See Them Big Apples [tmz came up with this one] A company placed portal-shaped "sculptures" in the cities of Dublin and New York, allowing residents to essentially have a public, non-stop Zoom meeting with each other. And the marketing stunt went about as well as practically anybody could've expected. While residents initially waved innocent signs […]
Yeah a lot of towns in Europe are ‘twinned’ with another European town - i always assume its just an excuse for the councilor to get free holidays when making the agreement but your idea makes it sound really interesting, a portal could be really cool.
City “twinning” goes beyond the EU. And it can happen for all kinds of reasons. My favourite example is the towns of Dull, Scotland, Boring, Oregon and Bland, New South Wales.
The biggest problem in Europe in the past was the constant war between the nations, Germany and France in particular. How do You reduce the willingness to go fight each other. You create connections.
Economic connections in the form of the coal and steel alliance, which evolved to become the EU.
Personal connections by connecting the people between the countries with multinational friendship. Twin cities are one tool creating the friendship. By having regular exchanges between students and adults. You don’t want to go to war with a friend you visited every summer. That’s also the reason for the Erasmus program, where you can have an exchange semester at university.
All of those were implemented since the WW2 and they seem to work. There hasn’t ever been a period of such a long peace in central Europe.