Book Review: Poling on Lachmund, Greening Berlin



Jens Lachmund. Greening Berlin: The Co-Production of Science, Politics, and Urban Nature. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2012. Illustrations. 336 pp. $42.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-262-01859-3; $28.95 (e-book), ISBN 978-0-262-31241-7.
Reviewed by Kristin Poling (University of Rochester)
Published on H-German (October, 2014)
Commissioned by Chad Ross
How Ecologists Found Nature in the City
Jens Lachmund's study of urban nature in twentieth-century Berlin begins with a discussion of the opening of the Südgelände Nature Park in March 2000. Located on the site of an abandoned rail yard, the Südgelände does not look like a traditional city park. It is densely overgrown and crisscrossed by walkways constructed of rusty metal—evoking the site's industrial past—that keep visitors from disturbing the vegetation. For most of the long history of urban green space planning, the plants that flourish here as a result of the site's long dereliction would have been considered weeds, more an eyesore than a worthy target of protection. In Greening Berlin, Lachmund sets out to explain how and why the Südgelände Park came to exist as it did. How did an overgrown rail yard become a celebrated natural landscape?