Abandoned railway wasteland 28/15/2023 ![]() ![]() When infrastructures are truncated, stripped down, or set aside in the wake of wartime destruction, geopolitics, or through the impact of economic decline and state disinvestment, these abandoned spaces emerge as laboratorial fields for the independent dynamics of nonhuman life. More recent stories from Berlin include the discovery of South African ragwort ( Senecio inaequidens), a plant that moved along railways and waterways and now flourishes in a Berlin parking lot (Seitz, 2020: 298) and the route via train from France of a cave spider ( Nesticus eremita) that found a habitat in an abandoned railway yard (Zerbe, 2019: 437). In their celebration of new arrivals, these early twentieth-century botanical studies allude to questions of belonging of these “accidental migrants”, at a time when other strands in German vegetation science such as plant sociology developed nativist and ideologically charged conceptions of nature and its relation to place (Gröning and Wolschke-Bulmahn, 1992). Bonte wondered which of these new arrivals would withstand, adapt, and someday acquire Bürgerrecht (citizenship) in the region (Bonte 1930: 8). The botanist Ludwig Bonte speculated about the accidental journeys each of these plants might have taken across the globe as a by-product of modernity’s circulating commodities. Between 19 over 700 new arrivals were discovered in Germany’s industrial Ruhr area. These “infrastructural floras” show how plants flourished in spaces of intense human disturbance. In the early 1900s, for example, scientists and amateurs created inventories of new arrivals that they termed Adventivflora (adventive flora) by botanizing the railways, canals, harbors, and industrial installations in Europe’s urbanizing regions. Explorations of the botanical city provide a window into the interconnected histories of infrastructure and nonhuman life (Gandy and Jasper, 2020). Now and again nonhuman agency becomes visible in the historical records of modernity’s vital networks, the moment it disrupts the flows of metabolic systems. Nonhuman life gathers alongside infrastructure networks, sometimes in unexpected ways and outside the parameters of capitalist space and time. The occluded histories of nonhuman life still have to be recovered from the archives of engineered landscapes. ![]() Infrastructure not only moves humans, it is a more-than-human project. They exemplify how nonhuman life repurposes infrastructural environments, both along and against the grain of their intended use. Many airfields across the world-active and abandoned-are migratory stopovers, foraging and nesting sites for birds and other species. Various urban biotopes provide ecological niches for rare and endangered insects, spiders, reptiles, and birds that used to be common in rural landscapes before the advent of industrialized farming. Currently Berlin’s largest Stadtbrache (urban wasteland), this 300 hectare field is marked by decades of infrastructural use and weathering: the tarmac is covered by lichens ruderal plants grow in the cracks of former service roads. In Berlin, skylarks have found a refugium between the runways of the former Tempelhof airport. Its disappearance from the countryside has evoked a particular sense of loss and anxiety among geographers and nature writers. The skylark ( Alauda arvensis) is associated with idealized pastoral scenes of long-lost agricultural landscapes. Undreds of skylarks up in the air, seemingly standing still over the meadows of a decommissioned inner-city airport.
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