The presidential election that is underway right now in France is playing out exactly as one might imagine. The first round of votes took place on April 10, and the second and final round -- which is now between Macron and Le Pen -- will take place on April 24.

How people voted in the first round can be mostly explained by geography. If you live in an urban center, an attractive tourist center, or have reasonably good rail connectivity to either of these two kinds of places, you likely voted for Macron.

On the other hand, if you live in a poorer rural area, you were more likely to vote for Le Pen. Our spiky unequal world remains, even in France, where more wealth tends to be redistributed compared to places like the UK and the US.

But there's another potentially correlative factor that should interest readers of this blog (even if it is somewhat obvious). If you voted for Macron in the first round, you were also less likely to rely on a car to get to work. Here are two charts from the Financial Times:

This point is perhaps obvious because geography and built form largely determine whether or not you want/need to drive. And the way to not drive is to live in a dense city. But I think it's also a useful reminder that owning a car does not necessarily need to correlate with high economic status.

In fact, when I look at these charts, not having to drive to work feels like a good thing.

We all know that inflation is a thing right now. Prices are rising. One way businesses can choose to respond to this is through something called "shrinkflation", which the Financial Times writes about here. The idea behind shrinkflation is that, instead of just raising end prices to absorb higher costs, you instead shrink or reduce your product or service offering. Of course, you could also do a combination of both things: increase your price and shrink your offering.

This shrinking can take many forms. A few less chips in your bag. A slightly smaller chocolate bar. Smaller food portions at the restaurant. Or maybe opt-in room service for your hotel room. It can also take the form of less space. Average apartment sizes in most big cities have trended downward over the years for this exact same reason. Developers are working to maintain some kind affordability in the face of rising costs.

I think a lot of people like to scoff at these sorts of practices. Why can't we just build bigger family-sized suites? But the reality is that it is being driven by real market constraints. Without something giving, like suite sizes, urban housing would be multiples less affordable compared to current levels. The developers I know don't have any sort of deep-rooted philosophical aversion to selling 5,000 square foot estates in the sky. The problem is simply that most buyers and renters won't like the sticker price.

So each year Europe runs a program called the European Capitals of Culture. The objective is to celebrate the richness of European culture and presumably drive throngs of tourists to its various locales. They do this by choosing a set of cities, designating them "capitals of culture", and then running events and programming all throughout the calendar year in those places.

When the program was created in 1985, it was originally called the European City of Culture, as there was only one city being chosen at a time. In the first year that city was Athens. But the program has since evolved and now multiple cities are chosen each year. For 2022, the European Capitals of Culture are Esch-sur-Alzette (Luxembourg), Kaunas (Lithuania), and Novi Sad (Serbia).

I was reading about Kaunas in FT this morning and I was fascinated to learn that this city of approximately 300,000 people has some 6,000 modernist buildings. Some are apparently in disrepair, but many remain in good form and, as part of the festival, visitors can book stays in some of the restored ones.

There is, of course, an interesting story behind these buildings.

This collection of modernist buildings is the result of a relatively narrow window of time and a specific set of circumstances. Lithuania gained independence from the former Russian Empire in 1918, following WWI and while Russia was busy fighting with itself. But at the time, its capital city Vilnius, which remains the capital today, was mostly occupied by Poland.

So Kaunas became its temporary capital city from 1920 to 1939, the latter date being when Vilnius was returned to Lithuania. This temporary designation created a tremendous need for new buildings, both public and private, and it just so happened to line up with the flourishing of European modernist architecture.

Kaunas didn't get any modernist "icons" from architects such as Le Corbusier, but there's absolutely nothing wrong with that. Kaunas instead created its own varietal of modernism, one that incorporated elements of Art Deco and one that you could argue is now deeply symbolic of a very important moment in its history: A peaceful period of interwar freedom and optimism.

Image: Kaunas 2022