Poor, sexy Berlin: the failure of urban planning.

• Author: Copeland, Dave

ON AN ENGLISH-language walking tour of Berlin--before the Irish tour guide can deliver his own rant against the misguided urban planning at Potsdamer Platz--a Vietnamese woman points to a triangular skyscraper across the square that was supposed to be the central focal point of "new" Berlin.

"That building? The way the corner points directly at the square?" the woman says. "That's bad feng shui."

That pleases the tour guide, who goes on to describe the square as a failed attempt to convert a bombed-out wasteland, left untouched throughout the Cold War, into an artificial center of commerce. But the visitor's statement probably wouldn't sit well with the Berlin city planners whose heavily subsidized efforts to make the city the economic capital of the European Union have faltered.

Immediately after the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, there were glimmers of hope in the form of private investment. Broadcast companies set up bureaus in the newly reunited city, and Western businesses looked for space to tap into the formerly closed-off markets of Eastern Europe. Overzealous government officials took a page from the American urban planning playbook, forging "public-private partnerships" to offer subsidies to seemingly anyone who wanted to build an office tower or a luxury apartment building. The large sums of government money, scantily supplemented by private funds, fueled a building boom that lasted through much of the 1990s. Even today, the Berlin skyline is littered with construction cranes, and signs in both English and German offer dirt-cheap rates on never-been-used apartment and office buildings.

But even as the building boom refuses to die, owners of some new apartment buildings contemplate tearing them down. The cost of maintaining and securing the unlived-in structures is becoming too much. The broadcast companies, which had planned to invest in Berlin in two waves, never sent the second influx of jobs and are scaling back the work force they did send.

"You just can't merge the East and West German economies like that and expect success," says Pieter Judson, a historian at Swarthmore College who has studied the social costs of reunification and postwar reconstruction. "It's being built up as a symbol. They want to attract new business and industries, but it's going to take years to happen, and in the meantime the government is just pouring more and more money into these projects."

The symbolic center of Berlin's excess is Potsdamer Platz...