Wherever you go — Paris, Venice, Istanbul — there's always a café, a hotel, a house where Hemingway had been. But Hemingway wasn't wandering alone. For a century, artists, writers, philosophers, and musicians clustered in the same cities, the same streets. Then the centre dissolved. This is the story of how culture found its hubs — and how it lost them.
↖ Click any dot on the map
From 1900 to 1940, Paris was the undisputed centre. New York absorbed the avant-garde in exile during the 1940s. London owned the 1960s. Berlin claimed the late 1970s. After that — the map fragments. Culture became distributed, digital, simultaneous. The hub dissolved.