In 1990 I moved to East Berlin. I’d rented a room around the corner, as I now know, from the research physicist Angela Merkel. The flat had no phone, so to make calls I had to walk 10 minutes to a phone booth in West Berlin. Later, I got a flat in the west with a shared toilet on the communal staircase and no shower. I soon learnt the codes of Berlin student conversation: “Where do you live? Do you have a shower? Maybe I could come round and shower at yours one day?”
Very little survives of that Berlin. Today it’s a swish metropolitan area of five million inhabitants, almost all of whom have in-house toilets. More people arrive every day to start tech companies or the vegetarian restaurants that service them. Berlin exemplifies the transformation of the rich world’s big cities this past quarter century. But that era may now be ending. London, New York and Tokyo have become not just overcrowded and overpriced, but also overstimulating. The star of the next 25 years could be the smaller city.
I’ll be careful here, because people have been announcing the demise of the megacity for a while now. It hasn’t happened yet. For each person who left London aged 32 whining that the place had become unliveable, there were always approximately 1.1 newcomers bidding for the vacant bedroom.