Poor, sexy Berlin: the failure of urban planning

ON AN ENGLISH-language walking tour of Berlin--before the Irish tour guide can deliver his own rant against the misguided urban planning at Potsdamer Platz--a Vietnamese woman points to a triangular skyscraper across the square that was supposed to be the central focal point of "new" Berlin.

"That building? The way the corner points directly at the square?" the woman says. "That's bad feng shui."

That pleases the tour guide, who goes on to describe the square as a failed attempt to convert a bombed-out wasteland, left untouched throughout the Cold War, into an artificial center of commerce. But the visitor's statement probably wouldn't sit well with the Berlin city planners whose heavily subsidized efforts to make the city the economic capital of the European Union have faltered.

Immediately after the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, there were glimmers of hope in the form of private investment. Broadcast companies set up bureaus in the newly reunited city, and Western businesses looked for space to tap into the formerly closed-off markets of Eastern Europe. Overzealous government officials took a page from the American urban planning playbook, forging "public-private partnerships" to offer subsidies to seemingly anyone who wanted to build an office tower or a luxury apartment building. The large sums of government money, scantily supplemented by private funds, fueled a building boom that lasted through much of the 1990s. Even today, the Berlin skyline is littered with construction cranes, and signs in both English and German offer dirt-cheap rates on never-been-used apartment and office buildings.

But even as the building boom refuses to die, owners of some new apartment buildings contemplate tearing them down. The cost of maintaining and securing the unlived-in structures is becoming too much. The broadcast companies, which had planned to invest in Berlin in two waves, never sent the second influx of jobs and are scaling back the work force they did send.

"You just can't merge the East and West German economies like that and expect success," says Pieter Judson, a historian at Swarthmore College who has studied the social costs of reunification and postwar reconstruction. "It's being built up as a symbol. They want to attract new business and industries, but it's going to take years to happen, and in the meantime the government is just pouring more and more money into these projects."

The symbolic center of Berlin's excess is Potsdamer Platz, which was once Berlin's equivalent of Times Square. With beer halls and stores selling everything from the latest fashions to gourmet foods, Potsdamer Platz became a central meeting point for pre-war Berlin.

By the time the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, however, Potsdamer Platz was a literal wasteland. More than 80 percent of the square had been destroyed in World War II, and there had been no time to rebuild it before the wall and its death strip cut through the heart of the district in 1961. East Berliners stayed away, and West Berliners were reluctant to build anything in the wall's shadow. Having been handed a clean slate by the German Democratic Republic, Berlin city planners came up with a post-reunification vision that was intended to recreate the pre-war Potsdamer Platz with a decidedly 1990s twist. Between 1997 and 1999, 17 major buildings designed by internationally renowned architects were completed on the site, which was developed by Daimler-Chrysler and Sony. If all of the construction materials used to rebuild Potsdamer Platz were loaded on rail cars, the train would stretch 5,0000 kilometers.

With thousands of square meters of office space, 8,000 new housing units and five multiscreen movie theaters in a 50-meter stretch, Potsdamer Platz was to be the symbol of the "new" Berlin, which German officials hoped would emerge as the cultural and economic capital of Europe. On paper, Berlin became increasingly attractive not only as a result of the fall of the Soviet Union but also because the eastward push of the European Union created new ties to developing economies in Poland, the Czech Republic, and Hungary.

Or at least it seemed attractive to German planners. "All of the sudden [in the early 1990s] Berlin is going to become the de facto center of Europe," explains Fariborz Ghadar, director of Pennsylvania State University's Center for Global Business Studies. "Germany suddenly has a much more dominant role. The United Kingdom is not really seen as Europe, and French influence is seen as having been reduced, so the Germans just poured money into Berlin like crazy. They anticipated Berlin being the big center of Europe, and it just hasn't happened yet."

Ghadar thinks part of the problem is that there are already a number of relatively strong regional economies in Germany. Berlin has to compete not just with Paris and London but with Frankfurt, Munich, Hamburg, and Cologne.