A Tale of Two Cities

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Perspectives on Berlin and Tokyo.

Architectural Kulturkampf

In the past couple of days the BBC website has had stories of architectural controversies in two cities,Tokyo and Berlin, both of which I have visited. The disputes highlight distinct attitudes to the urbanization that plays an ever-growing role in the lives of an ever-growing number of people.

In Tokyo, the plan is to tear down one of the few remaining historical buildings in the city – the 1920s Kabuki-za – in order to replace it with a development of greater capital intensity (Tokyo’s demolition drama), while in Berlin that plan is to raze a Stalinist-modern government building (the 1976 Palace of the Republic) and to re-build a Prussian palace that once stood on the spot (Berlin split over palace design). To put it a bit bluntly, Tokyo looks to the future for its inspiration, while Berlin looks to the past as its model.

Communist era souvenirs on sale near the Brandenberg Gate in 1992.

I was in Berlin in 1992, not long after the fall of the Berlin wall, and there was still at that time in the former countries of the Warsaw Pact the lingering feel of a recently vanished police state. In former Eastern Bloc countries, people viewed outsiders with suspicion, kept their distance, and the fear in their eyes was obvious. But West Berlin was maintained as a showcase for Western institutions in the middle of a grim and gray GDR, and the life of that great city was singular for that reason among others.

In Tokyo, city of relentless reinvention

I was in Tokyo in 2006 and experienced the crush of crowds and the rush of business and the breakneck pace and the unending neon of this uniquely Japanese metropolis. Tokyo is a city of continuous re-invention. As the BBC’s Andre Vornic put it, “Tokyo’s urban fabric famously thrives on constant renewal. But the decision to demolish one of just a few surviving historic buildings has shocked local architects.” Little or no concession is made to the past in Tokyo. Buildings rise and fall in succession, and one wonders how anyone can live in an environment in which, as is often said, change is the only constant. As I wrote in More on Republican Disarray, “…today’s change is toward change itself”, and Tokyo is certainly the city where this fact of the Zeitgeist is most thoroughly and relentlessly put into practice.

Tokyo and Berlin: Symbolic Cities

Cities like Tokyo and Berlin are symbolic for each country. One need not even pause over the symbolic significance of Berlin for the second half of the twentieth century. Both are cities with long histories, and cities that are capitals of government, industry, finance, and culture for their respective countries. What happens in Tokyo or Berlin will be noticed around the world, and establishes a precedent for other cities of similar size and influence.

Divided Berlin: A City that Symbolized the Cold War

A city is an institution, and in line with what I have in previous posts called the principle of historical viability (Today’s Thought on Civilization, More on Republican Disarray, and Challenge and Response), the institution of the city must change as the world changes or experience catastrophic failure. The deserts and jungles of the world are rich in abandoned cities that could not change at the pace that the world required. Hence they were left to the elements, to the decomposition of sun, gravity, wind, and rain, and to the probing insistence of roots under foundations and vegetation growing from roofs and walls.

Abandoned cities of the desert and the jungle...

Tokyo and Berlin have been destroyed and rebuilt time and again through their histories, and both are vibrant and living cities, filled with people who readily and proudly identify themselves with their home town. Neither is about to be abandoned any time soon. But the way in which their peoples will make peace with themselves and with their neighbors while making a life in the midst of millions of others is already diverging.

Different cities, different peoples, different paths

In Berlin, the demolition of the communist-era Palace of the Republic and the planned reconstruction of the Berliner Stadtschlos is heavy with symbolism. The battle over the buildings has been fought for years; it has been a bitter Kulturkampf conducted publicly. Even as the demolition of the Palace of the Republic is completed, the dispute will not go away. The structure of the projected reconstruction is controversial as well. And the Berliner Stadtschlos, damaged in the Second World War, had itself been symbolically demolished by the communist authorities, so we have come full circle. And this is the Western way: the dialectic is made concrete in social factions whose conflict settles the outcome but does not resolve or synthesize the factions. (The two party system of government in the US is another manifestation of this perennial Western characteristic.) In Berlin, the more things are returned to the way they were, hopefully to remain the same, the more the strife between factions changes.

Disputed buildings, either demolished or slated for demolition

In Tokyo, while there is a controversy over the planned demolition of the Kabuki-za, as reported it sounds as though most are reconciled with the fact that the building will be demolished and that little can be done to stop or to slow the Juggernaut that is modernity. Here, there is a sense of inevitability, the sort of historical inevitability that has gone out of style in the West with the passing of doctrinaire Marxism. So while Tokyo looks to the future for its concrete model, its people look to the past for the ideological superstructure that justifies and drives change and modernity. In Tokyo, the more things change, the more they remain the same.

Janus, the Roman god of doors and gateways, with one face looking to the future and another looking to the past - the dialectic in time...

Tokyo and Berlin, Japan and Germany, have taken different paths in their accommodation of change. They summarize between them the tension between tradition and innovation. Japan accommodates change by violently thrusting itself into the future. Germany accommodates change by returning to the history and traditions by which it has been defined. Tokyo thus looks forward to an infinite and open future, perhaps disconcerting for its people (certainly for visitors), while Berlin has a finite past to be reconstructed in endless iteration. The way in which each has changed is distinct from that of the other. And as urbanization is an institution that shapes the better part of the world’s population, now that we know that more people live in cities than in the countryside, these different approaches to urbanization will shape different social institutions which in turn will shape the individuals who live in these urban centers.

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Addendum:

Since the above was written I have had more to say about cities in The Rational Reconstruction of Cities.

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