Giacomo Biraghi has spent fifteen years and two thousand interviews trying to answer one question: is there really a distinctive European way of making a city? His answer, after all that fieldwork, is a cheerful and slightly heretical no — what actually runs the modern city, he reckons, is a global, real-estate-driven standard, and we should be a little more cynical about the green, healthy, peaceful renderings we keep selling ourselves. This is a man who's built his whole life around cities and stays ahead of the curve by avoiding urbanists — going out of the bubble to talk to the venture capitalists and technologists who are quietly deciding what our streets and buildings become, whether or not the word "city" appears anywhere in their job title.

We get into why Italy is secretly the master of sprawl rather than the piaz ...