Berlin-London.

'Potsdamer Platz is an example of completely commercialized public space' argued Dieter Hoffmann-Axthelm at a conference held in Berlin under the auspices of the British Council last month, when architects and critics from Germany and the UK discussed the nature of urban space in the two capitals.

What Hoffmann-Axthelm Failed to point out is that Potsdamer Platz, the latest urban complex in Berlin (AR January) was always completely commercialized, and that its fame in the '20s and early '30s derived largely because it was one of the few places in the city created entirely by commerce. So it was wonderfully lively compared to the great streets and squares created under the Fredericks and Williams.

Time and again, the contrast was made between London, the world city of nineteenth century capitalism created almost entirely by market forces, and Berlin, the (up to now) remote city on the eastern edge of central Europe, largely forged by successive authoritarian governments (except in the '20s and at present). It is what Michael Monninger of the Berliner Zeitung called 'a regional capital, now imposed on the whole country' - again, for the fourth time (and all the previous ones were unlucky). 'In Germany, no one likes Berlin' asserted Monninger.

London, although still immensely more powerful globally as an economic exchange - and locally as the political centre of its country, has never really tried to make a great figure for itself (well not much, apart from Nash). Richard Burdett of the London School of Economics, rehearsed Rasmussen's famous description of the British capital as a city of villages becoming a great urban tissue by a series of pragmatic accidents of commerce. Burdett's attitude to the muddle was far less tender and affectionate than the Dane's, and it was clear that, as a self-declared Roman, he would have been pleased if London had been ruled by a Sixtus V at some point. He was rightly critical of some of the effects of lack of planning combined with modern capitalism, which results in the city becoming a series of 'uni-functional areas' rather than an organic cluster of settlements in any case, he said distainfully, 'urban village is a contradiction in terms'.

The bodily experience of democracy?

Catherine Shonfield criticized London as a place in which 'public space is interior space'. But in all cities, she argued, public space should be considered as 'all the realm ... which is not residential or workplace: public space is where public time takes place'. It offers 'the bodily experience of democracy: the social equivalent of the parents' touch'. But though her arguments were passionate and more moving than most, they did seem to suffer a bit as one strolled down Unter den Linden later perfectly urbane and full of amiable people now, but only 60 years ago the stage of a quite different and terrifying social order. Public space is not necessarily a good in itself: there must surely be nuances between the privacy of a dwelling and the public life of the piazza. And the ways in which public space affects us as individuals are affected by not only its configuration or definition, but by social, political and economic factors as well.

Stefan Schroth argued that such forces are at work behind even the most amiable-seeming public space. For instance, the arcade at Potsdamer Platz, surely the most popular enclosed urban volume in Berlin at the moment (AR January p31), is actually a private space, which can be controlled at will by its owners, who have been given huge tax incentives to encourage them to develop quickly and on a large scale. Their influence spreads wide: much of the public open area of the complex is covered with water, which Schroth suggested was a means of controlling unwanted social behaviour. He called for an approach 'in which ethics and aesthetics come together in the creation of cities'.

But how? Wolfgang Schache was convinced that 'there can be no real urban life without density, which is not a number but a value'. He suggested that in 'this century architecture and planning have attempted to replace the old structures of the city with new. The new city has totally failed. It has been a history of disaster.' The nineteenth-century model, he argued, 'has been the most solid and adaptable'. It offers 'mass, density and complexity: the criteria of urban structure'.

Yet, once again, reality was more difficult. Leaving the conference, and walking down streets like Friedrichstrasse (which have largely been rebuilt since the Wall came down - AR January) to the rules of city planner Hans Stimmann which were intended to recreate nineteenth-century urbanity, dreariness was intense. In Berlin, Potsdamer Platz still looks like the best bet for a way forward, however compromised it may be by the scale of modern development. But can there be any antidote to that?