Greetings from… The New Grand Tour

tarting in the late 1600s, a Grand Tour of European culture was an essential part of a young English aristocrat’s education. The Enlightenment had come late to Britain, and the country’s universities were falling into near-obsolescence. (Christ’s College at Cambridge, for example, which would in time educate Charles Darwin, admitted only three freshmen in 1733.) And so the Grand Tour was undertaken in lieu of better schooling at home. A proper gentleman completed his education by taking in the sights of Paris and Rome and Venice, perhaps stopping on the return journey in Vicenza to admire Palladio’s villas, and in Geneva to bask in the brilliant gaze of Voltaire or Rousseau.

The emphasis, however, was primarily on Italy’s ancient ruins. “The Classical heritage,” writes Grand Tour historian Roger Hudson, “was Civilization, to all intents and purposes.” Notwithstanding such earnest goals, the Grand Tour was as much about oat sowing (in legendarily debauched Venice, in particular) as edification, and for many gentlemen-in-training the ultimate goal was simply to return to England exhausted by travel and Continental peculiarities, and fully prepared to conform to the tidy norms of home — “to make them see,” as one aristocratic matron put it, “that nothing is so agreeable as England.” In time, the English gents were joined by upstart American boys — the White House and US Capitol building were inspired by architect Benjamin Latrobe’s Grand Tour study of Palladio’s work — and by the mid-nineteenth century the first mass-market tourists had codified many of the Grand Tour’s biases into guide-book dogma.

I’d expected from the outset that my European journey would be a different kind of tour. I’d come with my wife and two kids for the express purpose of documenting something new: the development of a sustainable industrial order. I planned to interrogate a great many technocrats on the construction of solar plants and the reconfiguration of electricity grids, while my wife anticipated wrestling with how to take uncommon pictures of wind turbines. We didn’t count on Vauban’s enviable kindergarten, but by then, around the midpoint of our trip, we’d come to realize we were witnessing something much deeper and more significant than a gallery of new and improved Continental mousetraps — something that couldn’t be counted entirely in kilowatt hours or tonnes of carbon dioxide emitted. We’d found ourselves traversing the vanguard of Europe’s Green Enlightenment on a new kind of Grand Tour.

The Rousseau of this new Tour turned out to be Hermann Scheer, co-author and global champion of Germany’s renewable energy law (passed in 2000, and since copied by governments across Europe and, most recently, in Ontario), and to my mind the single most important progressive politician alive today. “This is a structural change,” he told me, “and each structural change leads to new winners and old losers.” He was referring specifically to the change from non-renewable to renewable energy, predicated as it is on a shift from scarce and expensive primary fuels like oil, coal, and uranium to free and ubiquitous fuel sources like the sun and wind; and from centralized, oligarchical control to a highly decentralized energy regime. But really he could have meant the whole greenward Continental drift. This wasn’t the swapping of one energy source or even one industrial base for another; this was the weaving of a whole new socio-economic fabric. And the real purpose of the New Grand Tour was to gawk at its marvellous texture and design.

Greetings from… The Most Livable City in the World

uality of life” — “livability,” for short — is a highly subjective term. What qualities? Whose life? Measured how? In any case, Denmark and its elegant capital, Copenhagen, frequently win international rankings of such matters. The Danes topped two recent surveys of the world’s happiest people, for example, and Copenhagen has placed either first or second on the last three worldwide Most Livable City lists published by the jet-setting British magazine Monocle. To these, I would add a singular measure by which the city has revealed itself to be an oasis of livability nonpareil: preschooler jet lag.

Copenhagen was the first port of call on our New Grand Tour, and I arrived with my four-year-old daughter a few days ahead of my wife and infant son, thus to squeeze in a trip to Legoland ahead of the working part of the working holiday. To land in a foreign capital with a four-year-old after twenty hours in transit is a bit like waking up half-drunk behind the wheel of a moving backhoe with a jug of nitroglycerine precariously balanced in the scoop.

Fortunately, Copenhagen’s airport is about as user friendly as they come. There are not just complimentary carts for carry-on bags, but complimentary strollers. There is lots of soothing blond wood, and everyone’s English is better than yours. Both the metro and the regional train network have platforms and ticket kiosks right in the terminal. And as I learned first-hand, it doesn’t matter if you buy a ticket for the wrong one while you’re corralling your ticking time bomb of a daughter, because it’s valid on either system.

We’d rented a flat near the main train station through a Craigslist ad, and perhaps owing to inflated world’s-most-livable-city standards the place had been significantly undersold. It was bigger, better furnished, and more centrally located than advertised. The owner had mentioned in passing that there was “a playground nearby,” by which she meant that the north wall of her apartment block, formed by the ramparts of the old royal shooting gallery, had been converted into the best urban jungle gym my daughter had ever seen. It had a zipline swing on fifty feet of wire, a giant sandbox, a towering rope pyramid, a wading pool. And on weekdays, a team of caregivers ran indoor and outdoor enhancement activities out of a small shed. Free of charge. With considerable flair.

The day after our arrival, we passed a long, lazy morning at the playground. The jet-lagged preschooler, however, is a capricious creature, even by the formidable standards of four-year-olds in general, and the question of how to make it through the afternoon loomed over the proceedings. I didn’t want to travel far, for fear of agitating my daughter with monotony, and I didn’t want to pay a Scandinavian-priced admission fee for anything one or the other of us would be too tired to see through. We were without toys or comprehensible TV. What to do? Copenhagen’s livability, I knew, was predicated in part on it being one of the most pedestrian-friendly metropolises on the planet. So we simply walked. And it was magic.

Livability, it turns out, is a broad, car-free plaza in front of city hall, crowded on this day, serendipitously, by singing, dancing Chilean soccer fans. (My daughter was reasonably sure this was a show being staged for her benefit.) Livability is the movable feast of the Strøget, central Copenhagen’s high street, which first cleared its cobblestones of automobiles in 1962, in time becoming the backbone of a network of pedestrian-only avenues and lanes billed as Europe’s most extensive. Livability is a passing parade of street performers and ice cream vendors, tidy squares every few hundred metres with a fountain to climb on or a broad expanse to chase pigeons across. Livability is the temporary exhibition (yet more serendipity) set up in one of those squares, an assortment of multicoloured shipping containers retrofitted as miniature performance spaces. Livability is your four-year-old sitting for fifteen minutes in preternaturally still concentration inside one of these spaces, listening to a Danish guitar virtuoso play some enchanting baroque composition. (Free of charge. With considerable flair.) Livability is a great old ship’s anchor that doubles effortlessly as a climbing gym — this mounted at the head of Nyhavn, the row of cafés housed in old candy-hued warehouses along Copenhagen’s waterfront, which serves as the exclamation point at the Strøget’s terminus.