[29] Richard Cockett — Vienna, City of Ideas

Modernity is a Viennese phenomenon, says historian Richard Cockett, who is currently working as senior editor at The Economist. The cauldron of Vienna ca. 1900 with its dynamism, its migrants and its cultural new beginnings and especially the political and intellectual energies after the First World War created panoply of new approaches which revolutionised life far beyond Vienna, and indeed Europe. As creative minds and experienced city planners, film directors, engineers, philosophers, economists, artists, and designers fled from the Nazis, the world would never be quite the same again, from fitted kitchens to neo-classical economics, from Hollywood to shopping malls, from nuclear physics to right-wing populism, all had their debut what had been an imperial capital and was now an experiment in living.