Ruderal city : ecologies of migration, race, and urban nature in Berlin

Author(s)

    • Stoetzer, Bettina

Bibliographic Information

Ruderal city : ecologies of migration, race, and urban nature in Berlin

Bettina Stoetzer

(Experimental futures : technological lives, scientific arts, anthropological voices)

Duke University Press, 2022

  • : pbk

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Note

Includes bibliographical references and index

Description and Table of Contents

Description

In Ruderal City Bettina Stoetzer traces relationships among people, plants, and animals in contemporary Berlin as they make their lives in the ruins of European nationalism and capitalism. She develops the notion of the ruderal-originally an ecological designation for the unruly life that inhabits inhospitable environments such as rubble, roadsides, train tracks, and sidewalk cracks-to theorize Berlin as a "ruderal city." Stoetzer explores sites in and around Berlin that have figured in German national imaginaries-gardens, forests, parks, and rubble fields-to show how racial, class, and gender inequalities shape contestations over today's uses and knowledges of urban nature. Drawing on fieldwork with gardeners, botanists, migrant workers, refugees, public officials, and nature enthusiasts while charting human and more-than-human worlds, Stoetzer offers a wide-ranging ethnographic portrait of Berlin's postwar ecologies that reveals emergent futures in the margins of European cities. Brimming with stories that break down divides between environmental perspectives and the study of migration and racial politics, Berlin's ruderal worlds help us rethink the space of nature and culture and the categories through which we make sense of urban life in inhospitable times.

Table of Contents

Preface: Forest Tracks vii Acknowledgments xi Introduction 1 Rubble 1. Botanical Encounters 35 Gardens 2. Gardening the Ruins 67 Parks 3. Provisioning against Austerity 103 4. Barbecue Area 138 Forests 5. Living in the Unheimlich 173 6. Stories of the "Wild East" 205 Epilogue: Seeding Livable Futures 239 Notes 245 References 283 Index 319

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