Description
Book SynopsisIn
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
Table of ContentsPreface: 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
