Berlin Diary -- One
July 30 2019
So much green space here, big green spaces. It has 46% green or water (LA has ~6% but is surrounded by National Forest and has the ocean). Weedy, slightly feral, growing forests of invasive ailanthus; they pop up everywhere. One would think, given all the earnest discussion and ideologically driven science about the benefits of urban open space and urban trees, that all this green space full of trees might make Berliners the happiest urban dwellers on the planet. Surely it is one of the greenest of world cities (actually, Moscow is at the top at 54% --- how do Muscovites rate on the happiness/wealth index. . . ). Berlin is airy, punctuated by large patches of forest with lakes, the boulevards are tree-lined, smaller city parks are tree filled. From the air, Berlin is green. And Berlin is huge. Open space takes a lot of space
But what do I see walking around? Lots of smoking, people who are not by any measure, in good physical health. Among the young, 35% smoke, adults 25%. Obesity or near obesity is quite prevalent. Across adults, 60% are overweight, 25% obese. Public drunkenness is not uncommon. While this is probably not much different than other places, how does it fit with the growing hegemonic idea that people in cities with lots of trees are healthier and happier? Its very difficult to reconcile.
Happiness, or lack of anxiety and depression are very complex concepts, and also hard feelings to describe, even harder to hold on to. They are here, they are gone. How does one even know if one is happy, free of anxiety and depression? They operate on so many different levels of awareness. Are they simply medical conditions? High blood pressure, high cholesterol or other? No, they operate on affect, on feelings, on a perception of how one is doing. And these may have physical manifestations – its all connected. What comes first is not clear!
Berlin would seem to have it all – open spaces, public transportation of various kinds, bicycles, cars, density in its built areas, shopping, housing, rivers and parks. Yet none of these can relieve a kind of pervasive anxiety about the future, about daily life and the rising rents, about immigration and economic change.
While Berlin presents a wealth of attributes and qualities that make urban living comfortable and pleasant, a pleasure for the eye and easy access to consumption goods, the fundamental disquiet and undefinable fear about the future are deeper than urban amenities. This is probably because urban amenities don’t come with a sense of commonality about what people’s desires are for themselves going forward. There is not bonding and threads of connection around purpose and mutual support (at least from the perception of the outsider). Drinking is a great solace, so is eating and smoking, a relief, a pleasure. (I often think that if I were homeless, or otherwise in difficulty, I would start smoking! Such a nice, immediate high).
So open spaces, good urban morphology, are not sufficient. There is a need for a sense of purpose, a sense of social bonding. Easy to say, so hard to do, and contemporary society has fallen into consumption as our common enterprise. This does not seem to have escaped those who reside in Berlin, as comfortable and agreeable and green as it is.
Berlin Diary 2
August 11, 2019
I have not seen as many extremely thin people anywhere I have been before. Men and women who are so thin that their cheeks are sunken in – especially the older ones – and who, nearly all, smoke. There are young and old stick figures. Some seem driven by fashion, sporting the latest, or what they deem the latest. At a restaurant the other day, I sat at a table next to two young Brits, man and woman. The man was dressed in black, with dyed black shoulder length hair, very pale and thin, bad teeth and cheap plastic boots. He spent lunch chain smoking, drinking white wine and hunched, hands trembling, talking about his agents and his need for more money and how he sprays shaving cream on wasps to kill them in his room. The woman was of normal proportions.
At a neighborhood soccer game on a field at the center of Mitte (about 2 acres), a skeletal younger woman sporting black leather clingy thigh-length coverings under a light knee length black dress, high heels, short hair and a baseball cap, highly made up. Congratulating the winning players, smiling widely gracing her entourage, also smoking away. Very fashionably attired. On the same outing on Saturday, a number of very thin young women rode by on bikes, sat at cafes drinking coffees. More thin women than men, but on another day I saw a man in his 50s, sitting at a café, so thin it was striking and uncomfortable (I could not take my eyes off him), nursing a coffee and a cigarette. Berlin seems to be a city that maintains a sense of fashion, such as it is, with noticeably up scaled dressing in places like Mitte, and an accompanying obsession with thinness, along side the general growing problem of obesity. Perhaps 2 sides of the same coin of discomfort with the self.
Mitte is former GDR, and is the most convivial and intimate neighborhood in Berlin, where there are still small one-off shops, and growing high end intrusion, like Comme Les Garcons. Lots of cafes, bars and restaurants of all kinds, including in the former Jewish girl’s school, a building designed by Alexander Beer in the New Objectivity Style (function over form) in the early twentieth century. There a formal restaurant and a nice lunch place with excellent pastrami sandwiches —Mogg. Mitte has an infrastructure of small parks and playing fields. The soccer game field in the heart of apartment buildings, was divided into two, with two games going on at once, mixed gender teams. Drinking and hot dog eating on the sidelines, cheering and hanging out. Lots of children of various ages, a great convivial scene.
Mitte’s buildings are up to 5 stories, some have setbacks with greenery in front, and most of the area is built as a series of courtyards – buildings along the street, but then 1-2 interior courtyards with apartments or commercial uses in the buildings behind. This is a really efficient and livable urban form – allowing for air and light into the apartments and more energy efficiency because of the common walls. Its also quiet in the interior and the courtyards often have some greenery too, a tree, a patch of weeds and flowers. Mitte was largely reconstructed after the war, so the buildings look well maintained, there are few that seem neglected. People walk and bike.
I drove to Leipzig earlier in the week. It is in former GDR, south of Berlin about 2.5 hours on the autobahn. Leipzig is the birthplace of Wagner, Mendelssohn and Bach. It has a beautiful Renaissance downtown that has been restored and complemented with new buildings around walk streets, all turned into a giant mall. It has wonderfully restored covered passages which must be a treat to walk down in the winter, also entirely transformed into stores and restaurants. Same stores in each town Belin or Leipzig, London or Manchester, LA or NYC, and chain restaurants. Repeat the formula. Attract tourists to the historical urban fabric, unique in each city, feed them into the consumption venues that are the same, predictable and comforting. And people flock and buy.
The countryside to Leipzig from Berlin is largely flat, with monoculture industrial forests of pine trees with nothing growing on the forest floor along the freeway, giant fields crisscrossed with huge draping power lines are also a big part of the landscape. There are also giant warehouse and distribution centers dotting the freeway adjacent land. Huge wind turbines cluster in various places, and the region is home to large agro-industrial chemical factories. Villages seem reduced to being dormitories for the large factory complexes, including VW, with little to no local commerce like a bakery, especially in the smaller villages. They are fairly deserted in the day. No visible farms, a few sheep grazing near the Elbe River, but otherwise no animals, few gardens of any kind in the villages. But there are shopping centers at village edges. Good bike paths across the towns and countryside and bus stops, but roads and cars seem to be the main transportation venues. It was a pretty bleak drive, no hedgerows have been kept between or in fields, no wood coppices for birds and other wildlife. I did drive through a couple of nice mixed species woods, hard woods, a few pines with understory nearer to Leipzig. It was such a relief from the dominant industrialized and rationalized landscape.
There are 80 million people in Germany and the economy is strong, people are pretty prosperous. The rolling stock seems fairly new, the autobahn crowded with trucks moving goods. This time of year there are lots of tourists. Airports are crowded. People are shifting toward flying away from the more time-consuming train. (I am going to a small town outside of Stockholm for a conference next week. Train was 9 + hours, plane 1.5. . . and the plane was cheaper). The path forward to less energy intensive futures does not seem any more clear here than elsewhere. Keeping people employed is critical, higher unemployment in the former GDR contributes to the sense of anger, resentment and shame and being useless and unimportant, fueling hatred. But the question is, what should people do that shifts us away from the high energy, materials and consumption economy that is not sustainable? Wendell Berry once asked – what are people for? Good question, to which we need to add, what shall we do with ourselves to live well and lightly on the planet? I have found no clues here, other than the old urban fabric with its inner court yards and human scale – built that way because there was no fossil fuel to assist.
Berlin Diaries - Three
19 August 2019
You leave the crowded chaos of Tegel airport in Berlin, the capitol of Germany, an antiquated facility whose replacement has been botched for a decade with billions of Euros poured in, for Stockholm airport. Calm, clean, efficient, smooth. Easy Jet makes such travel absurdly cheap – about $80 RT and 1.5 hours. The train equivalent is 9hrs + and lots more money. That is the tragedy of the modern era. Externalize the costs on the environment. Nature is still cheap. And we believe our time and convenience to be valuable, thus worth sacrificing the planet.
I was invited to an Applied Energy conference in Vasteras Sweden, about 100 km. east of Stockholm. Smooth transition from the average 150km/hr train from the airport to the train station, easy ticketing and access to the commuter train, running every 20 minutes or so. Voila. And all electric.
Vasterås is a smallish town of about 150,000, home to a university, the first H&M store and to ABB, a vast global technology company bringing to all of us increased automation and replacement of human intelligence by machines. Global, sophisticated, imbricating itself into all aspects of daily life and buildings, mining and manufacturing, the leading edge of smart. Mining? No problem, electrified mining machines operating efficiently underground in unventilated tunnels (big money saver), extracting materials from the bowels of the Earth for our ‘needs.’ Smart buildings? Networked computer sensors deployed throughout, bringing information to the super hub, transmitting all necessary data to know what is going on and to dispatch solutions to any emerging problems. Humans may be before some screens. . . or not. Engineers have our backs.
The Applied Energy conference was attended by hundreds of Chinese students, professors, researchers, all involved in the minutiae of energy, from battery technologies to coal plants, and especially hydrogen. The fashion in China is the hydrogen transition. Its back. Extremely technical papers, delivered in often halting English, the presentations were mostly impenetrable for me, but indicative of the direction of the transition in China. Unleashing all these minds on new technologies and their cost efficiencies. I don’t think I have heard as much jargon about markets and efficiencies, ever. So many earnest angels dancing on the head of a pin. Nothing about life cycle costs, materials scarcity, pollution, and what is trying to be achieved. That was the topic of my keynote, the first morning, and I had many, many questions, and lots of people approaching me to say how much they appreciated my bringing up the issues. My cautionary notes did not seem reflected anywhere else, other than the sobering key note that followed mine, another reminder that we need to drastically curtail the use of fossil fuels. Absolutely. Doing so could soften the extremes of unpredictable future climates and higher heat. In fact, Michael Obersteiner, the speaker, called for such a drastic reduction in emissions so that another ice age would be triggered to restore Earth systems balance. . . well, clearly not in our lifetimes. He is going to be the new director of the Environmental Change Institute at Oxford.
I was struck by the ubiquitous presence of immigrants in Vasteras and then also in Stockholm. Perhaps because they were so evidently not Swedish! Twenty percent of the population is immigrant, most recently Syrian, Iraqi, Afghani, Eritrean and Somali. A growing, Russian fomented and supported (in part) backlash is occurring, especially in Malmo, or so it is said. How difficult it must be to assimilate people from such deeply different cultures, (or is assimilation the right thing anyway?). Swedes have, still, very strong cultural habits and societal expectations, Protestant values. They retain a distinct, and somewhat difficult to describe, vibe, for lack of a better word. Calm, courteous, organized, orderly, a clean aesthetic reflected in the interiors. Great lighting to create intimacy and warmth – one might snort and say, of course, given the climate, but the Japanese, oddly despite their aesthetic sense, have terrible lighting and cold, dark winters. In contrast to Germany, even convenience stores retain decent healthy food (largely dairy based). Good bread, lots of fish, less obesity and smoking, it seems like a society that had an internal ethos. And the singing! At the conference banquet an acapella group sang a few Swedish folk songs, lovely. Apparently there are such groups throughout the country, and small orchestras and bands too. Swedes still, also, put lights in their windows with open curtains, a kind of rural vestige that creates welcoming city streets. Somehow there is a sense of security there, of stability (though I did see lots of security eyes on the street everywhere).
Stockholm retains a number of its older neighborhoods, largely 18th – 19th century. It is very well interconnected by a smooth, quiet subway, a light rail system and buses, bike lanes everywhere and scooters (with designated parking zones). The downtown got unfortunately modernized and is unattractive, a place of malls. But the outer neighborhoods retain a walkable charm with cafes, restaurants, one-off stores and boutiques. Perhaps rents have not ballooned to the point of extinguishing local commerce. I watched toddlers to 5 year old children in a nursery school playing outside on different types of wheeled tricycles of different sizes, pulling carts, pushing carts, 4 wheelers with articulated front and back that could be controlled with a stick. Learning very early on, inculcated with the bicycle culture and wearing safety vests. There were also scooters!
The history museum – or actually the military museum – was fascinating. Essentially from the early middle ages on for about 400 years, there seemed to be war, expansionary expeditions into Poland and Germany, Finland, Norway and Russia. No moderation to the desire for empire. Entire families accompanied soldiers and at least as many horses. Disease and famine killed more people than battles, country sides were devastated as armies roamed for food and lucre to support them since there was no food service with the armies. Back and forth went the borders, back and forth the rulers. Crazy, futile, destructive, expensive and cruel. Stockholm was also one of the most polluted cities in northern Europe, one of the reasons the wealthy built summer cabins on the surrounding islands –to escape. A totally fascinating visit. By the 19th century, the Swedes were tired of expeditions and settled into their existing territory, turning toward how to govern internally. Lots of ups and downs there too.
Berlin’s German History museum takes up where the Swedes left off in a sense. The middle ages were dominated by feudal fiefdoms, coming together and sparring until about 1600. Germany hosted the rise of Martin Luther and John Calvin who both, in different ways, waged war against the Pope and Catholicism, and each other. Once that was more or less settled, it seemed that the Germans decided to engage in their own expansionary European expeditions, waging war after war after war, with France, Italy, the East, Spain, and so forth. Same tales of devastation and misery. On through the second WW.
Now, what it makes me think is that war is the easy path, the one that exploits human reactivity and defensiveness. The one that can make men – especially young men – feel like there is a purpose in life (to wreck death on others). The harder path is to make peace, to create ways in which humans understand their interdependence, their commonality and to work toward wellbeing. This is the real challenge. Humans have waged war for centuries on end, we are pretty good at it. While today we won’t be using horses (surprising how many horses were used and died during WWII), we will be using increasingly destructive arms, arms that can actually annihilate ALL life on the planet – wow, what a technological accomplishment. But what we have not done is taken up the far more difficult path toward human well-being and tolerance. Where are those leaders? Those who cultivate compassion and understanding instead of fear and anger? Who build on our commonalities rather than our culturally bound differences. I think we need to grow them, they need to be trained and shaped, to be fostered and instructed. We need institutes and schools, summer camps and curricula, urgently. And part of the initiative is to connect human well-being and peace to the Earth we live upon. We can no longer wage war against other humans, nor on the planet. Those phenomena are fundamentally intertwined.
Back in Berlin, I am once again struck by the messiness of the green, the weedyness of it all. The Swedish green is tidy (well what I saw was!), and there were lovely flower plantings of red dahlias, black eyed susans, some sunflowers, different shades of green stuff. Rich and warm hues melding. In Stockholm I saw a tree maintenance crew, one guy was using hand clippers to remove the shoots from the trunk of a tree! Imagine paying for that. Maintenance of public space.
