Stuttgart

One of the things I immediately noticed about Stuttgart the second we left the train station and walked through the city center was the racial and ethnic makeup. It was infinitely more diverse than I had imagined in my head. It was a bustling international hub for people of all different backgrounds. Because I had not done previous research on Stuttgart so that I would not have any expectations once I got there, I was extremely surprised by the social and architectural makeup of the space. I did not expect such an urban or commercial setting. I was incredibly surprised when we went on our tour of Stuttgart and just around the corner was an incredible castle and gardens as well as a government building. It was a stark contrast to the urban spaces in the United States where each space has a single use. The business district, or the shopping district etc; this was my first exposure to such mixed use space and I loved it immediately that you could have *in theory* everything you would need to survive within walking distance. Thorsten’s thoughts on the 15 minute city stuck with me. Being from southern California, I could never and will never be able to have everything I need within a 15 minute walk. This confirmed my suspicions that the perfect city is definitely not one in the US. Throughout our time in Stuttgart, the idea of racial congregating stayed on my mind. On one of the nights we decided to go out, we went to a club called Schraglage. I was dumbfounded to see that the only white people were the people in our class. I couldn’t believe that a space in Germany had so many people of color. I loved it. This really reminded me of the idea of conglomerate economies that we studied in Urban Economics. Putting similar businesses next to each other attracts more customers than if they would be in separate spaces. Although poc are not competing businesses, their presence attracts more poc people which will they attract even more, generating more profit (or just overall benefit in this case). This had me thinking a lot about the dynamics of economics, social interaction, culture and how for better or for worse, people will gravitate towards spaces and people that have similar identities to them.