RC21 CONFERENCE 2013
Resourceful cities
Berlin (Germany), 29-31 August 2013
Humboldt-University Berlin, Institute for Social Science, Dept. for Urban and Regional Sociology
Exploring urban wastelands
The multiplicity of cultural responses to urban wastelands and other marginal spaces is partly related to the diversity of such sites and their varied origins: whilst some spaces have developed spontaneously within ostensibly “empty” sites, others have emerged out of the neglect or abandonment of previously maintained spaces such as lawns, parks, roadside verges or other degraded remnants of designed nature.
Using Berlin as its focal point this session will examine spontaneous spaces of nature such as wastelands and other marginal spaces. Disciplinary sub-fields such as “landscape urbanism” have recently emerged in relation to the development potential of void spaces in post-industrial cities. Yet ecological rhetoric is often deployed as a pretext for the elimination of pre-existing spaces of nature that already have high levels of cultural and scientific interest. In some cases wastelands have been transformed into spaces of leisure with multiple forms of urban nature ranging from “semi-wild” landscapes to closely maintained elements of conventional park design.
The papers should try to answer questions like the following:
What kind of landscape aesthetics is invoked by the protection of spontaneous spaces of urban nature?
In such circumstances, how can cultural or scientific complexity be effectively communicated?
How might a more critically reflexive urban ecology enable new understandings of the cultural and socio-ecological dynamics of contemporary cities?
Session Organizers
Hillary Angelo, Department of Sociology, New York University, Current mailing address: c/o Tina Bucek, Arneckestrasse 88, 44139 Dortmund, Germany, T: 015258433100, E: hillary.angelo@nyu.edu
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