In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

5 Places in the Making: From Wastelands to Urban Nature Parks The Species Protection Program provided a blueprint for the reorganization of Berlin’s urban space on the basis of ecological knowledge. It was through more specific site-focused projects, however, that the goals of the program actually became implemented. In this chapter I will use the example of urban wastelands or ruderal areas, as ecologists also called them, to zoom in on the dynamics through which the biotope-protection regime materialized in the cultural and material order of urban space. More then any other of the biotope types that ecologists had distinguished in their surveys, wastelands became the focus of long-lasting and socially extended campaigns for preservation. As I will show, the campaigns for wasteland protection crystallized around a complex set of meanings of these places—or “place images,” as I call them here. (See also Shields 1991.) I will trace how promoters of wasteland protection constructed these place images, how they mobilized them to undermine dominant policy schemes, and how they translated them into alternative projects of building “nature parks.” Activists and other political stakeholders in urban nature conservation , however, appropriated ecological schemes of meaning selectively and aligned them with others that were equally important for their political practice. What in the end became institutionalized as a nature park was a social and material result of these practices and the place images they articulated. After giving a short overview of the development plans against which the nature-park idea was articulated, I will show that these plans relied on a very negative framing of the wastelands. I will then show how critics of the development assembled an alternative place image, one that aligned ecological representations (species numbers, biotope type category) with images of wilderness, historical memory practices, and new modes of visual and physical apprehension. These images, however, did not remain stable throughout the trajectory of the political process that led to the designation 162 Chapter 5 of nature parks. They became accommodated with further concerns, which resulted in different interpretations of the concepts of wastelands and nature parks. At the same time, tensions that existed within the original concept of the nature park led to different interpretations of the park, giving special emphasis either to recreation issues, to garden aesthetics, or to the site’s significance for species protection. In the case of the park at the Gleisdreieck, this led to complete abandonment of the idea of a nature park that originally had motivated the project. The Quest for Redevelopment: Urban Planning in the 1980s It was only because of their marginal locations that vast areas of the former city center had remained undeveloped for such a long time. Whereas other parts of West Berlin had been widely built up in the 1950s and the 1960s, and a new city had evolved in Charlottenburg, the broad zone running along the wall remained largely untouched. In the east and the south of the Tiergarten park, huge vacant areas had been left by demolition done under the National Socialist government (as a preparation for the creation of a gigantic new center) and by the bombing raids during the war. The railway tracks that traversed the former center, including the Anhalt passenger station and Anhalt freight station, had been severely damaged during the war but were used to some extent by the East Germany company that operated the railway network of the entire city. Further east along the wall was the Friedrichstadt (as the northern part of Kreuzberg was called), a working-class neighborhood south of the former city that had been severely damaged during the war. Until the late 1970s, reconstruction of these areas proceeded in a rather limited and piecemeal manner. Since the 1960s, chunks of the Tiergarten, the adjacent wastelands, and the partly abandoned railway tracks that connected the center with the south had been earmarked for the so-called Westtangente, a newly envisaged element of Berlin’s inner-city highway system.1 Although the Senate renounced them in 1981,2 road construction plans for the area reappeared on the agenda of the newly elected Christian Democratic Senate (Der Tagesspiegel 1982). After the signing of the Grundlagenvertrag (foundation agreement) in 1972, a more cooperative relationship emerged between the GDR and the FDR; this helped the Senate to launch development projects on the various no-man’s-lands that existed between the two parts of the city. Since 1972 the Senate had been in (secret) negotiations with...

Share