Stadtschaft and Urban Wildscapes
In: Edgelands: A Collection of Monstrous GeographiesSearch for other papers by Weronika Maćków in
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The presence of nature in urban landscapes and the role it plays in the everyday human experience of the city has long been the subject of various academic inquiries which focused on the aesthetic, social, economic and health aspects of city life. This chapter aims to study an often unrecognized kind of urban landscape which Marion Shoard calls the edgeland, i.e. a wild greenspace on the fringes of the city that is often desolate and unplanned. Usually littered with ruins, sewage facilities and every kind of industrial waste edgelands are spaces of exclusion characterized by Siegfried Lenz as the elements of urban Stadtschaft. Human experience of Stadtschaft is that of mourning and resentment as well as self-accusation. The following chapter recognizes the potential of these ‘leftover’ places which have lost or never possessed fixed functions and are open to diverse uses and new meanings. The study of wildscapes in this respect seems especially promising due to wildlife’s ability to appear in urban interstices regardless of any plans or control. Degenerated wildscape of industrial ruins and empty allotments may in this light express its critical potential and therefore reconcile the two types of experience of abandoned urban spaces – that of grief and of hope. However, it seeks to evade simple dichotomies (wild / cultivated, natural / cultural, loose / controlled) by engaging them in a dialogic process. The displacement of oppositions follows the logic that governs smooth and striated spaces as described by Deleuze and Guattari. Shifts of meanings that structure the relations between wild and civilized spaces are perceived here as inherent to and constitutive of heterotopic urban space.