For those who have an interest in the modern history of European cities, Richard Vinen’s recent book – “Second City. Birmingham and the Forging of Modern Britain” (Allen Lane: 2022, pp. 548) – will prove to be an absorbing and rewarding reading. There are many research lines in this ambitious book on the history of Birmingham – the second largest city in the UK, mistakenly neglected notwithstanding its importance according to the Author. The two lines I focused on by reading the book are ‘change’ and ‘actors of change’ in Birmingham’s history since the early XIX century.

Vinen’s book would certainly deserve a long essay. For now, I isolate, and very shortly discuss in this and a few more posts some of the issues that attracted my interest.

“Cars had been a symbol of Birmingham for the whole twentieth century.” – Vinen writes in Chapter 9 (“Motor city 1945-1975). As a matter of fact, “… everyday travel by car was rare until after1945” – and to own or not own one was a perfect social class marker. The change that transformed Birmingham occurred in a matter of few years. To highlight a key feature of Birmingham’s urbanity, Vinen notes that “in 1943, when he was over seventy, Byng Kenrick, the industrialist and former Lord Mayor, still got around Birmingham by bicycle.” Yet, in the same year, as he emphasizes, H. John Baptista Manzoni, who would become the main figure in the city’s post-war spatial development, was already envisioning Birmingham as a ‘car city’: “… I see no reason why traffic in this country should not reach the proportions of traffic in America … one vehicle for every adult.”

The fabric of the city was rapidly transformed accordingly, and public transport significantly downsized. A decade later Birmingham was the perfect example of a ‘motor city’.

Birmingham’s history reminds us that profound and rapid structural transformations of investment and consumption patterns happened in the recent past in Europe, and there is no rational reason to deny that they can happen again. It is just a matter of intellectual engagement and political will.

Nowadays, to envisage cities with just a very few cars around within a decade – and accomplish a U-Turn with respect to the current urban mobility pattern – cannot be regarded as an unrealistic prospect. Indeed, the primary obstacle is the ‘market paradigm’, whose interpretation of capitalism is now shared by the main political cultures in Europe. The market paradigm does not contemplate ‘structural changes’ as a policy objective or as social phenomena emerging from the public debate.

The history of European cities – as Vinen’s book on Birmingham confirms – is the best antidote against the desiccation of the social and economic imagination that the market paradigm has engendered in European democracies.