This week’s travel dream: Watching Berlin go green

Berlin is on its way to becoming the “most eco-hip capital on earth,” said Marc Barasch in Condé Nast Traveler. Over the past decade, Germany’s Green party set the country “on the path to a green future,” and Berlin was first on its agenda. The party’s environmental values “permeate life” in this historic city, but being green in Berlin isn’t about “doom-and-gloom” global warnings. Berliners believe that green living should be “playful as well as purposive,” that sustainability can be sexy, and that environmental consciousness and creativity go hand in hand. It is this way of thinking that is transforming Germany’s once-grim capital into a real “emerald city.”

My tour of green Berlin begins atop the Fernsehturm, the sleek, 1,200-foot television tower at the city’s center. Gazing out at the “sprawling municipality 10 times the area of Paris,” I am “struck by the azure and emerald of the Spree River and Tiergarten district.” From this vantage point, Berlin “stands revealed as a city in a forest, cut by canals, surrounded by distant, glistening lakes.” Back on the ground, I head to the city’s “most iconic building, the formerly bombed-out Reichstag.” Today, the parliament building is “Germany’s green emblem,” warmed by geothermal heat and generating its own electricity using refined canola oil. But its most impressive feature is a “modernist geyser of mirrors” that seems to be erupting inside the building’s central glass dome. Because the dome’s floor doubles as the parliament chamber’s ceiling, the mirrors also funnel in natural light and help circulate air.

The greening of Berlin can be seen everywhere, from the city’s 400 miles of bike lanes to a sunlight-powered catamaran that can be hired for a tour down the Landwehrkanal. The public-transportation system is a “marvel of green efficiency,” while electric cars are multiplying. “Grass roofs” on many buildings capture and purify rainwater, and the skyscrapers in Potsdamer Platz, the city’s new heart, have windows that actually open, thus cutting air-conditioning use. Old breweries and factories, meanwhile, have been transformed into clubs, theaters, and music venues. “Sustainability has to bring delight,” one local told me. In Berlin, it does.

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