Every design for Dessau

Picture a town on a broad floodplain where the Mulde flows into the Elbe, ringed by so many parks and palaces that it counts among the greenest in Germany. That is Dessau, since 2007 a district of Dessau-Roßlau, with the well-wooded Mosigkauer Heide to the south and, as its highest point, the Scherbelberg, a former rubbish dump.

Living here means living with the rivers. Floods come every year, and the flood of 2002, which left the Waldersee district almost completely under water, is still remembered. It also means walking out to Schloss Georgium and the Anhaltische Gemäldegalerie, or past the Bauhaus, where Walter Gropius, Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky taught after the school moved here from Weimar in 1925, and on to the Meisterhäuser. For centuries Dessau was a capital of Anhalt, and the garden landscape around it is a World Heritage Site.

If the Bauhaus taught you to love clean lines and the parks taught you to slow down, Dessau is worth carrying with you, whatever river you happen to live by now.