close to be to others. Choice promised to be individualist without thereby undermining social cohesion or – in contrast to the ‘new woman’ (Neue Frau) or ‘bachelor girl’ (garçonne) of the 1920s – the stability of the gender order. According to some observers, the fact that most residents of recently built areas preferred to keep a distance from each other did not mean that they were isolated. They still granted their neighbours access to the telephone, accepted their deliveries or minded their children.Footnote ²² Such a ‘thin’ concept of neighbourly relations was congenial to the predominant, stability-oriented version of democracy,Footnote ²³ and it contrasted favourably with the image of the Eastern Bloc. This was asserted in the Hansaviertel, purposely built in 1957 in the vicinity of the – then still open – border to East Berlin, while forming a quiet subtext of life in Nieuw West, where ideological polarisation did not intrude, and no event forced Mr and Mrs Kuyper to take more than a superficial interest in politics. Local, national or European identities did not seem threatened, given that the residents of Casal Palocco were free to combine a desire for contemporary Swedish or nineteenth-century English furniture with ‘American-style’ shopping excursions or barbecues, all without ceasing to be recognisably Italian and Roman.Footnote ²⁴

However, such a sanguine view was by no means universally shared. Even in a supposedly consumerist and technocratic period, strong doubts persisted as to the desirability of the emerging, revamped urban society. The first problem was with personal choice itself and the consequences to which it led. The Goed wonen magazine was not alone in associating an ‘egocentric effect’ with newly built residential areas and modern developments. A portrait of a successful female professional in her late thirties who, ‘unfulfilled as a woman’, regularly poured herself several drinks upon returning to her apartment building in central West Berlin attests to fears that gender relations might be destabilised.Footnote ²⁵ Moreover, not everyone was convinced that the ‘American style’ was simply one cultural reference among others. Thus, the Milan daily Corriere della Sera commented critically on life in the new suburb Metanopoli. In this ‘modern artificial city’, a managerial middle class drove cars, lunched in self-service canteens and dedicated its spare time to sports or television. ‘The New City, in sum, reveals Americanising tendencies. It is isolated from the surrounding society, reminding me in certain ways of an American community on foreign soil, as part of an occupation regime.’ This questionable model was already inspiring developers elsewhere and might thus be ‘the anticipation of a future society’.Footnote ²⁶ In a similar vein, a journalist for the – equally bourgeois – Neue Zürcher Zeitung expressed concern about the new weekend habit of driving around Greater Zurich to visit several shopping malls, to the detriment of extant city, village or neighbourhood centres. ‘We behave as if we lived in Texas without taking into account that conditions here are fundamentally different.’Footnote ²⁷

Another, no less crucial, concern was that modern developments were undermining rather than fostering the individuality of persons, couples and families. Spatial settings that appeared, at first glance, congenial to the principle of personal choice could also be seen as homogenising and coercive environments. The spectre of uniformity or ‘massification’ was by no means the preserve of ever-disgruntled intellectuals, as the frequently defensive or concerned tone of statements in favour of modern living shows. A ‘model flat’, Goed wonen explained, was not intended to be followed by everyone, but as a starting point for individual adaptation.Footnote ²⁸ Mass production of buildings according to types was a necessity considering the pressing need for affordable accomodation, but it was pivotal not to base it on the wrong blueprints, which stifled rather than stimulated family life and the pursuit of hobbies.Footnote ²⁹ High-rise buildings in particular came under attack. One of their advocates felt compelled to justify the uniformity that prevailed from the top floor all the way down to the mailboxes in the entrance hall by citing the democratic principle of equality. Another argued that high-rise buildings could blend harmoniously into their surroundings because they used a comparatively small amount of space and therefore allowed the preservation of adjacent old trees.Footnote ³⁰ The planners of the Hansaviertel, the flagship development of Cold War modernism in West Berlin, were faced with a critique from the minister for family affairs in the early Federal Republic, Franz-Josef Wuermeling. In 1957, the Catholic conservative expressed his regret that the high-rise buildings were meant to accommodate families, too. To him, such ‘housing machines’ were reflective of a ‘collectivist view of life’; they curtailed children's ‘freedom of movement’ and were bound to ‘massify even the last citizen who still feels himself to be a free man’. The secretary of the International Building Exhibition replied that high-rise buildings allowed for ample green spaces between them, as well as providing their youngest residents in particular with ‘literally a wider horizon’ and the skills required for ‘handling a lift independently’.Footnote ³¹

One might see in such statements mere responses to the predictable critical noises accompanying any major innovation after its effects become visible. One might also point out that architects and planners were more willing to take on board residents’ views than has often been acknowledged – through specialised outlets such as Goed wonen, public exhibitions or, in Charles de Gaulle's France, an unscientific poll that led to more flats being designed according to the preferences of middle-class families.Footnote ³² But to leave it at that would be to underestimate the political and intellectual power that the critique of modern living exerted in the 1950s and 1960s. It overlapped with the equally important critique that modernity remained incomplete and its benefits unevenly distributed. In France and Italy socially engaged Catholics and left-wing activists alike pointed to the persistence of urban poverty as well as to problematic aspects of capitalist development. Communist councillors led the charge against corrupt politicians and greedy construction magnates, as in the film Hands Over the City (Le mani sulla città, 1963), set in Naples, or politicised the popular resistance against the demolition of the old city centre, as in Toulouse.Footnote ³³ Moreover, across Western Europe both left-wing and conservative voices kept alive the nagging doubt as to whether ‘modern’ apartment buildings and suburban homes were really an expression of legitimate, socially unharmful choices.

For instance, Alexander Mitscherlich contended that contemporary cities’ functional differentiation and spatial dispersal had caused an existential ‘inhospitability’. For the prominent German psychologist and social critic, capitalist development, civic irresponsibility and schematic planning made preserving old-style ‘urban humanity’ and ‘giving room to the individual’ in ways adequate to the ‘technological age’ equally impossible. The stylistically eclectic ‘pseudo privacy’ prevalent in affluent suburbs was as problematic as the isolation that multi-unit buildings both reflected and imposed: ‘An apartment building with some thirty studios. The tenants are professionals. If one of them falls ill, he is practically stranded, because no one knows their neighbour, and human beings are after all not made for the life of a hermit crab.’Footnote ³⁴ The left-wing humanist thus questioned the very idea of elective affinities, since in his view contemporary urban spaces undermined human relations worthy of the name and fostered destructive egotism rather than the residents’ true interests.

Mitscherlich's perspective had much in common with that of the French Neomarxist Henri Lefebvre, for whom industrialisation, top-down planning and the promise of homeownership had ‘dulled’ the ‘consciousness of the city and of urban reality’, and who proposed a critical urban theory as an intellectual alternative to narrow functionalism.Footnote ³⁵ Without wishing to deny important differences in political conviction and conceptual ambition, Mitscherlich's and Lefebvre's views overlapped to a remarkable degree with Louis Chevalier's damning account of the ‘assassination of Paris’ as it had been built in the nineteenth century. For this, the conservative historian blamed a grand coalition of government technocrats, business interests and urbanites who took part in the ‘general conversion to real estate’, preferred supermarkets to corner shops and were convinced that they owned not only their cars but also streets, sidewalks and public squares. For Chevalier, consumerist individualism and uniformist planning were increasingly destroying the very individuality of Paris itself.Footnote ³⁶

As has been argued in this section, modern (sub)urban spaces held great attraction in the 1950s and 1960s because they were based on the principle of elective affinities. In a context of economic affluence and the growth of the welfare state and notwithstanding persistent social inequalities, millions of Western Europeans could now realistically hope to choose which furniture to pick and combine, how much distance to keep from neighbours or relatives, and how to commute between their residential area and centrally located sites of work and consumption. However, the critique of these spaces as isolating and ultimately coercive environments was part and parcel of this period's urban history. In addition to intellectuals and activists of different persuasions, it was shared by novelists such as Georges Perec, who dissected a young middle-class couple's modernist way of life in The Things (Les Choses, 1965), and film directors such as Jacques Tati, whose Playtime (1967) stars himself as a loveably clumsy provincial struggling to find his way around a Paris office building. In the French capital as well as in Munich or Amsterdam, bohemians converted the critique of functionalism and domesticity into happenings and other artistic provocations.Footnote ³⁷ Thus, to the residents and observers of cities, the benefits of modernity appeared more intertwined with its downsides than is suggested in surveys of Western Europe's age of affluence.Footnote ³⁸ It was this often tacit but ever-present ambivalence that made the predominant model of urbanity so vulnerable to the onslaught of left-wing radicalism, beginning in 1968.

II

The commune sharing a large flat in West Berlin in the autumn of 1968 consisted of five adults and two children, with more people intending to join at some future point. According to its members, all money was collectivised to buy food or occasionally go out for a drink. At the same time, the domestic tasks were carried out through ‘individual initiative’ rather than planned in advance. The communards much preferred this life to the ‘isolation’ experienced in sublet flats or even the one-bedroom apartment in a new building that one of them was offered by her parents. Moreover, they saw it as a basis for various ‘political actions’ and as a building block for an alternative society in which a large number of communes would be on offer, so ‘that you could change whenever you wanted’, until you found the ‘people who you can live with best’. Interestingly, the members of the commune demarcated themselves from the more collectivist mentality prevailing in the – then as now much more publicised – Kommune 1.

Consequently, ‘free’ sexuality between various members did not play an important role in this particular commune, and ‘divergent opinions’, for instance regarding the recent Soviet intervention in Czechoslovakia, were considered inevitable. However, other questions were a little more difficult. To some extent, the communards recognised this themselves but tended to blame it on unfavourable circumstances, for instance when they explained that they simply could not let the children ‘romp and make noise as we’d like to’, since this would get ‘too loud in such a small apartment’. Of potential contradictions in their vision they seemed unaware. For instance, it remained open whether the communal environment would, in the long term, really encourage everyone's ‘individual pecularities’, and whether this issue could be addressed by a universal ‘ability to start a new commune or to move into another one’. It was equally unclear whether the necessary domestic labour could be carried out merely through ‘individual initiative’, without some sense of organisation. The principle of equitable sharing, for one, was rather undermined by the acknowledgment that a vital task was left to a female communard: ‘We all take care of the children. Someone has to get them ready in the morning; Heike usually does that.’Footnote ³⁹

This self-characterisation points to key issues in Western Europe's urban history from the late 1960s to the early 1980s. During that period, a sizeable number of young adults questioned the correlation between (sub)urban modernity and the principle of personal choice, which had already attracted a sizeable amount of criticism throughout the previous decade. What others saw as a path to a desirable familial privacy, they considered no less stifling and rigid than old-style conservatism. Rather than imposing ‘collectivism’, alternative living promised to free them from the conventional family and allow for personal growth in self-chosen and consequently malleable communal settings. This new type of elective affinities would be congenial to a broader understanding of the individual than that marking mainstream society. It also underpinned an activist political style whose importance transcended the respective flat, neighbourhood or city. However, the source also hints at potential pitfalls of this optimistic conception. Would different claims to self-realisation prove compatible in the longer term, or would they eventually clash, for instance when voiced more forcefully by women? Would they remain radical, or would they eventually constitute merely one lifestyle among others? On the one hand, West Berlin itself offers ample evidence for urban radicalism, for instance when New Left activists challenged municipal planners and capitalist developers by agitating against particularly brutalist landmark projects. On the other hand, the growth of an Alternativszene of self-governed cafés, bookstores and cultural centres entailed the possibility of becoming, in the longer term, a semi-accepted part of the cityscape, peacefully co-existing with the remains of the old middle and working classes and the presence of recent immigrants.Footnote ⁴⁰

In order to arrive at an answer to these questions, it is, in the first instance, crucial to take the New Left's urban radicalism seriously. Nowhere was such an approach to politics more in evidence than in Italy, where it simultaneously challenged a functionalist (but, in actual fact, often dysfunctional) modernity and a deeply ingrained conservatism, and succeeded to a remarkable extent in bridging divides between students, workers and the subproletarian poor. In an extensively researched PhD thesis, Mathias Heigl has shown how social movements in 1970s Rome acted according to the principle that major decisions had to be made by those whom they affected.Footnote ⁴¹ Self-empowerment, often transcending legal boundaries, prevailed over the logic of capitalist developers, established institutions or political parties (including the Communists). Since the largely non-industrial Italian capital offered few factories for agitation, a crucial focus was on changing life in the neighbourhoods. Activists, including many ‘ordinary’, mostly poor urbanites, reduced their rents or electrity payments and occupied residential buildings. They organised local festivals, adult education courses and cultural events for children. The Collettivo femminista opened a centre offering advice, self-help and personal interaction to women. The Collettivo Policlinico challenged the medical hierarchy and pushed for improved conditions in the city's foremost hospital. Together the two collectives even set up an abortion clinic, although it was eventually dissolved by the police. An approach to politics that took individuals, including their gender, body and emotions, as its starting point thus resulted in new appropriations of urban space. While the eventual accomplishments fell short of the wide-reaching transformative ambitions, the impact on Rome's political culture and social order was still considerable.Footnote ⁴²

By focusing on subjectivity in specific urban spaces, leftist activists, in Italian as well as the more affluent West German, Dutch or Swiss cities, tacitly distanced themselves from the global revolutionary visions and ‘urban guerilla’ phantasies that had been in full swing during and immediately after the revolt of 1968. But they were still radical in aiming at a very different idea of elective affinities than that prevalent in Western European cities during the 1950s and 1960s. Not only did they raise awareness that large numbers of residents stood little chance of enjoying access to new apartment buildings or single-family homes and were, for instance in Rome's poorer districts, even denied basic infrastructural facilities. They also charged that both the impersonal features of modern living and the rigid environment of the established family led ‘not just to an impoverishment but to a division of individuals’.Footnote ⁴³ The New Left rejected the model of urban consumers, who opted for a particular lifestyle, personalised it by combining different products and drove broader changes according to the logic of demand and supply. Instead, it foregrounded more substantial, ‘thick’ subjects, who together conquered ‘autonomous’ spaces and thus began to transform society slowly and from the bottom up. Defending old, often nineteenth-century neighbourhoods against municipal authorities and capitalist developers mattered because these offered affordable residential and recreational spaces alongside a richer, less functional and constrained environment than newly built areas. As one German squatter put it in 1981: ‘We are sitting here and doing all these actions because we’re not prepared to resign ourselves to a world consisting of concrete and of cities increasingly devoid of life. We also don't feel like all pissing off surreptitiously and silently to the countryside.’Footnote ⁴⁴

Such alternative spaces were deemed crucial for allowing young people to develop an ‘identity of their own’ rather than become a mere ‘product of adjustment reflexes and other-directed influences’, to actually experience ‘freedom, imagination, beauty and lust for living’ instead of merely learning about them from films or books.Footnote ⁴⁵ One article characterised the transient subjects who populated Zurich's Autonomes Jugendzentrum, the focus of a massive revolt in 1980/81, in almost lyrical terms. They had acquired their individuality neither by attending school or university nor by working in a factory or office but by roaming the streets, and were now finally able to realise it in the recently founded youth centre.Footnote ⁴⁶ Twenty years later, one activist recalled how he began to join demonstrations: ‘for the first time, I had the feeling that one could actually live in Switzerland’.Footnote ⁴⁷ In a similar vein, squatters in Amsterdam stressed that their primary focus was on creating spaces allowing them to live as they wished, with like-minded others. One of them, Tycho, explained: ‘I just want to make good use of my time, doing things I like . . . . What I want keeps clashing with the authorities.’Footnote ⁴⁸

The fluid communication within, and spontaneous ‘actions’ of, the squatter scene were congenial to Tycho's desires, including occasionally throwing stones at the police, thus avoiding ‘the feeling of continuing to live without having resisted’.Footnote ⁴⁹ A loosely structured movement allowed for a blend of political radicalism, subjective liberation and uninhibited interaction. The emphasis lay not on continuous and organised activity but on exceptional situations transcending ordinary causality. These comprised ecstatically self-empowering outbursts of violence alongside peaceful activities such as all-night parties, naked sunbathing or brunching on a public sidewalk.Footnote ⁵⁰ Moreover, there was no programmatic contradiction between Tycho's and others’ avowedly self-centred perspective and the interest taken in ethnic and sexual minorities, drug addicts or psychiatric patients, who were very much present at the neighbourhood level but excluded from the official image of the city.Footnote ⁵¹ Indeed, many activists themselves were gay or lesbian, experimented with drugs or faced, due to their status as foreign citizens, the threat of expulsion. The New Left's elective affinities thus encompassed solidarity with other marginalised people and consequently a notion of urban space as a site of both empowered and fragile subjectivity.

This political emphasis on the tension between marginalisation and empowerment had important intellectual repercussions and inspired a new critical and interdisciplinary scholarship on Western European cities. For instance, the eclectic French thinker Michel de Certeau, an ordained Jesuit priest, registered his satisfaction that Paris's century-old built environment, the ‘lost stories and opaque acts’ at work in urban life, and the habit of appropriating the streets by walking them had survived the onslaught of ‘functionalist totalitarianism’. For de Certeau, these symbolic layers, alternative narratives and everyday practices subverted the ‘Concept city’ and offered a ‘readable identity’, in stark contrast to New York, whose essence he saw encapsulated by the extreme vertical perspectives available to visitors of the World Trade Center.Footnote ⁵² A similar emphasis on small-scale acts of appropriation and subversion lay at the heart of a renewed historical engagement with the urban working class, which was no longer seen as a homogeneous entity but as a complex ensemble of men and women modifying social reality through their own choices and strategies. In the light of such a vision, the city of the past appeared as a ‘site of possible ressources’ rather than a mere arena of exploitation and repression.Footnote ⁵³

However, individual preferences and collective solidarity, perspectives on the past and visions of the future did not blend into each other seamlessly. Doubts about the new kind of elective affinities permeated the discourse on alternative forms of urban living, especially once the initial enthusiasm had somewhat receded and tensions surfaced. Some activists deplored an excess of individualism in loosely structured settings. One Amsterdam squatter expressed disappointment that, after having taken considerable risks to defend others’ occupied houses against the police, he did not receive a similar degree of support in return. And a critical voice vividly described how in the autonomous youth centre (Autonomes Jugendzentrum) certain persons and cliques dominated meetings and siphoned off much of the subsidy granted by the city of Zurich: ‘At the end of the day this boils down to a situation in which he who has the sharpest elbows, yells most aggressively and is most cunning has his way – just like in bourgeois society!’Footnote ⁵⁴ By contrast, other activists struggled with the lack of privacy in squatted houses, where the intense communication and emphasis on action made it difficult to retreat with a book.Footnote ⁵⁵ Not coincidentally, female activists picked up on the excess of individualism and the lack of private space alike, associating them with the assertive masculinity that predominated in the alternative scene. One of them observed that women tended to be pushed to the margins in heated debates because they lacked the necessary ‘healthy dose of confidence’, while another explained how much she enjoyed living by herself again after having constantly been used by men wanting to offload their emotional baggage.Footnote ⁵⁶

Such perceptions fuelled a critique of urban radicalism, which was voiced by insiders and sympathetic observers alike. A councillor in Amsterdam noted acerbically that squatters were in the process of becoming one of several ‘tolerated subcultures’ that treated the left-wing parties as a sort of department store and did not shy away from asking the dreaded state for various subsidies and stipends.Footnote ⁵⁷ Joschka Fischer, justifying his incipient transition from anarchist in Frankfurt's West End to career politician within the Green Party, pertinently described how erstwhile activists flocked back from India, the countryside or ‘some cosmic depths and widths’ to accomodate themselves to life in the city. Their radicalism was now ‘a moral rather than a political alternative’, a ‘mere demand directed at the individual and devoid of practice, life or experience’.Footnote ⁵⁸ The future German foreign minister thus drew the consequences from the increasing proximity between an initially radical culture and a changing urban mainstream. As early as the years around 1970, the activist defence of nineteenth-century buildings and neighbourhoods had enjoyed some sympathies among otherwise moderate middle-class residents, who shared the widespread doubts about the desirability of ‘modern’ planning and architecture.Footnote ⁵⁹ A decade later, the back pages of ‘alternative’ magazines revealed the contours of a lifestyle driven by peculiar but not categorically different kinds of personal choice, be it for Greek restaurants, group therapy or contacts with potential partners.Footnote ⁶⁰ Indeed, in the course of the 1980s and 1990s, many erstwhile features of radicalism blended or were co-opted into a new kind of urban society. Rental contracts for long-standing squatters; previously unknown street cafés and organic shops; the abolition of restrictions, for instance on sunbathing on the lawns along Zurich's lakeshore; subsidised youth centres, music festivals and arthouse cinemas; municipal governments beginning to see ethnic and sexual diversity as an asset rather than a liability – all this points to the current (though no longer new) hype about the ‘creative city’ as well as an atmosphere that has undeniably become more tolerant than it was only a few decades ago.Footnote ⁶¹

Depending on one's political leanings, one might thus write the story of either a sad decline or a welcome integration of urban radicalism. Yet, both versions would, by themselves, leave out an important dimension of urban societies since the 1970s, which arose from the counter-reactions to New Left activism. The orientation towards domesticity and consumption that had been such a crucial feature of the two previous decades not only persisted, it was vigorously defended. Already in 1968 many Parisians were angry at student radicals for destroying public property and burning their hard-earned cars, and glad to leave the city for the Whitsun weekend thanks to the petrol provided by the armed forces during the general strike. In Zurich in 1981 an elderly man yelled at demonstrators ‘We are working from morning till evening, and you are smashing the things we built over decades! What the hell are you thinking?’Footnote ⁶² Urban radicalism visibly and tangibly challenged widely shared preferences, and it even claimed that a conventional existence was not worth living. This triggered resentment not least among working-class residents, whose range of personal choice had always remained limited, and who were, in a more volatile economy and amidst renewed social divisions, increasingly caught between aspirations for a higher living standard and worries about their future prospects. As West Berlin's trade union boss succinctly put it: ‘The worker earning 1600 Marks wants nothing to do with university radicals. The Berlin worker is firmly attached to the rule of law.’Footnote ⁶³

During the 1970s and 1980s centre-right newspapers articulated a renewed urban conservatism. Reports on attacks on the government by subsidised artists, crimes committed by immigrants or drug addiction destroying families fuelled the widespread doubts about cultural subversion, alternative lifestyles and ethnic diversity.Footnote ⁶⁴ The perspective assumed was that of the beleaguered ‘little man’. In this vein, small business owners were plagued by junkies begging on West Berlin's Kurfürstendamm or the transient subjects attracted by Zurich's Autonomes Jugendzentrum, both of whom were scaring off potential customers.Footnote ⁶⁵ Consumers indirectly payed for the windows of banks and department stores, which were regularly smashed by radicals enjoying a pleasant life ‘at the expense of the general public (read: the taypayer)’.Footnote ⁶⁶ Interestingly, the urban conservatism of the 1970s and 1980s shared some tenets commonly associated with leftist activism, namely the new emphasis on civic participation over bureaucratic decision-making and the doubts about modernist development.Footnote ⁶⁷ But the solution it proposed lay in a turn to the past, in a renewed attention given to picturesque canals or side streets, ‘traditional’ festivals and expressions of old-style civic pride.Footnote ⁶⁸ Consequently, one Catholic politician claimed that ‘the happiest moment of living in Milan’ had been in the 1950s, at a time of lower living standards but a ‘psychological climate’ less riddled by uncertainties.Footnote ⁶⁹ Urban conservatism thus firmly defended the principle of consumer choice based on hard work, demarcating it from alternative subjectivities and embedding it within a framework of ‘traditional’ local identities. It was shared by many former social democratic voters, strengthened the democratic right in cities such as Frankfurt, West Berlin and Paris and, by the 1990s, fed into a new right-wing populism that has by no means been limited to rural or small-town constituencies.Footnote ⁷⁰

The New Left's head-on challenge to the 1950s and 1960s relationship between urban societies and personal choice thus had deep repercussions. Radical activists across Western Europe fought for a richer notion of individual ‘life’, which they began to realise in conjunction with like-minded others and hoped to eventually employ to transform cities as a whole. However, this was from the outset a highly ambitious and tension-prone project, and conversely a starting point for a greater diversity of leisure sites and lifestyle choices. The ongoing debate about whether the 1968 revolt should be interpreted principally as an expression of left-wing radicalism within a longer pre- and afterhistory or as a harbinger of late twentieth-century consumer society appears rather misleading from the vantage point of cities, for both dimensions were inherent in the new type of elective affinities embraced by urban radicals.Footnote ⁷¹ Moreover, it is crucial to take the indirect effects of New Left activism into account, ranging from overlaps with a socially broad scepticism about modernist cityscapes to counter-reactions feeding into a new – and hitherto underrated – conservatism. By the 1980s, the relationship between urban societies and personal choice had become far more complex than could have been anticipated two decades earlier.

III

The present article has focused on elective affinities in order to synthesise some of the recent historiography on Western European cities between the mid-1950s and the early 1980s. Along the way, it has cited a broad array of voices, ranging from family-oriented suburbanites to the authors who denied them a meaningful existence, from radical activists to their decidedly ‘ordinary’ opponents. This has not been intended merely to add colour to an otherwise dry account of social and spatial change, but to make a broader point about discourse and agency in urban society. For without the quietly expressed demand for privacy on the one hand and, on the other, the much more vocal quest for a fuller ‘life’, without the ideas of modernist architects and the critical intellectuals who contradicted them, Western European cities would have a very different spatial and social outlook today. All of these voices grappled with, but also gave shape to, the interplay between individualisation, depersonalisation and repersonalisation or between dis-embedding and re-embedding that has been highlighted in Georg Simmel's and Anthony Giddens's prominent sociologies of modernity. The resulting complexity had much to do with broader cultural trends during the period under discussion, and indeed with the ambivalence of the very notion of individuality in twentieth-century Europe.Footnote ⁷² This ambivalence needs to be accounted for conceptually, unlike, for instance, in David Harvey's unequivocally negative picture of a mere ‘aura of freedom of choice’ in contemporary cities, of ‘intense possessive individualism’ complemented by ‘individualistic isolation, anxiety and neurosis’.Footnote ⁷³

While personal choice and elective affinities have thus been identified as an overarching theme in the urban history of Western Europe since the Second World War, they were closely linked to the particularities of two discrete yet intertwined periods. Crucially, the new spatial order emerging in the 1950s and 1960s was seen in ambivalent terms. Although (or because) the spread of ‘modern’ apartment buildings, suburban homes and road networks reflected the preferences of millions of urbanites, it triggered nostalgia, resentment and resistance. For the critics, it threatened to undermine social cohesion, the specificity of a given city and even the individuality it purported to foster. It is only against the backdrop of this critique that the radical left after 1968 could assume such significance especially on an urban level. The communards and squatters of the 1970s and early 1980s did not succeed in revolutionising Western European cities, but they challenged their social and spatial order and ushered in a number of crucial if sometimes unintended changes. An urban history that does not confine itself to case studies and is methodologically attentive to expectations, practices and effects can thus offer important insights to contemporary European historians.

What, in the end, was ‘Western European’ about all this? In the cities of the Eastern Bloc, domestic privacy and alternative lifestyles were by no means absent, but they played a more tacit role within a structure determined by communist dictatorship.Footnote ⁷⁴ Conversely, although doubts about modernist planning and suburban life were certainly articulated by American intellectuals, they did not have anywhere near the same impact on mainstream culture and the spatial order. England's ‘Western Europeanness’ is questionable with regard to its contemporary urban history, since its middle class and its democratically elected politicians abandoned city centres to a far greater extent than on the continent.Footnote ⁷⁵ Finally, southern European cities were much more marked by rural in-migration and consequently a quest for a level of housing and infrastructure that could be taken for granted in West Germany or the Netherlands; comparatively prosperous Italy arguably constituted a mixed case.Footnote ⁷⁶ Thus, in Western Europe with its recent affluence and its tradition of cultural critique personal choice and elective affinities were more consequential than elsewhere, while also being especially complex and disputed. As a result, they were inextricably linked to the transformation as well as the continuity of urban spaces and societies.