Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-ndw9j Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-20T04:17:11.716Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

3 - Traversing wastelands: reflections on an abandoned railway yard

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 May 2022

Cian O'Callaghan
Affiliation:
Trinity College Dublin
Get access

Summary

Introduction

A long patch of vacant land appears through the windows of the train moving from the airport to the centre of Berlin. This linear zone of grasslands stretches alongside the tracks passing through the south-eastern district of Schöneweide. A former roundhouse drifts by, followed by a derelict brewery covered in shrubs and a banner appealing to ‘leave no one behind’. Traversing Berlin's track wilderness has long stirred the imagination of artists and filmmakers. In the 1981 film Berliner Stadtbahnbilder, the German writer and director Alfred Behrens secretly captured his train journeys across the divided city. The film portrays a marooned transport network of geopolitically induced disrepair: deserted platforms and defunct tracks overgrown by birch trees; a railway landscape suspended in time; or, as Behrens describes it, ‘a post-industrial wilderness at the heart of the city’.

Over the past two decades, patches of this urban wilderness have been absorbed into prize-winning public parks. An example includes the Natur-Park Südgelände in Schöneberg that opened in May 2000 – an abandoned railway yard that was designated a nature reserve and conservation area, with grassland biotopes and wild-growing woodlands (Kowarik and Langer, 2005). Another example, which has been widely celebrated in the field of landscape design, is Park am Gleisdreieck in Kreuzberg, completed in 2013. The park design evokes a new type of ‘wasteland aesthetic’ (Gandy, 2013: 1306) by integrating Gleiswildnis (‘track wilderness’), as signs label the remnants of wild forest, with various leisure and sports facilities.

Other abandoned railway zones, notably, those in more peripheral locations in the former East Berlin, have remained hidden and, until recently, attracted little public curiosity. However, with increasing pressure on land development, the track wilderness north and south-east of the city centre in boroughs like Pankow and Treptow-Köpenick is gradually being razed for speculative interests. The corporate seizure of Stadtbrachen (the German word for urban fallow or wasteland) now extends to the smallest vestiges alongside the tracks. The financialisation of the city that is reshaping Berlin's housing sector (Fields and Uffer, 2016) visibly seeps into the realm of urban nature.

Type
Chapter
Information
The New Urban Ruins
Vacancy, Urban Politics, and International Experiments in the Post-Crisis City
, pp. 53 - 72
Publisher: Bristol University Press
Print publication year: 2021

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×