The authors, all practising architects, planners and urban designers, say that Europe finds itself once more at a crossroads. Increasing ethnic migration, increasing touristic and commercial movement, and the ever more closely intertwined communication and financial networks are all having their effect. There are urgent questions about the kind of space these flows and networks will produce. The spatial dilemma is this: ‘Will [Europe] take the path of least resistance, leading to uniformity, or will it take spatial and cultural variety as paramount guidelines?’ The authors clearly prefer the second alternative. But in the light of the intertwining to which they allude, this is a complex and often self-defeating task. One might even wonder whether a simple, somewhat modernistic question is in fact sufficient to take on the task. It is not really possible simply to take the state, the nation and national identity – or even local history – for granted as the binding element and basic principle underlying local differentiation in the approach to urban design and architecture. Today we are really growing out of the idea of the nation as an ideological binding agent, despite the increasing nationalism of its fierce rearguard action. Nor can a metaconcept like identity be grasped just like that without doing it violence.

This perhaps is why the introductory essay (on which more later) is followed by a piece dealing with the concept of identity, whose subject and approach strike one as slightly incongruous, a piece of architectural and cultural criticism by Mathis and Michael Güller and Harm Timmermans on the present role of the National Museum of Culture in Europe. The thesis of this essay is not without pragmatism: the traditional 19th-century role of the national museum as a tool to create national identity still exists, but the form taken by and purpose of this identity are becoming steadily more absurd (Paulus Potter’s Bull as emblem of the area called multicultural Holland?). In this gap lies an opportunity to give meaning to the post-national era. European national museums, the authors say, must start to tell open-ended stories encouraging the public to reflect on issues like identity, while lacking the doctrinal bias of the old nationalism or a different political ideal.

That, not surprisingly, is what the following essays appear to do. Ivan Nio’s ‘Ethnoscapes’ deals with the challenges presented by the large numbers of immigrants. It considers two subjects: the movement of immigrants in and through Europe, and the concentration of foreigners in particular districts of European cities. Nio defines the ‘ethnoscape’ as a wide network within which immigrants, assisted by the Internet in particular, are able to maintain close links with their family, business contacts and friends anywhere in the world. This transnational network – mistakenly ignored in discussions on immigration – is important because it helps immigrants to achieve economic emancipation while limiting the necessity for integration, or in any event avoiding splitting the immigrant’s citizenship. Nio goes on to discuss the dilemma presented by the choice between dispersal and concentration of immigrants in a city. He argues, and this is an important point, that the free choice of the migrant must be decisive: though mixing of population groups may be preferred, concentration does not create social problems as long as the resulting homogeneity and relative segregation results from the free choice of all those involved, particularly the immigrants. The ultimate aim is to transform areas of ethnic concentration into instruments for emancipation. The piece ‘Together’, by Angelika Fuchs and Wouter Veldhuis, deals with a new form of colonisation, in which the rich, usually rather older Dutchman, German or Englishman settles in the marvellous climate and magnificent countryside of southern Europe, and discusses the social and economic consequences of this behaviour both for the home country and the country of immigration. Arjan Harbers’s ‘Borderscapes’ deals with the national egotism that generally underlies sensitive spatial decisions, such as the location of organisations that are environmentally harmful. Harbers argues that such sensitive decisions should henceforth be taken at a European level, to avoid their being charged with electorally sensitive, political considerations. Finally, Florian Boer and Christine Dijkstra’s ‘Funscapes’ denounces the uniformity produced by the leisure industry, as much in the countryside as in the town. The piece concludes with a SWOT analysis of the ‘capsule’ – a component of urban design that the authors believe can avoid the problems of a gated community while at the same time succeeds in retaining the quality of the particular location, without lapsing into a Disneyfication of its identity. Taken together, these essays can be seen as a relatively homogenous approach to the problem of individualism, a subject also raised in Robert Broesi’s introduction.

Broesi states that Europe’s politicians and civil servants have long since been overtaken by everyday reality. Europeans make eager use, on their own initiative, of the present openness of Europe’s internal borders and so introduce a personal dynamism into spatial planning. There is no unambiguously European identity, nor is there any such thing as a clearly ‘European’ policy. The only Europe that exists is the Europe of the individual, that starts something itself in reaction to particular situations, and in the process makes use of already existing transnational networks. The true transformation of Europe, according to Broesi, is a ‘bottom-up’ process, with Brussels playing no more than a supporting role.

The book is a brave attempt to investigate today’s problems. Its insights are absorbing, but in the end it fails to overcome the paradoxes it reveals. It expresses a need for guidelines capable of guiding the process of diversification. Ultimately, diversity cannot be made uniform.

The book is published in a bilingual form. The English translation is for the most part reasonable, though some translations obviously come straight out of a dictionary. It should be possible to do better. The book includes many fantastic maps, which go well with the text. The book as a whole is clearly designed, with the Dutch and English texts clearly distinguishable. It is a pity that no notes are provided to accompany Bas Princen’s and Raymond Wouda’s often masterly photographs.