Reflections on Life in the City

Store Near TU Berlin That Sells Only Items Related to Hamburg

Posted by James

On my way walking to work a few weeks ago, I spent some time reflecting on living in the city. I've spend most of my life in small suburban towns, not really suburbs in the sense of not having a central street, but by no means cities the size of Berlin. The largest cities I lived in prior to Berlin were Stuttgart and Boston for a summer and Karlsruhe for a year and a half. None of them were half as interesting as Berlin, but then none were as large either. For the last 30 odd years, I've lived in a suburban town, Mountain View, part of the larger suburb that is Silicon Valley.

Many of my younger friends and colleagues in Silicon Valley now live in or want to live in San Francisco or Oakland. Recently, there's been a lot of protest on the part of long-time residents of these cities against the new tech workers who they claim are driving up rents. But if you talk to the tech workers who want to live in these cities, they view their life in the city as temporary. Once they settle down, get married, and start having kids they are going to move out to suburbia, like where they grew up so their kids can have a lawn on their 5000 square foot lot with a single family home. This attitude has colored my view of city living, that it was for 20 somethings and 30 somethings wishing they were still 20 somethings, and real life starts in the suburbs. Even better is a 3 acre lot out in the country where the neighbors are a quarter mile away and you don't have to listen to their music, to say nothing of them walking around on the floor above your head as we sometimes experience here in our apartment.

But after living in Berlin, I'd have to say that my attitude has changed. Everywhere you look in my part of Berlin (Charlottenburg), there are kids. Kids playing ball, kids riding bicycles (sometimes even with their parents), kids taking the S Bahn and bus, kids crawling around in the dirt at Scheulsenkrug (a beer garden we often go to), kids walking with their parents, moms out pushing baby carriages with kids, you name it. On my way to work, I saw a well dressed woman walking along with two young girls. The younger one was holding tightly to her mother's hand, while the older one was holding a doll and singing a German children's song at the top of her lungs.

The only thing you don't see: moms driving their kids to their next appointment in huge SUVs. There are some SUVs in Berlin, but parking is so difficult that there are not many. You do see a lot of Smarts and other smaller vehicles that will fit into a micro parking space. Of course, the situation might be quite different in Kreuzberg or one of the other "cooler" boroughs. There, the 20 somethings and 30 somethings wishing they were still 20 somethings tend to congregate, and so maybe there's less evidence of the city as a place for nurturing a vibrant family life. Similarly, out on West End or in Wilmersdorf where there are more single family houses and the urban cityscape looks like a traditional suburb you are likely to see more SUVs.

The other thing that struck me was the sheer overwhelming variety of retail available. Nearby is, for example, a store specializing in pink second hand woman's clothing, and only that. I walked by a store just selling tin figures, like tin soldiers. And in the photo above, you can see a store selling items relating just to the city of Hamburg, and, in particular, Hamburg's soccer team, HSV, which for some strange reason seems to be as beloved or even more so in Berlin as it is in its hometown. And restaurants. We live in an area where 4 Vietnamese restaurants are within a 5 minute walk from our house. Indian restaurants tend to be a bit more on the scarce side, but there are at least 2 within a 10 minute walk.  And they are always crowded. You even see people eating breakfast at a restaurant table outside on the sidewalk, sometimes alone. It seems like you could visit a different restaurant every weekend night of your life just in Charlottenburg and still not visit all of them.

So my appreciation for the city as a good place for all kinds of human life has increased substantially by my experience here in Berlin. Somehow, I wish we could get some of the urban amenities that Berlin has but are sorely lacking in Silicon Valley, like bicycle and public transit infrastructure, so Silicon Valley could grow up into the city it is trying to be, instead of lingering in a prolonged adolescence as a gigantic suburb.