Berlin

I live here. It's a great city. In short, I am almost 29 years old and it is a city I should definitely have moved to 5 years ago.

Part of the reason that Berlin seems so big, though nothing like as large as London, is that there is a huge imbalance of places-to-live and places-to-do-things. There are barely any homes but those stacked on top of each other, and these take up huge complex-like plots of land that go on without end. Sometimes they are interrupted by countryside-like patches of land running adjacent to hardly-used roads. Sometimes they are filled with grime and they get you down just walking through them.

These huge residential buildings are normally covered in art that can hardly be called graffiti, because it is so professionally done. They typically show photo-realistic draughtsmanship, yet retain the spirit of something grittier. Even the stickers you see slapped around with strong glue seem to be the products of studied professionals. You see the not-graffiti artists at work sometimes, spraying a long banner stretched across a wooden fence which encloses the building site of yet another massive "Haus" in construction for the many newcomers to the city.

Next to the building site's freshly sprayed, street-style mural advertising the "Baugesellschaft"; building society, is a lamppost so thickly pasted with neon posters over the years that the entire wad threatens to slump, when it would fall onto the broad pavements like a chunk of bark from a tree.

The aspect of a real capital city it lacks is the sense that one is hopelessly unimportant in the scheme of things, as one properly feels in a London. Sometimes I wonder if the city really deserves to be the capital city. It would be as if the youthful creative and start up types of London lived in an entirely different city of their own.

Imagine in London that the bankers lived mostly elsewhere in the country. And there were cities that made close rivals in every economic sense. Yet if London was still the only city in the country that was really truly ultimately cool. Yet the coolest city in a country that, even they would admit, is probably the least cool in Europe.

In some ways what is unique about Germany is that even its geography is highly specialised and efficient at what each member does. Munich builds cars, Frankfurt banks, Hamburg pedals smut and Berlin cradles the young and creative.