At the forest edges of the city: nature, race and national belonging in Berlin

Abstract

While Berlin is currently promoted as a flourishing “Green City” and “Europe's Nature Capital,” debates about immigrant segregation and unemployment stress the emergence of troubled neighborhoods and ghettos in the city’s body. In this context “urban nature” emerges as a category across a whole set of registers: 1) as guideline for urban planning, 2) as a way of describing urban conflicts around immigration, race and inequality, and 3) as everyday form of experiencing and reshaping the city. Based on fifteen months of fieldwork in Berlin, this dissertation engages several ethnographic sites – multicultural gardens, forest schools, urban parks, and a post unification era nature park at Berlin’s fringes – to examine how natural landscapes become sites of contestation over national belonging and race. Drawing on participant observation and interviews with several immigrant and refugee communities, as well as environmentalists, public officials, foresters, and East and West German nature lovers, this project asks: how are social inequalities and notions of belonging reconfigured in conflicts over the creation, use, and management of green spaces?