Ruderal City: Ecologies of Migration, Race, and Urban Nature in Berlin by Bettina Stoetzer (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Ruderal City: Ecologies of Migration, Race, and Urban Nature in Berlin by Bettina Stoetzer Thomas Sullivan Ruderal City: Ecologies of Migration, Race, and Urban Nature in Berlin. By Bettina Stoetzer. Durham: Duke University Press, 2022. Pp. xvii + 328. Paper $28.95. ISBN 9781478018605. Ruins, voids, and overgrown spaces have long been a distinctive feature of Berlin's built environment. Scarred by massive destruction during World War II, divided during the Cold War, and then subject to major development and speculation following [End Page 517] reunification, Berlin has been shaped by cyclical patterns of rupture, destruction, and re-imagination. Repeated regenerations produced a city, over time, with fragmented gaps that often became overgrown, hosting spontaneous, ever-evolving botanical communities. Within these spaces of ruination and spontaneous growth, unplanned and unique environments emerged, combining expected plant and animal species with "unexpected newcomers": non-native species arriving via war, displacement, migration, and trade (37). The study of these sites by celebrated urban ecologist Herbert Sukopp and his collaborators made Berlin a center for the study of "ruderal ecologies": unexpected, unplanned, and unpredictable assemblages of plants and animals spontaneously emerging within disturbed urban spaces. A substantial number of scholarly publications, including recent books such as Jens Lachmund's Greening Berlin: The Co-production of Science, Politics, and Urban Nature (2013) and Matthew Gandy's Natura Urbana: Ecological Constellations in Urban Space (2022), have further examined and analyzed these spaces. Bettina Stoetzer's book, Ruderal City: Ecologies of Migration, Race, and Urban Nature in Berlin (2022), similarly takes Berlin's ruderal ecologies as a starting point but utilizes them in a new way, arguing that they offer an alternate way of examining urban life and processes. Positing that ruination and rubble are "central to the urban landscapes we inhabit" and the constant product of "social exclusions, capitalist urbanization, and profound environmental change," Stoetzer proposes and advocates the use of a "ruderal analytic" (25–26). Building on the ecological understanding of the term, Stoetzer conceptualizes "ruderal" organisms as arising in conditions of hybridity, disturbance, and inhospitableness. The ruderal, then, is "neither wild nor domesticated" and arises as the product of "juxtapositions of contrasting environments" (4). This conceptualization of ruderal-as-analytic echoes the ecological version in multiple ways. Just as ruderal plants arise in disparate, in-between, and unexpected spaces, a ruderal analytic encourages an ethnographic approach focused on "catching glimpses of seemingly disparate worlds" (5) and focuses attention on the gaps and cracks of modern urban life (25). Echoing the hybridity of ruderal plants, which often trouble categorization, this approach calls on researchers to question clear conceptual distinctions, all-encompassing terms, and totalizing perspectives regarding urban life and spaces. Alternatively, it advocates for articulating complexity, accepting partial answers, and assembling fragments of stories to imagine new possibilities for more than just urban existences. Just as ruderal plants arise spontaneously in diverse environments yet can have related origins, the hybridity of ruderal plants also encourages a multisite approach, advocating collecting many strands of stories and then "seek[ing] connections between sites and track[ing] relations" that might suggest new understandings or possibilities (26–27). Demonstrating this "ruderal analytic," Stoetzer offers an engaging ethnographic analysis of multiple sites in Berlin and its hinterlands, illuminating the role of nature [End Page 518] in racialized politics and processes of migration and German nation-making. Using interviews and participant observation of a variety of actors in forests, parks, and urban gardens, Stoetzer examines how sites of urban nature are made and remade, contested and reimagined, managed and occupied, all in ways that reconfigure inequalities, racialize people and practices, and reinforce national boundaries (6). Following an introduction to Berlin, the fieldwork underpinning the book, and the concept of the "ruderal," Stoetzer proceeds in four parts. First, she explores Berlin's history as a site of ruderal ecologies via the example of sticky goosefoot (Chenopodium botrys), a ruderal plant that has unexpectedly thrived in post-World War II Berlin. Using this species as an example, Stoetzer chronicles the role of nature in the making and remaking of Berlin and the German nation. The following three chapters each analyzes multi-sited fieldwork in different types of urban nature sites: intercultural urban...