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rfmcdonaldAs I headed east on the Gerrard streetcar Saturday evening to join ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
bonoboboy and vorpal in their great weekend moving adventure, I couldn't help but recognize the sad reality that Toronto is an ugly city. Even natives agree with me on this, I'm told: The architecture of all but a few buildings of note is purely utilitarian, city planning is a joke, and the sprawling Simcityesque suburbs' expansion has been checked only by the new greenbelt. Without a Haussmann appearing sometime in its future, Toronto is doomed to remain Toronto. It's for this reason that I suspect that Toronto's desire to join the first tier of world cities, alongside such metropoli of global note as New York and London will remain unfulfilled. There just isn't enough attractive infrastructure, or quite enough people, or sufficient mitigating factors, to make the claims of Toronto's boosters stick.
Toronto's still a major city, though, bigger than many other metropolises of note. Did you know that more people live in the Greater Toronto Area than in Berlin? Berlin's population hasn't even doubled since 1900, while Toronto's has grown by a factor of 20. Then again, Toronto now does remind me of the Berlin of the Wilhelmine Empire and especially of Weimar. I point you, again, to Wolfgang Schivelbusch's The Culture of Defeat: On National Trauma, Mourning, and Recovery.
In the Second Empire, Berlin boomed, became a cosmopolitan centre attracting migrants from around Europe (Germans from the provinces, Poles and Jews and Czechs from the east, Swedes from the north), became an industrial centre of note, evolved into a leading European nucleus for technological research, attracted all sorts of cultural and political radicals, game to be a world-historical force in its own right. In Weimar, vertiginous modernity took on a darker tone, true, but then there were also the movies and the sexual liberation and the cabarets and the motorcars crowding Potsdamer Platz. Berlin's history was accelerated by industrialism as Toronto's was accelerated by post-industrialism. Berlin in its time and Toronto in ours were called, with mixed envy and disdain, the most "Americanized" of their nation's cities, the most open to foreign influences, the most innovative.
Berlin's rise was aborted, of course, wrecked by the Red Army and Cold War partition. As Gary Wolf wrote in his June 1998 article for Wired, "Venture Kapital", reunified Berlin may have forever missed out on its opportunity for world-city status.
This sad fate didn't have much to do with Berliners' own wishes, not with their own famous inclinations towards the sorts of radicalism and internationalism. Rather, Berlin's decline out of the first tier had most to do with the envies and fears of the country that it ruled. The situations in Toronto and Canada are rather different--Toronto has fully a sixth of Canada's population where 1930s Berlin had barely a twelfth, Canada's not likely to suffer anything like the Peace of Versailles, Germany was unlucky--and so it might well be useful to warn Torontonians about Berlin's precedents. Even so, Berlin lost its position at the forefront of industrial modernity, somehow. May Toronto never even risk losing its particular contemporary charms.
bonoboboy and vorpal in their great weekend moving adventure, I couldn't help but recognize the sad reality that Toronto is an ugly city. Even natives agree with me on this, I'm told: The architecture of all but a few buildings of note is purely utilitarian, city planning is a joke, and the sprawling Simcityesque suburbs' expansion has been checked only by the new greenbelt. Without a Haussmann appearing sometime in its future, Toronto is doomed to remain Toronto. It's for this reason that I suspect that Toronto's desire to join the first tier of world cities, alongside such metropoli of global note as New York and London will remain unfulfilled. There just isn't enough attractive infrastructure, or quite enough people, or sufficient mitigating factors, to make the claims of Toronto's boosters stick.Toronto's still a major city, though, bigger than many other metropolises of note. Did you know that more people live in the Greater Toronto Area than in Berlin? Berlin's population hasn't even doubled since 1900, while Toronto's has grown by a factor of 20. Then again, Toronto now does remind me of the Berlin of the Wilhelmine Empire and especially of Weimar. I point you, again, to Wolfgang Schivelbusch's The Culture of Defeat: On National Trauma, Mourning, and Recovery.
Before 1871, no one would have thought of comparing the Prussian royal residence and garrison site to cities like London or Paris. With the founding of the empire, however, the new capital suddenly found itself in the same company as those European metropolises. Moreover, the decision in 1890 to transform Germany into a world power gave the question of Berlin's status a new urgency, since a global power was unimaginable without a metropolis. Nevertheless, Berlin, as even Wilhelm II remarked in 1896 in connection with plans for a World's Fair there, simply could not compare with London or Paris in historical importance, cosmopolitanism, population, or grandeur. The only option for Germans was therefore to redefine "world city" so that their capital would fit the bill.
[. . .] A new understanding of the world city evolved whose dimensions and scope were no longer those of London and Paris but of New York and Chicago. Underlying this shift was the conviction that, while the classical European capitals were no doubt grand historical monuments, they were as useless in the modern global economy as gigantic open-air museums. Long before Le Corbusier, who spent the prewar years as an architect in Berlin and coined the phrase living machine, Berlin architects, city planners, and transportation managers developed the idea of the world city as a functional construct of the global economy. World cities were those into which the international traffic in goods and money flowed, and the younger and more dynamic they were the more "worldly" they could be considered (276).
In the Second Empire, Berlin boomed, became a cosmopolitan centre attracting migrants from around Europe (Germans from the provinces, Poles and Jews and Czechs from the east, Swedes from the north), became an industrial centre of note, evolved into a leading European nucleus for technological research, attracted all sorts of cultural and political radicals, game to be a world-historical force in its own right. In Weimar, vertiginous modernity took on a darker tone, true, but then there were also the movies and the sexual liberation and the cabarets and the motorcars crowding Potsdamer Platz. Berlin's history was accelerated by industrialism as Toronto's was accelerated by post-industrialism. Berlin in its time and Toronto in ours were called, with mixed envy and disdain, the most "Americanized" of their nation's cities, the most open to foreign influences, the most innovative.
Berlin's rise was aborted, of course, wrecked by the Red Army and Cold War partition. As Gary Wolf wrote in his June 1998 article for Wired, "Venture Kapital", reunified Berlin may have forever missed out on its opportunity for world-city status.
One of the most obvious reasons that Friedrichstrasse remains empty is that Berlin remains poor. Despite the early commitments from Sony and Daimler-Benz, it hasn't proven strictly necessary to establish an office in Berlin in order to do business in Eastern Europe. The slowly developing economies of the former communist countries are forming their own direct ties to the power centers of the West. The main airport hubs for heading east are Frankfurt and Vienna, not Berlin.
While the government is still scheduled to move by the turn of the century, the German Institute for Economic Research has revised its population prediction, and now expects the Berlin population to shrink slightly between now and 2015. Many of the government employees are expected to settle in the suburbs. Unemployment in the city hovers between 17 and 18 percent. Meanwhile, the takeover of formerly East German industries by private firms from the West has rendered much of the East Berlin population unemployable. Heinrich Mäding, an economist from the Deutsches Institut für Urbanistik (a research group funded by a collection of German cities and towns), admits frankly that many of the people from East Berlin who were over 50 years old when unification came have no future of any kind in the labor market. Reduced to continuously demanding financial assistance from a grudging federal government, the city itself is virtually bankrupt.
This sad fate didn't have much to do with Berliners' own wishes, not with their own famous inclinations towards the sorts of radicalism and internationalism. Rather, Berlin's decline out of the first tier had most to do with the envies and fears of the country that it ruled. The situations in Toronto and Canada are rather different--Toronto has fully a sixth of Canada's population where 1930s Berlin had barely a twelfth, Canada's not likely to suffer anything like the Peace of Versailles, Germany was unlucky--and so it might well be useful to warn Torontonians about Berlin's precedents. Even so, Berlin lost its position at the forefront of industrial modernity, somehow. May Toronto never even risk losing its particular contemporary charms.
