Obviously It’s Kreuzberg

There’s a particular comedy in applying the full rigor of academic urban planning to the question of where exactly Berliners choose to annihilate themselves on a Tuesday. Jakob F. Schmid is a city planner with a statistical soft spot for nightlife economies, and as part of a research project called Stadtnachacht—"the city after eight"—he converted Berlin and other German cities into interactive maps showing where parties run hardest and where the nocturnal economy pulls in the most money.

The verdict: Mitte, Kreuzberg, Friedrichshain. Berlin, city of perpetual surprise. There’s value in having what everyone already knows confirmed by data—urban planning has to work with something—but the cartographic revelation that Berlin’s most legendary party districts are, in fact, Berlin’s most legendary party districts carries a deadpan quality that almost qualifies as performance art.