Jens Lachmund. Greening Berlin: The Co-Production of Science, Politics, and Urban Nature. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2012. Illustrations. 336 pp. $42.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-262-01859-3; $28.95 (e-book), ISBN 978-0-262-31241-7.

Reviewed by Kristin Poling (University of Rochester)
Published on H-German (October, 2014)
Commissioned by Chad Ross

How Ecologists Found Nature in the City

Jens Lachmund's study of urban nature in twentieth-century Berlin begins with a discussion of the opening of the Südgelände Nature Park in March 2000. Located on the site of an abandoned rail yard, the Südgelände does not look like a traditional city park. It is densely overgrown and crisscrossed by walkways constructed of rusty metal—evoking the site's industrial past—that keep visitors from disturbing the vegetation. For most of the long history of urban green space planning, the plants that flourish here as a result of the site's long dereliction would have been considered weeds, more an eyesore than a worthy target of protection. In Greening Berlin, Lachmund sets out to explain how and why the Südgelände Park came to exist as it did. How did an overgrown rail yard become a celebrated natural landscape?

For Lachmund, answering this question requires an examination of not just urban green space planning, but also scientific practice in the unique environment of the West Berlin exclave. He argues that fieldwork conducted by ecologists in the 1950s through the 1970s played a central role in shaping Berlin's path—breaking policies of "biotope protection." Cut off from the hinterland, ecologists in West Berlin turned their attention from pastoral landscapes to urban spaces by force of circumstance. They found that the war-scarred city's many abandoned lots made for particularly interesting ecological study, since they fostered the flourishing of diverse species not usually found in the built landscape. Berliners were in turn more likely to see the ecological value of these ruderal (meaning rubble or wasteland) landscapes both because their unlikely beauty seemed to reflect something of West Berlin's thriving counterculture and because the city's slow economic development meant that there was little competition for the use of abandoned land. 

Lachmund convincingly demonstrates that specific fieldwork practices encouraged ecologists to find nature in the city, rather than seeing the built environment in opposition to the natural landscape. At first, the practice of "species spotting" emphasized individual plants and animals, not particular sites set aside for conservation, and so allowed ecologists to see nature everywhere. The compilation of species inventories also helped emphasize diversity of species as a goal of conservation. This in turn made urban wasteland environments seem more valuable, since abandoned lots tended to have a large variety of species. Some of the book's liveliest details come from Lachmund's descriptions of intrepid ecologists conducting fieldwork in the city. Poking about in abandoned lots, taken for exterminators and scrap metal harvesters, they contended with dog walkers, playing children, and prostitutes who each found their own uses for the open spaces and diverse vegetation of urban wastelands.

With the rise of West German environmentalism in the 1970s and 1980s, Berlin's urban nature moved from the sole purview of a small group of experts to become an issue of broad civic concern. Examining the drafting and implementation of the Species Protection Program (enacted in 1988, following the 1978 Nature Conservation Act), Lachmund outlines how a new understanding of the city as an ecological phenomenon, as supported by ecologists' fieldwork practices, shaped conservation policy goals in Berlin. For example, neophyte species were included in a 1991 "Red List" of endangered species that was one of the products of the 1978 act (p. 102). A more traditional conservationist approach would have categorized neophyte species as intruders, evidence of human corruption of the environment that threatened indigenous flora. By including neophyte species for conservation, the experts who compiled the 1991 list affirmed the value of urban environments as part of nature.

The goals of the Species Protection Program were also realized through the protection of wasteland landscapes, principally the Südgelände site mentioned above and the Johannisthal Airport. Lachmund argues that the planning of these sites created a new model for urban green space, the "urban nature park," that combined the goals of conserving urban wasteland biotopes with recreational possibilities for nearby residents that referenced the sites' urban industrial histories (p. 191). The boundary between what counted as desirable nature and what counted as "degradation" remained unstable in these parks. So, for example, the continued transformation of the Südgelände plot into dense wood in the 1990s was viewed not as a natural greening process, but as a "serious form of deterioration" since "many of the rare species that populated the site depended upon the existence of meadows and were now threatened" (p. 188). Instead of celebrating these plots as evolving urban ecosystems, the nature park place image effectively established as its reference point the abandoned landscapes of Cold War Berlin between the 1950s and 1970s, when most of the fieldwork Lachmund describes had been conducted. One must look to the broader social, political, and cultural resonances of abandoned and neglected spaces in Berlin—the Berlin of the squatter movement and counterculture—to understand why a particular kind of urban wasteland might have seemed worthy of protection. This insight makes Lachmund's book an interesting contribution to the growing body of literature on the ways in which our understanding of nature is always culturally and socially inflected.

Lachmund situates the rise of this new kind of urban green space within the earlier history of nature conservation and urban green space planning in Germany with an opening chapter that sketches the dominant "nature regimes" going back to the late nineteenth century. He argues that the "urban biotope regime" that emerged in Berlin in the second half of the twentieth century "both drew upon and went beyond" these older traditions (p. 20). It drew upon them by blending the goal of conservation with that of taming and designing urban green space for the recreational benefit of residents, and went beyond them by defining green space as part of the city, rather than simply as compensation for its ills. Lachmund's final chapter examines the evolution of policies since German reunification, as the focus has shifted from conservation in urban nature parks to compensation for the environmental impacts of ambitious, and lucrative, urban development plans. This closing chapter leaves open the question of whether or not the urban biotope regime Lachmund describes simply represented a particular moment in Berlin's history that has now passed, linked to the peculiar conditions of the city's division, or whether it might form the basis for future policy. His case for Berlin's broader significance would have been strengthened by some further discussion of the relationship between Berlin's conservation projects and broader movements in postindustrial urban green space planning.

By weaving a careful examination of the practices and institutional frameworks for the study of urban nature in Berlin together with their wider social and political contexts, Greening Berlin makes a singular and helpful contribution to our understanding of the place of nature in Berlin since 1949. It draws on a wide range of sources, including scientific literature, the field notebooks of key ecologists, press coverage, city archives, and a few oral interviews. Lachmund's own field is science and technology studies, and his book is primarily concerned with the ways in which scientific expertise is translated into public policy. Although his details of the negotiations between scientists, policymakers, and broader publics are nuanced and complex, Lachmund's focus on the production of knowledge about urban nature with so little description of the landscapes themselves might limit the broader appeal of this study. His accounts of ecological surveys of the flora and fauna of Berlin wastelands, for example, rarely specify any of the species in question. That omission, while understandable given the book's admirable focus and brevity, does make it more difficult to imagine these wasteland spaces as part of the urban landscape, beyond the smattering of included black-and-white photographs. This might be disappointing to the reader who approaches this book with a primary interest in Berlin or the history of the urban landscape, rather than the history of ecology or the social study of science. Nonetheless, this book deserves to find an audience in urban and environmental studies, as well as among historians of Berlin and the German relationship to nature.

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Citation: Kristin Poling. Review of Lachmund, Jens, Greening Berlin: The Co-Production of Science, Politics, and Urban Nature. H-German, H-Net Reviews. October, 2014.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=40908

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