On my first weekend in Berlin, I hopped on the Ringbahn----Berlin's circular rail line----and rode it for a while around the circumference of the city, staring out the window to the city slide by, listening to the clamor of unfamiliar voices. The whole way around, I could see the TV tower anchored at the center of my journey like the peg at the middle of a clock where the hands connect. Like a sun pulling the trains into orbit.
It has become a habit of mine to instinctively scan the horizon whenever I am wandering around the city to see if I can spot the TV tower rising like blueberry speared on a toothpick into the Berlin sky. Oftentimes I find it, and even if I have no clue where I am on a map, once I see the TV tower I know exactly where the center of the city is: I can tell how distant I've wandered into the peripheral regions of Berlin. (The series of paintings above shows the TV tower at four different times throughout the day, from different points in the city.)
A climb up the Berliner Dom or the Reichstag building reveals the characteristic that makes this orientation possible: Berlin, like many European cities, is a low city. Neither the Cathedral nor the Reichstag building are particularly tall structures: the Dom is 98 meters high and the Reichstag is 47 meters. But from the observation platforms of both of these structures, you can see pretty much everything, all the way to the dark mass of the Tiergarten, Berlin's largest park. Certain features stand out once you're familiar with Berlin's more significant structures: the Siegessäule ( 67 meters tall) poking out from the Tiergarten, the small colony of Hochhäuser at Potsdamer Platz with the jewel-like surface of the Deutsche Bahn tower (103 meters) catching the light, the twin spires of the church at the Nikolai Viertel, and of course, the Fernsehturm, Berlin's highest structure at 368 meters.
Whoever is marketing Berlin would have you think that the Brandenburg gate (standing at a measly 26 meters) is Berlin's most significant monument----its image is plastered on the windows of the U-Bahn trains and is used in the official logo for the "Visit Berlin" Instagram page, etc. But visually and practically, nothing is a more obvious visual symbol than the Fernsehturm.
So anyway, what are the benefits of living in a low city, besides being able to see your local Soviet-futurist symbol of Communism from almost anywhere you go? What a "low city" really means is that much of a city is built at a "human scale," or a scale that is designed specifically with the response of human users in mind. Designing at the human scale might entail designing in a way that promotes efficient use, but it can also mean design that priorities the psychological effects on people.
Several of the friends and family members who have visited me in Berlin have noted while walking around Schöneberg or Mitte that Berlin really doesn't feel like a "city" when you're at its heart---it feels more like a vibrant, charming town.
Certainly, the Manhattan-like concrete-jungle urban landscape trope has a certain appeal----a forest of skyscrapers communicates grandeur, power, weight. But there is also something to be said for the charm of an urban area where one could imagine getting to the top of any building by taking the stairs. You can see the sky, for one thing. And it's true----everything feels like it was made for you. Landmarks are allowed to truly be landmarks; serving to mark a particular point in urban space rather than getting lost in the jumble of skyscrapers. Scanning Berlin's landscape is like taking a quick overview of the city's history: you can see its church steeples and the dome of its synagogue, its monuments to the victories of Prussian kings, its high-rise clusters where large-scale international development entered in the 1990s. You can see the necks of cranes emerging from the sea of buildings, signaling the filling of a void or a hotspot of advanced gentrification. And don't forget the Fernsehturm, broadcasting Berlin's former status as a divided and contested city.
Part of the reason this is possible is that the streets are designed at the human scale, too. Although there are cars in Berlin, some of the streets are reserved for pedestrians only. Roads that are built for cars are not built at the human scale, they are built at the car-scale. But roads that were planned 300 years before the car was even invented become unique public spaces where innumerable encounters occur every moment. They are designed to be seen from street-level, from people-height, at walking speed. American cities like Boston often lack these multi-use public spaces, because they were planned for the automobile. After all, designing a building that is meant to be seen from a highway interchange at 50 miles an hour is a very different process than designing a building that is meant to be seen while eating brunch at the café across the street.
These features of human-scale planning are everywhere in Berlin, and help make the city more navigable, more understandable, and more walkable.
As Jane Jacobs wrote, “There is no logic that can be superimposed on the city; people make it, and it is to them, not buildings, that we must fit our plans.”
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