“The suburbs are the place where energy is in the city—in the good, in the bad,” said Renzo Piano in 2015. 

Old left-right distinctions are fading as class identities break down. The big-tent party families, the social democrats and Christian democrats, will probably be the biggest losers in the upcoming election, and may lose their joint majority in the European Parliament to an array of parties with a firmer address on a new political scale. Invented by David Goodhart, a British political commentator, this goes from traditional, typically rural or small-town “somewheres” to cosmopolitan, big-city “anywheres”. Left-versus-right bellwethers like Lower Saxony, where the old duopoly remains unfashionably strong, now seem like political museums...