Backlands _ post-industrial urban wildlands in Berlin

_4 Natures

Kowarik proposes a framework for understanding urban woodlands according to a four branched categorization scheme. (Kowarik, 22) Such a classification system admittedly cannot adequately explain all of the complexities inherent in the development of real ecosystems and how they are shaped by human activity. Nonetheless, the "four natures model" does present a useful framework for understanding existing ecosystems as the product of long and on-going cultural and ecological processes.

Nature of the first type could be described as remnant natural communities much like those of precolonial forests.  The Oak-Hemlock forest at the New York Botanical Garden is one particularly well known example of such an ‘original’ forest. 

Nature of the second type is the classification given to those ecosystems that have arisen from an agricultural or silvicultural past.  The Sihlwald in Zurich is an example of such a forest, whose species mix and morphology has been heavily influenced by the selection for certain species and ecological conditions by humans over many generations. 

Nature of the third kind is that nature which arises out of horticultural planting.  Such landscapes tend to have a broad diversity of native and non-native species in combinations and placements that have been heavily influenced by the selection of humans for aesthetic and scenographic landscape qualities.  The Tiergarten in Berlin is a fine example of such a landscape.

Nature of the fourth type is the categorization for those landscapes and ecological communities that have developed in post-industrial and urban landscapes, largely without the intentional guiding hand of human beings.  In these landscapes the lines between culture and nature, between ecological forces and social forces, are at once drawn into sharp relief and blurred and confused.  Such hybrid landscapes can challenge users and designers alike to reform long-held notions of what constitutes nature. 

In a landscape where cultural and natural phenomena are inextricably linked, how does a designers situate their interventions relative to centuries old stone walls, rusting hulks of abandoned industrial machinery, woodland groves of non-native trees growing amidst abandoned railroad tracks, or a field of rare flowers that have found an unlikely home in the gravel and asphalt of an abandoned factory? 

Such landscapes challenge us to consider or reconsider where we draw the lines between cultural and natural forces.  They challenge more critical consideration of how the contemporary city dweller relates to both the cultural relics of past and the dynamic ecologies of global cities.

Nature of the fourth type, as it is manifested in two urban woodlands in Berlin, is the topic of this project.  The Schoneberg Sudgelande Natur Park and the Gleisdreiek were both once vital nodes in Berlin’s rail transportation system.  The partition of Berlin in the aftermath of the Second World War rendered these two facilities, along with much of the city’s rail infrastructure, obsolete.  Over the intervening decades between the rise and fall of the Berlin Wall, an emergent ecology took shape among the ballast, tracks, bombed out buildings, and coal heaps at these two sites. Recent efforts are again transforming how these sites relate to the urban life of the city.