Berlin: Capital of Bohemia, or Global 'Pitstop'?

New York Times art critic Michael Kimmelman recently published a thoughtful piece comparing SoHo in its artistic heyday to contemporary Berlin. On the other hand, and not to put too fine a point on it, Kimmelman compares 1970s SoHo--one neighborhood within the Big Apple--to contemporary Berlin. So it's not surprising that he is 'struck' by 'one obvious difference' between the two scenes:

SoHo then was a genuine community, a world within the art world, nested inside the larger world of the city. Berlin, for all its glories and advantages, has become, in terms of art, a pit stop on the global caravan. For better and worse, its cultural circles are in large part made up of transients who don’t necessarily speak the language and who live on top of the city. They’re there for the cheap rents, studio space, parties and one another.

Without denying that Kimmelman has a very good point, it nevertheless seems to me that there's a real lack of precision here. Why not compare 'SoHo then' to one of Berlin's arts clusters in, say, Friedrichshain, or Mitte, or Kreuzberg--especially when the differences between Berlin's different scenes can be rather intense? So what if there isn't a 'genuine community' that unites all of Berlin's art world? It's much more likely that one would find such community at the level of the neighborhood, or Kiez.