Berlin, the Virtual Global City

Abstract

This article analyzes the significance of the global-city epithet as a transformational city-building image for post-Wall Berlin. The boosterist ambitions of the New Berlin’s massive rebuilding program have not brought the former Cold War outpost into the top tier of contemporary global cities; rather, the regained capital is languishing under bankruptcy and high unemployment. Nonetheless, Berlin’s legacy of extreme mutability, combined with its obsessive self-representations in architectural exhibitions and other virtual environments, provide a strategic platform that enables the city to imagine and plan its urban future toward globality. The multiple virtual-city stagings of Berlin function in a pragmatic, entrepreneurial manner, by serving as a lure for, e.g., culture and multimedia industries to relocate to Berlin. Such globally linked companies are indicative of how branding in the virtual realm can help build a new economic reality into being.

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