Back from Berlin

[fivemack]

Suppose you had a country; a workshop of the world, eighty million people, a hundred billion Euros trade surplus with the rest of the planet.

Suppose that it discovered in 1990 that a great band through its capital city consisted of incredibly conveniently-placed brown-field sites, left so long that the weeds had turned them into green-field sites.

Suppose that its habits of spending on buildings and on infrastructure in the ensuing decades were such as to drive into perceptible deficit even so rich a country.

Then you have Berlin. Twenty years ago, a city of rotting concrete; now, a city of shining glass.

You may gather, I liked it. More gushing and innumerable photos, later.

Comments

[jvvw.livejournal.com]

I was really surprised how different Berlin is from the rest of Germany. My sister spent a summer there and when I visited a year later I borrowed her guidebook which was unusable, the place had changed that much.