ABSTRACT
During the post-war years the military quit the Esplanade entirely. Formerly sealed off from the life of the city, the area was entirely redeveloped, and, at the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century, one almost gawks at it as a show-and-tell monument to the post-war Modernist urban imagination. Metropolitan Strasbourg does offer a number of exceptions to this general French pattern, the most striking being the case of the Esplanade, where a 1960s-style mega-creation sits not in outlying suburbs but very close to the city center. A combination of this healthy Strasbourg economy and a progressive mechanization of local agriculture brought about immigration from the Alsatian countryside to the city, which thereby changed its demographic character. Winston Churchill was a prime mover in the choice of Strasbourg as a symbolic center for "the Construction of Europe" after World War II.
