If you want to walk on the wild side in a city, go the Südgelände in Berlin. This 45-acre oasis in the inner city contains 334 species of flowering plants in its meadows and woods; it is home to falcons, foxes, grasshoppers and 95 species of bee, 60 of which are listed as endangered. No one planned this exuberant wilderness; it emerged on what had been one of Berlin’s busiest railway marshalling yards. The postwar division of the city rendered it redundant; nature reclaimed it with astonishing swiftness, intertwining itself with the rusting infrastructure. Many of the seeds germinated there had hitched a ride on the rails, often from distant origins, escaping from packing cases. Some had blown in from gardens and parks. The site’s biodiversity reflects the human history of Berlin, its trade, its gardening fads, its wars, and the geopolitics of the Cold War.
Forget a formal, fussy park with its baize of cropped lawn and pampered flowerbeds; nature thrives in messiness. The Südgelände is successful, biologically speaking, because it is unplanned. But paradoxically it is also successful because it is planned. Threatened by redevelopment in the 1980s, like so many of Berlin’s then numerous urban jungles that had sprung up on bombsites and along the Wall, it was saved by sustained community activism. Today it is a public nature reserve. Its wildness has been preserved by elevated walkways so that visitors do not trample on wildflowers or disturb ground-nesting birds. Left to itself, the rail yard would become a tangled forest; the array of grasses and meadow flowers survives thanks to infrequent mowing and grazing sheep.
I take delight in the Südgelände because it showcases the unexpected richness of urban ecosystems and the lurking potential of nature in cities, so often restrained and tidied up. But it speaks to me in a different way as well. It offers clues as to what makes cities successful, not just now, but throughout history.
A few years ago, I published a history of cities and urbanism, from their distant origins in Mesopotamia right up to our present megalopolises. Metropolis hit the shelves in 2020, in the misery days of lockdown. Confidence in cities and urban life could not have been at a lower ebb; people seemed to want to escape them rather than revel in their anarchic energies. The kinds of places I highlighted in Metropolis – markets and souks, bathhouses and cafés, low dives and cacophonous public piazzas – were the human equivalents of the Südgelände. They are the marginal, unexpected, sometimes scruffy places where the soul of the city is to be found, where serendipitous connections happen. They are organic creations, unplanned and unintended, that provide the lush environment in which creativity sparks.
The pandemic had put paid to those delights, of course, albeit temporarily. But when I was researching Metropolis it became readily apparent that they were in short supply with or without covid. In contrast to the spatial messiness of past cities, where human activities (high and low) were jumbled up together, the much-heralded urban renaissance of the early 21st century was in danger of sanitising cities to death, draining them of their vital energies. Songdo in South Korea exemplified this trend, apparent all over the globe. Built from scratch at the cost of tens of billions of dollars, Songdo was intended as a paradigm of the future “smart city”, powered and managed by the latest digital technologies, promising an outstanding quality of life in its numerous skyscrapers.
Songdo, to my tastes, manages to combine the soaring skyline of Manhattan with the numbing tranquillity of a suburban street in Los Angeles. But I don’t want to be unfair on Songdo. It is merely an exaggerated version of many other tech-driven global cities: highly managed, very clean and a little boring. You can find its equivalent in Shanghai, Singapore, New York, London and even parts of Lagos, Nigeria. Back in 2000 there were 600 skyscrapers around the world. By the time the pandemic hit there were over 3,000 and the number was expected to reach 41,000 by 2050; every city aspired to hoover up the most valuable commodity going, human capital. Build it and they will come was the prevailing attitude in the age of giddy urban self-confidence: safe, shiny towers, a signature crenulated skyline, high-end restaurants and glitzy malls.
But is this true now, in 2023? Or do we want something more from our cities as they recover from the hammer blows of recent years? I hate to drag your mind back to the dire days of lockdown, but one of that period’s most heartening developments was the reclaiming of city streets as places of sociability, when restaurants moved their tables outside. Another feature of this time, much trumpeted by news outlets and social media, was the noticeable increase in wildlife as city streets became quieter. Boars brazenly sauntered the streets of Paris; deer grazed outside London housing estates; wild turkeys took over a school in San Francisco. For all their misery, lockdowns showed us something was amiss with our urban models. The emphasis since 2020 has shifted as a result: it is inching back to the age-old notion that streets are at the heart of urban life. We need to make cities more liveable, more fun, if we are to attract people back and restore faith in urban life. There is also, clearly, an overwhelming need to make cities resilient against pandemics and climate change. Those two things – quality of life and resilience – are closely connected. That brings us back to the Südgelände.
Hyper modern cities are the ones that foster patches of rugged beauty
The old railway marshalling yard was particularly cherished when West Berlin was an island, isolated by the Cold War. The Südgelände and other neglected sites speckled throughout the city provided West Berliners – pinned behind the Iron Curtain and severed from the countryside – with a semblance of wilderness, a place to experience nature at its spontaneous and unpredictable best. It also gave botanists places to study. What they discovered in their explorations of the urban landscape was a mosaic of diverse habitats hidden in plain sight. Ruined and abandoned places bedecked with foliage and micro-forests were plain enough to see. But every city abounds in marginal places, from the sides of railway tracks to the gaps alongside chain link fences. Berlin’s pioneering urban ecologists found that cities attract numerous spontaneously occurring species, most of them non-natives that not only withstand the heat, pollution, hard surfaces and continual disturbances of the human-made environment, but actually thrive in it. With their huge amount of wildlife, brought deliberately or accidentally, urban wastelands contain a greater level of biodiversity than manicured parks or even the surrounding countryside, providing pollen for bees and habitats for wildlife. Even the well-trodden streets of Berlin are home to 375 species of urban plants – or weeds as they are sometimes called. This ecosystem turned out to be as dynamic and complex as the human city: a cosmopolitan mix of native and immigrant species that were rough and tough enough to survive the mean streets and which are in a constant state of flux as the environment shifts around them.
Sprayed, mown and despised: this ecosystem is more often than not restrained rather than given the chance to flourish to its full potential. But we are beginning to realise that the urban ecosystem is more than a curiosity. Cities will have to deal with threats greater than lockdowns in coming years. Extremes of heat and rain will make urban life more challenging. Every city needs places like the Südgelände. Trees offer shade from high temperatures. They also soak up a lot of excess water when the clouds gather. Semi-wild urban meadows provide a similar benefit. Philadelphia is farsighted in its strategy of breaking up its hard surfaces, actively encouraging patches of rugged vegetation that can hold, store and filter stormwater. The concrete edges of New York, hubristically designed to hold back the power of water, are beginning to go green with emergent marshland that will defend the city against rising sea levels and hurricanes. Another curious by-product of lockdown days in British cities was the sight of unmown verges, roadsides and roundabouts. In place of close-cropped grass came troops of wildflowers threading their way through grey cityscapes, an undeniable gain for a country undergoing a biodiversity slump. Hypermodern cities are not ones mushrooming with eye-catching skyscrapers and ritzy developments; they are the ones fostering patches of rugged beauty as part of a self-defence strategy. It is what will make them resilient.
More wildlife and fewer cars: these were the surprise benefits of lockdown and surely the ingredients for a successful modern city. Taking cars off streets and replacing them with trees and people is a ravishing prospect for many; but it is resisted with ferocity. In the face of this hostility we should focus our minds on the gains and make the case as powerfully as we can. Streets that are fringed with trees and mini meadows are not just better protected against the effects of climate change; they are places where we actually want to be and mix with others. Amsterdam was once a city congested with cars. Go to the city’s Frans Halsbuurt district today and you’ll find streets of startling greenness. Motor vehicles are only allowed to make deliveries. In the place of parked cars come trees, hollyhocks, purple loosestrife, salvias and climbing roses. There are flowers grown and tended by residents; there is also plenty of spontaneous urban vegetation, aka weeds. Here, inner city streets blur into country lanes. Most importantly, the canopy shades a living landscape, a street of sociability, play and mingling. Swapping cars for trees makes environmental sense; but the gains for human interconnectivity and pleasure are just as significant.
The unregulated spontaneity of the Südgelände is more than a metaphor for the benefits of marginal, unlikely urban spaces for human creativity. Few cities tolerate so many street weeds and wild places as Berlin. It is also a powerful magnet for the kinds of young, creative people that are the life blood of any city and essential for their future. Is this coincidental? Berlin’s permissive attitude towards the urban ecosystem is bound up with its bohemian character. Cities that embrace wildness, of all kinds, reap many surprising rewards.
Ben Wilson’s two most recent books are “Metropolis: A History of the City, Humankind’s Greatest Invention” and “Urban Jungle: The History and Future of Nature in the City”, both published by Doubleday
