I've done this before. Up on the heights of Tallinn, overlooking the old city and across at the new one.

I prefer the old. In the mad scramble of development that followed independence, Tallinn has acquired a downtown reminiscent of the soulless CBD's of middle America. Pointlessly tall chain hotels, malls feeding into malls feeding into malls. Wide streets with pitiful considerations for pedestrian traffic. It's sad that the medieval builders of Tallinn produced a more welcoming city than the modern ones.

I stopped by the Estonian Museum of Architecture as the light was fading and checked out their wonderful collection of models and maps (and a fantastic and unexpected urban photo exhibition in the cellar!) and found out part of what went wrong. Following the end of WWII (The Great Patriotic War for some in these parts) Soviet planners couldn't wait to erect statues commemorating the victory all over the city. Competitions were held endlessly, plans were made for multiple grand squares with imposing monuments of Marshal Stalin and other contemporary heroes. Then Stalin died, and people got bored, and nothing got built, until the famous "The hell with it, lets just build a car park" mentality set in. Shame.

The Museum had some plans for new buildings and they looked much more promising, especially a plan for the Tallinn city hall by Bjarke Ingels Group that looks like a series of jumbled boxes with a rooftop cafe. I hope it gets built and that Tallinn can create a beautiful modern city center to rival the gorgeous old one.