I've only been to Berlin once. It was for a long weekend in 2007; one where my friend Alex Feldman and I grossly underestimated the required travel and ended up not sleeping very much. But it was awesome. I loved the city. So much in fact that the two of us ended up enrolling in a basic German class once we got back to Philadelphia. I, of course, remember almost nothing from this class, but I can say apfelstrudel with a surprising degree of convincingness, provided there are no follow-up questions.
One of the ingredients that, I think, made Berlin what it is today is that, at one point, it had a lot of empty buildings. As many of you know, these under-utilized assets ended up becoming a breeding ground for creativity and, more specifically, techno music. It's a perfect example of Jane Jacobs' mantra that new ideas required old buildings. This overall creative energy is also what gave Berlin the slogan, "poor but sexy." What the city lacked in wealth, it made up for in spades with coolness and creativity.
But that was then. Eventually the buildings filled up, the city got richer, the secret got out, and things started getting more expensive. In the span of a decade, Berlin saw its average apartment rents double. Which is why in 2020, the city approved a five-year rent freeze for the 1.5 million or so flats that were constructed before 2014. Eventually this freeze was deemed unconstitutional, but it didn't change the fact that the city was clearly becoming less poor and -- arguably -- less sexy.
Or maybe not. Guy Chazan -- who is FT's departing correspondent in Berlin, just wrote this in a recent opinion piece:
Despite everything it is still, in the words of one Irish friend of mine who has lived here for more than two decades, the world’s “largest collection of black sheep”. It is a sanctuary for renegades and misfits of all persuasions, who benignly coexist with their more bourgeois Bürger neighbours. Despite the rising cost of living here, it still seems to be full of creative people doing God knows what but always looking like they’re having the time of their lives.
And as anyone navigating its countless construction sites knows, it’s also a place of sheer, unbounded potentiality. As the art critic Karl Scheffler famously wrote in 1910: it is a city that is “damned to keep becoming, and never to be”. When I finally board the plane out of here after nearly a decade in this city, it will be that “becoming-ness” I’ll miss most.
This to me is an incredible compliment for a city that I barely know, but that he presumably knows quite well. What makes cities truly great is that they're constantly in a state of becoming. In fact, it's exactly how I would describe Toronto. To be, means you've arrived somewhere. It also implies a certain stasis. And that's not what you want when you're a city. You want a constant flow of news ideas and new energy changing things. It makes me happy to know that Berlin, seemingly, hasn't lost this.
Cover photo by Stephan Widua on Unsplash
Our team has been spending a lot of time underwriting sites that would fit within the City of Toronto's new Major Streets Study. The last time I checked these policies were still under appeal, but the expectation is that they will eventually come into force and start encouraging small-scale apartments up to 6-storeys on all "Major Streets" across the city. This is meaningful progress for our city, and we're excited to be working on projects in this space.
At face value, 6 storeys on all major streets sounds like every great European city you've ever been to. But after studying countless sites, what I will say is that these policies are not designed to recreate Paris or Barcelona or Berlin. Instead, they are intended to be deferential to single-family houses. You see this in the required setbacks and in the maximum building depth, among other things. We all know why this is the case, and it was probably needed as a first step, but I think it's important to point out this subtlety.
Because there are at least two effects to this: one, the end future state will not be a uniform urban street wall, like what you'd find in Europe. That is not the goal of the current policies. And two, it unnecessarily makes the smallest sites more challenging to develop. That's a real shame, because more granularity is often a positive thing for cities. So we still have work to do. But I'm optimistic we'll get there, eventually. City planning typically works in increments.
I'll be the first to admit that I have an urban bias. I like walkable narrow streets. I like being able to cycle around. And I like not having to drive when I want to do things. But this can create a city-building blindspot and Paul Kulig, Principal at Perkins&Will Toronto, reminded me of that this week. Here's a tweet where he compares two streets, both of which have a right-of-way width somewhere around 40m:
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The image on the left is Prenzlauer Allee in Berlin. And the image on the right is Finch Avenue West in Toronto. Despite both having light rail running down the middle, one of these streets is walkable, vibrant, and generally urban, and the other is very suburban. What this reminds us is that a wide street isn't necessarily an insurmountable challenge. It's ultimately how we design that street that is the make or break.
Here's another look at Prenzlaurer Allee:
In addition to transit running down the middle of it, it also has a ton of on-street parking. In many cases, the cars are parked perpendicular to the curb. So it's not like this street isn't also accommodating to motorists. The key differentiator is how the buildings are placed. They come right up to the street and are accompanied by a great pedestrian realm (note all the patios below).
This is one of the things that Toronto needs to be focused on following the investments made in public transit on streets like Finch and Eglinton. We don't want generous setbacks on these streets. Make them 0m. Towers in a park kill any chance of street life. We can talk all we want about "active frontages" on our arterial roads, but who wants to sit on a patio on a street like Finch? Nobody.
But as Berlin shows, there's absolutely no reason why we couldn't change that. Thanks for the reminder, Paul.
Cover photo via Google Street View