Berlin is a very different city to Paris. The city streets lack the intimacy of Paris and the vast boulevards have a cold and empty processional quality to them. Away from the boulevards the residential streets reveal busy clusters of urban activity with people enjoying the well established Berlin café culture.

The city is a sprawling mix of architecture that reflects its unique political history. The residential buildings are generally either stark communist housing developments or early twentieth century apartments many of which are undergoing gentrification.

Berlin is a strange city of doubles. The political and physical division of the city during the Cold War has led to a peculiar doubling of civic and cultural centres.

There appears to be an effort to create a unified urban landscape in Berlin. One of the urban design strategies used to unfortunate effect is the idea of the tabula rasa whereby urban sites are cleared to make way for new developments. This utopian idea appears to be favoured in order to conceive urban spaces free of compromise but more often than not the strategy has produced unimaginative urban spaces that deny the unique physical history of the city.