Multispecies Conservation Movements and the Redefinition of Urban Nature at Berlin's Tempelhof Airfield

Abstract

The “ecological turn” in urban planning ( Scott and Lennon, 2016 ) has led to increased recognition of ecosystem services, experiments with green infrastructure, and other efforts to “re-nature” the city. These trends, however, often sidestep the inherently political nature of the “natural,” overlook the role that sensory qualities and the phenomenological experience of space play in planning, and fail to recognize the agency of non-human actors in shaping urban natures. Here, we argue that grassroots urban conservation movements can offer a partial corrective, but that in doing so they can also introduce new contradictions and entrench different hegemonic structures. Drawing on actor-network theory and other more-than-human ontologies, we show this using the case of Tempelhof Airfield, a former airport in Berlin, Germany, which was preserved via a referendum as public open space. We trace the referendum campaign and analyze the policies enacted through it — which did not restore or remediate the brownfield but rather declared it to be worth preserving on ecological grounds in its current state. We argue that this was only possible due to the lively presence of non-human entities at the field, particularly the Eurasian skylark, an “endangered” species, which, by not being too scarce, actualizes an interspecies conception of urban nature by resonating with human sensory experiences of the landscape. While such multispecies assemblages represent an exciting possible future for urban environmental movements, we warn that their contradictions and reliance on endangered species regulations result in a brittle conservation situation in which a hegemonic species with particular affective affinities and cultural importance to humans is being protected in favor of other, perhaps more threatened species, and in which a particular type of landscape is being preserved in favor of one which might support more species or more effectively counteract climate change.

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