The author Mark Lam­ster has inter­viewed me about my book and about urban his­to­ry for Design Observ­er. He liked City, describ­ing it as “a mag­nif­i­cent achieve­ment”. One of his ques­tions was: Giv­en the oppor­tu­ni­ty to live in any of his­to­ry’s great cities in their respec­tive hey­days, where would you go? Here’s part of my answer:

Berlin in the so-called Gold­en Twen­ties. It was a deeply trou­bled city that had expe­ri­enced the hyper­in­fla­tion of 1922–23, when news­pa­per press­es were used to print ban­knotes. There were reg­u­lar street bat­tles between the Nazis and the Com­mu­nists. But para­dox­i­cal­ly it was also an incred­i­bly dynam­ic city, attract­ing some of the era’s great­est artists, writ­ers, sci­en­tists and film­mak­ers. It was a con­cen­tra­tion of tal­ent that has nev­er been equaled in Europe. Albert Ein­stein went there, as did Leo Szi­lard, the sci­en­tist who first real­ized how to unleash the pow­er of the atom. Bertolt Brecht was there and the open­ing of his and Kurt Weill’s The Three­pen­ny Opera in 1928 became a night peo­ple remem­bered all their lives. The Berlin artist George Grosz used to walk the streets with a sign read­ing “Dada über Alles”. It was the city of Alfred Döblin, whose mod­ernist nov­el Berlin Alexan­der­platz (1929) is one of my favorite depic­tions of big city life. His nov­el echoes with the lost sounds and sights of Berlin: faces glimpsed amongst the crowds, snatch­es of con­ver­sa­tion, phras­es from songs and adver­tis­ing hoard­ings, news­pa­per head­lines, the rat­tle of trams in Berlin’s streets, and the squeals of dying ani­mals in Berlin’s vast new slaugh­ter­house. Berlin’s heady mix of dan­ger and cre­ativ­i­ty encap­su­lates every­thing that makes urban life so end­less­ly fas­ci­nat­ing and allur­ing.

Read the whole inter­view here.