ABSTRACT
Almost twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Berlin continues to be a city ‘in the making’. Urban boosters’ dreams after the City’s reunification, that Berlin would become a ‘global city’ rivalling London, Paris, or at least Munich or Frankfurt have not materialised. The Economist (2006) put it pointedly that Germany’s largest city and political capital ‘resembles a glitzy shopping mall with lots of smart boutiques but no anchor tenant’. Heavyweight companies that had left Berlin after 1945, such as Siemens and Deutsche Bank have, despite the building and planning frenzy of the 1990s, seen no reason to return. Instead, Berlin struggles to this day to catch up with other economic centres of the poly-central German system, and is often regarded as a third-tier or gamma city in the global urban hierarchy (Krätke 2004 and Ward 2004).
