Berlin

This weekend I’m German. I accepted an invitation from the Center for Metropolitan Studies and am spending four days in Berlin. On Friday I presented my paper “Cities, Games & Media,” which’ll be available online shortly.

[meanwhile I've arrived back in NYC, suffering from a jetleg within a jetlag]

What better place to talk about video game interpretations of urban environments than a city that seems to have a building for every phase in its development over the last 750+ years? While my NYC suffers from an ongoing shortage in space, Berlin, according to one of the presenters, has more space than it knows what to do with. Even if they’d develop all the remaining space into residential areas, there wouldn’t be enough people to collect enough taxes to pay for its infrastructure. So, subsequently, there’s a lot of interpretative space available.

In addition to the conference, I made sure to see as much as I could. And so I walked all over town on Sunday. First in an organized tour led by a an urban historian appropriately named Florian Urban, and following in the company of Laura Frahm, who showed me the best place to get crepes in Berlin.