Stop me when this starts to sound familiar.
An enormous garden, in the middle of the city, growing nothing but sustainable food, under possible zoning conflict, cared for cooperatively by members of the local community with an overpriced, limited seating, pop-up restaurant once a week. Something you've heard before? Were it not for the silly accents I would be absolutely convinced that I'd woken up from a Euro-themed acid trip back in good old San Francisco. I'm also drinking a delicious beer and talking about gentrification, which certainly isn't helping.
Yes, I am dining in the Prinzessinnengarten, a "mobile" urban garden on the corner of Prinzenstraße and Moritzplatz. What exactly makes it mobile? Well, as you can sort of tell from my shitty iPhone pictures, the whole garden is planted not in the ground but in burlap sacks and milk crates. From the about page I guess this all figures into some kind of urban farming experiment, though I've heard from reliable sources that it has more to do with the farm's somewhat unclear future. As in the city could at any moment say, "Well hey, that was fun, huh? Okay, time for you sleeveless longhaired troublemakers to get the fuck out." Obviously, as I finish the rest of my delicious beer and promptly order another in the shade of a flowering pear tree, the last thing I want is to see the farm close, but at the same time it would be highly entertaining to see an army of volunteer farmers carrying an entire city block's worth of produce to... where exactly?
Wait a second, is that the Fuckparade I hear in the distance? It can't be.
I got to hand it to the Berliners, man, they really know how to take it easy. The whole city is filled with this energy--it's hard to put it into words exactly but the best way I can think to describe it is an overwhelming sense of fine-ness. As in "I'd like to open a community garden in this vacant lot." Fine, go for it. "My fellow homeless artists and I are going to squat in this abandoned apartment building and paint murals on all the walls." Okay, fine, you totally should. "This giant public structure? I'm going to climb to the top of it and plant a slightly suggestive flag." Sure, that seems fine. It's not the kind of place where things have to be registered and regimented and filled out in triplicate before they get done. First something happens, and then maybe later someone comes along and funds it. Or at least doesn't shut it down.
This probably goes a long way towards explaining the claims that Berlin is the new Paris or San Francisco--the place where do-ers from any field, be it art or business or technology, can come to find the resources they need to get things done. It all boils down to the fact that the city hasn't peaked yet. It's still a gray blob of protean city-mass; like a bowl of wheat grass soup it's not much to look at but it's got all the building blocks of something great. Contrast this with Paris, where just to find affordable housing you have to move out to the middle of nowhere, like Montreuil. Berlin has cheap-as-fingernails housing and light industrial space right in the heart of the city. You say you've got a couple hundred a month lying around? Get ready to host your own fur-fetish roller disco parties until six in the morning, every morning; I'm willing to bet you'll probably get a tax deduction on your floor wax.
Am I pushing hard enough yet? COME TO BERLIN! BUY NOW! PRICES LOW!
An enormous garden, in the middle of the city, growing nothing but sustainable food, under possible zoning conflict, cared for cooperatively by members of the local community with an overpriced, limited seating, pop-up restaurant once a week. Something you've heard before? Were it not for the silly accents I would be absolutely convinced that I'd woken up from a Euro-themed acid trip back in good old San Francisco. I'm also drinking a delicious beer and talking about gentrification, which certainly isn't helping.
Yes, I am dining in the Prinzessinnengarten, a "mobile" urban garden on the corner of Prinzenstraße and Moritzplatz. What exactly makes it mobile? Well, as you can sort of tell from my shitty iPhone pictures, the whole garden is planted not in the ground but in burlap sacks and milk crates. From the about page I guess this all figures into some kind of urban farming experiment, though I've heard from reliable sources that it has more to do with the farm's somewhat unclear future. As in the city could at any moment say, "Well hey, that was fun, huh? Okay, time for you sleeveless longhaired troublemakers to get the fuck out." Obviously, as I finish the rest of my delicious beer and promptly order another in the shade of a flowering pear tree, the last thing I want is to see the farm close, but at the same time it would be highly entertaining to see an army of volunteer farmers carrying an entire city block's worth of produce to... where exactly?
Wait a second, is that the Fuckparade I hear in the distance? It can't be.
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| Box wine, meet box corn |
This probably goes a long way towards explaining the claims that Berlin is the new Paris or San Francisco--the place where do-ers from any field, be it art or business or technology, can come to find the resources they need to get things done. It all boils down to the fact that the city hasn't peaked yet. It's still a gray blob of protean city-mass; like a bowl of wheat grass soup it's not much to look at but it's got all the building blocks of something great. Contrast this with Paris, where just to find affordable housing you have to move out to the middle of nowhere, like Montreuil. Berlin has cheap-as-fingernails housing and light industrial space right in the heart of the city. You say you've got a couple hundred a month lying around? Get ready to host your own fur-fetish roller disco parties until six in the morning, every morning; I'm willing to bet you'll probably get a tax deduction on your floor wax.
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| This picture didn't come out very well. |
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