Ruderal City: Ecologies of Migration, Race, and Urban Nature in Berlin

by Bettina Stoetzer

In 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 emergent futures in the margins of European cities. Brimming with stories that break down divides between environmental perspectives and the study of migration and racial politics, Berlin’s ruderal worlds help us rethink the space of nature and culture and the categories through which we make sense of urban life in inhospitable times.

352 pages, Hardcover

Published December 2, 2022

Reviews

[Noanodium · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love people who can connect together thoughts and phenomena that to me would seem apparently disconnected as the author does in this book.

While the book has a core theme it sticks to, it also makes some fascinating digressions into different (but still related) subjects, since the author always finds a really interesting entry point into the topics she writes about.

She acknowledges the problematic aspect of anthropology and the colonial dynamic between the scientist/observer and the one observed and makes a conscious effort to work against it, which I appreciate, though at times I feel like she fails in this task a little bit. The book then ends up being a mix of really humane encounters that through individual stories open up the conversation about the bigger issues, interspersed with paragraphs that are being self aware about the dehumanization that the scientific research of a group of people can cause while at the same time feeling (to me) also incredibly dehumanizing. I'm not sure what the author could have done differently, maybe this is just an inevitable part of this kind of research.

Overall a great book that I definitely want to reread, it provided a great insight into how the German (and overall European) culture defines itself and its others.

[Emily Smith]

“Anthropology needs to account for the fact that it is not separate from the havoc that colonial exploitation of land and people wreaked and continues to wreak across the globe.” pp 11

[hanita]

read for class