The dominant account on European urban history sees the post-1970s period as the happy end of a changeful drama. Modernist town planning with its objectionable corollaries of top-down decision making, tabula-rasa urban renewal, functional separation, and the primacy of car traffic was finally renounced, and the paradigm change gave way to approaches such participatory planning, contextual design, respect for the historic city, and the model of a compact, mixed used, and socially inclusive city. So all’s well that ends well? Not quite. This lecture will show that the supposed fix of modernist shortcomings in the late twentieth century gave rise to an entirely different set of problems, including gentrification, disneyfication, and an environment that masks increasing economic polarization with reinvented historic façades and narratives of civic solidarity. It will also show that the “rediscovered historic city” in Germany, Britain, France, and other European countries has little to do with a return to the pre-modernist era but constitutes an unprecedented urban situation with its particular challenges and opportunities.