Exploring the City of Rubble: Botanical Fieldwork in Bombed Cities in Germany after World War II

Abstract

In recent decades, the flora and fuana of cities have become the objects of the inter-disciplinary research field of urban ecology and related policies of urban nature conservation. Although the term "urban ecology" is quite recent, it is argued in this paper that the formation of urban nature as an object of ecological knowledge has a much longer history. For example, in Germany, after World War II, the large rubble areas that existed in all bombed cities soon became important research fields for botanists studying plant migration and vegetation development in the context of the city. This paper uses the case of these botanical research activities to shed light on the historical origins of ecological thinking about nature in the city. Drawing upon a socio-spatial approach to science and practice, the paper explores the interaction between the social and material order of the city and the formation of ecological knowledge. As will be shown, botanists studying the rubble areas created various representations (e.g., lists, statistical tabulations, maps) of urban space that contributed to the transformation of the cultural and political meaning of urban wastelands. At the same time, it will be argued, urban wastelands were practically appropriated as scientific workplaces in which these representations were locally crafted. What later became the science and politics of urban ecology is to a large extent the outcome of this mutual shaping of knowledge and urban space in the post-Second World War period.

Marginalia: Aesthetics, Ecology, and Urban Wastelands

“…He carried out a series of meticulous studies of the flora of urban wastelands during the 1930s and 1940s that were formative for a later generation of botanists, including Herbert Sukopp, who led the study of the island city of West Berlin from the 1960s onward and remains the most influential figure in the field. The studies by Sukopp and his colleagues, based at the newly created Institute of Ecology at the Technical University in Berlin, produced some of the most detailed surveys of urban flora that have ever been produced (see Sukopp 1990;Lachmund 2013). Not only did these studies rework existing phytogeographic approaches to botanical research, as elaborated by Josias Braun-Blanquet and others, but they also provided a welter of socioecological insights into the changing structure of urban space over time (Figure 1).…”

“…In Sebald's hands, the term natural history invokes powerful connections between materiality, the production of meaning, and the limits to representation: precisely those elements that have yet to emerge within the field of urban ecology itself. Studies of the natural regeneration of damaged sites in cities such as Berlin, Bremen, and Kiel, and the emergence of new ecological patterns and assemblages, also began to reshape aspects of ecological science and the scientific classification of different vegetation types (Lachmund 2003). The idea of the cultural landscape, as a recognizable and regionally specific aesthetic unity, was irrevocably altered with both methodological and ideological implications for the study of nature and landscape.…”

Queer Ecology: Nature, Sexuality, and Heterotopic Alliances

“…In Berlin, for example, the clearance of vegetation from the Lützowplatz in 1978 provoked protests from both ecologists and sex workers. In this instance a site of signifi cance for botanical fi eldwork became entwined in a larger set of arguments about the rights to urban space and also marked the growing politicization of urban ecology as a discipline oriented towards the protection of marginal landscapes within the city (Lachmund, 2003). Urban nature reserves in London and elsewhere have often become signifi cant sites for cruising and sexual encounters between strangers yet this mutual use of space has not evolved into any kind of sustained political dialogue.…”

Wilderness: The Nature of Urban Shrinkage? The Debate on Urban Restructuring and Restoration in Eastern Germany

“…However, it was only from the environmental debates of the 1970s and 1980s, and the establishment of urban ecology as a discipline in its own right that work on this type of urban nature was carried out independently. Through the use of urban habitat mapping, systematic recording of urban nature has been carried out since the 1980s in (western) Germany (Lachmund 2004), whereby industrial areas and wastelands were often not included in the surveys because they were seen as "negative habitats" (Keil 2002: 20). The mapping showed that cities-in comparison with other types of landscapes-usually show a high biological diversity.…”