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

Germany has, over the last 2 years, really gotten into balcony solar panels:

The ease of installation and a potent mix of government policies to encourage adoption has made the wee arrays hugely popular. More than 550,000 of them dot cities and towns nationwide, half of which were installed in 2023. During the first half of this year, Germany added 200 megawatts of balcony solar. Regulations limit each system to just 800 watts, enough to power a small fridge or charge a laptop, but the cumulative effect is nudging the country toward its clean energy goals while giving apartment dwellers, who make up more than half of the population, an easy way to save money and address the climate crisis.

Of course, there's only so much that panels like these can produce. By some estimates, a "large well-positioned balcony" might only produce 15% of a home's electricity needs. But hey, that's still something, and it seems like something that Toronto should be looking at.

We also have balconies.

We know that, for a variety of reasons, more and more people are living alone. As of 2018, single-person households represented about 28% of all households in the US. This is up from 13.1% in 1960.

Here in Canada, single-person households became the predominant household type in 2016 (we're also at 28%) for the first time in Canada's 150+ year history. And the numbers are even higher for some European countries. In Finland, Germany, and Norway, more than 4 in 10 households are single-person.

Part of this has to do with people living longer. In Canada, 42% of people aged 85 or older (and living in a private household) live alone. But part of this is also cultural. Japan has one of the oldest populations in the world, but it doesn't have the highest percentage of single-person households. Although, the number is relatively high and increasing. It's nearly 40%.

Whatever the case may be, you could argue that there appears to be some sort of global trend line toward more people living alone. But here's an important question: Is this a good thing?

Albert Wenger recently argued in this blog post that, actually, we need new forms of living together. Whether it's multigenerational living or coliving with like-minded friends, there are clear benefits to living with other people. You get to share resources. You get elders that can look after kids. And you get company.

There's also an opportunity to curate your environment. As Phil Levin puts it on his coliving blog Supernuclear: "If your home is filled with motivated people, you will be more motivated. [And] if your home is filled with funny people, you will laugh more."

Albert posits that office conversions (which are obviously in vogue right now) could serve as an opportunity to rethink our built environment around coliving. And while this is certainly true, I'm not sure we need it to happen. There are ways we can live together today, within our existing environment, if we want to.

The question is: do we?