Joel Kotkin ist kein Berliner

Would-be urban guru Joel Kotkin recently published a piece in the British magazine Prospect containing lots of misleading comments about our dear Berlin. My response is here, since Prospect, for whatever reason, chose not to print it.

There is no question, as Joel Kotkin argues, that mayors around the world have gone overboard in their embrace of Richard Florida’s ideas about “the creative class.” Conferences on how to make one’s city hip and cloying ad campaigns have often indeed been useless distractions from a host of important urban issues.

But Kotkin himself goes overboard in his supercillious attacks on Florida and his disciples. I have no idea whether the current mayor of Detroit is doing a good job, but I know from experience how that rustbelt city has desperately been in need of an image make-over. No doubt, fifty plus years of urban decline was not caused by a crisis in hipness, but the fact is that college educated twenty- and thirty-somethings stay away from Detroit today because of damaging myths and misguided perceptions that “there is nothing there.”

Regarding Berlin, where I am living for the year, Kotkin’s comments are totally off the mark. Mayor Klaus Wowerweit has done the right thing in bolstering Berlin’s reputation as a cultural capital and a fun place to live, even as a fiscal crisis has loomed and the industrial labor market has collapsed. Tourism may generate only $7 per hour hotel jobs in New Orleans, but in Berlin it sustains operas, theaters, museums, galleries, antiquarian booksellers, and a host of other cultural institutions. Obviously, tourism also generates good jobs. I have a feeling that Maestro Barenboim’s salary, for example, is rather above the minimum wage. Berlin’s population certainly declined since reunification, but that could be an inevitable effect of pent up demand for suburban housing after years of living in an enclosed island. There are already signs, moreover, that the population outflow has reversed.

Kotkin, like Richard Florida, has marketed himself as a consultant to American cities, including St. Louis, where I otherwise reside. Many of his ideas have been based on solid principles of urban planning. Some of them, including his own previous infatuation with the dot-com economy, were as faddish and overblown as Florida’s. This latest attack on Florida’s success as an urban guru has the unmistakable smell of sour grapes.