Once depicted as a “Blue Banana” stretching from Manchester to Milan, Europe’s industrial heartland has moved eastwards just as its political center of gravity has shifted to Germany. The term was coined in 1989 – the year the Berlin Wall fell – to describe French geographer Roger Brunet’s work identifying a manufacturing megacity, visible from space at night as a band of light curving from England to Italy via the Netherlands, Belgium, West Germany and Switzerland. Brunet was worried that France, a highly centralized economy dominated by Paris, was falling off the map.