Kiez Mentality

Kiez Kiez...like birds chirping.
Kiez is a word thrown around a lot here. It was one of my first new terms coming to Berlin and refers to a neighborhood or region connected by one community. Getting to know the Kiez means not just learning the streets geographically, but also culturally; the events and local happenings. There might be Kiez meetings, where members of the community get together to discuss Kiez issues. It can be used as an identifier, ie. ‘coming from in the Bergmann Kiez’ (in Kreutzberg). As in this case, it might be named for a popular/central street in that area (Bergmann str.). In Kreutzberg for example, you also have the Oranien(str) Kiez.
It might be mistaken to think of Berlin as a cohesive city. Something you can sense early on, is that it is very neighborhood based. Even more, areas like Wedding, or Charlottenberg, Spandau or Treptow are really their own self-sufficient little towns. Even Kreutzberg, Friedrichshain and Prenzlberg, though there is more crossover, can be very self-contained. The idea didn’t come together for me until someone pointed out that these names of present neighborhoods represent what once really were separate towns. Over time they expanded into each other and were eventually subsumed into the greater Berlin. Neukolln (the ‘junkie’ hood) was once a city, larger than Berlin. Until it was swallowed. In many ways, the ‘city’ is still just a collection of these towns, bound by name, some streets, some train tracks, separated by a preserved identity and their own Kiez mentality.
Undoubtedly there are other cities like this. NY is not this way, because it is so up-close against itself. Sure, it has areas with distinct personalities, but this is different than pseudo-towns because it was a modern, planned city as opposed to an evolution from ye olde townships. Berlin is just so verdammt big. I don’t know LA but from what I’ve heard maybe it has a similar feeling, or rather is on another extreme end: sprawling decentralization.