Cologne Cologne Cologne (; , , ) is the largest city of Germany's most populous federal state of North Rhine-Westphalia, and its 1,075,935 (2016) inhabitants make it the fourth most populous city in Germany after Berlin, Hamburg, and Munich. The largest city on the Rhine, it is also the most populous city both of the Rhine-Ruhr Metropolitan Region, which is Germany's largest and one of Europe's major metropolitan areas, and of the Rhineland. Centred on the left bank of the Rhine, Cologne is about southeast of North Rhine-Westphalia's capital of Düsseldorf and northwest of Bonn. It is the largest city in
Historical Archive of the City of Cologne of photographs on the history of art, architecture, culture and photography in Cologne and the Rhineland. The plan was to build the “safest and state-of-the-art city archive in Europe“ by 2017. After the decision of the city council, a detailed concept was worked out and approved. In 2013, in the context of the city's financial crisis, local political debate began to move towards re-considering this decision, and even to imposing a planning moratorium. Protests by local support groups as well as national archive organizations followed. In 2017, the total damage from the collapse was estimated at 1.2 billion euros. Before