Biophilic berlin: Socionature in the city

Joshua Berdouk [LinkedIn] [Email]

Anthropology has long focused on cities being built environments, but rarely how they become grown environments. This article explores the human-plant interactions that constitute socionature within Berlin, Germany. Ethnographic comparisons between two case studies and my own photography in Berlin uncover three major dimensions that characterise human relationships with urban plants. Berliners and plants care for each other through a complex nexus of affection and relational wellbeing. Berliners’ care for plants can often become a political zone of contested governability and mediate the citizen’s relationship with the state. Plants contribute to imaginaries of place, identity and sustainability which are challenged by the obstacles of reality. Plants therefore act as agentive neighbours, who interact with humans symbiotically in contributing to the socionatural experience of urban dwelling. Life in Berlin is therefore defined equally by what is built and by ‘who’ grows.

Introduction

OLD LADY: Changing… it keeps changing. I see towers, where there were trees.

Going, all the stillness, the solitude. Georgie, Sundays disappearing all the time, when things were beautiful…

Act 1, scene 11 from ‘Sunday in the Park with George’ (Sondheim, 1983: 77)

An old lady sits for a fictionalised George Seurat to paint her on an island park in Paris. She laments the disappearance of trees from an industrialised city, anguished by the apparent incompatibility between the built and grown environments. Like the Old Lady, I love trees, but I also love cities. Although my dream was to move to the big city, what I miss the most in London is the greenery I left behind in my native Cymru (Wales). When I see trees lining an avenue, ivy climbing a façade, or flowers hanging from balconies, my eyes brighten and my heart sighs with joy. I consider both materials to be architectural wonders; humans construct beautiful buildings while trees grow their own canopied structures. I love cities not just for what is built, but for what grows.

I visited Berlin last summer, and the blooming bounty of green that I fell in love with could not have been further from the post-industrialist gloom I expected. Greenspaces covering a third of its territory , Berlin is one of the most forested cities in Europe and serves a prime example of more than just urban parks (Senatsverwaltung für Mobilität, 2023). Everywhere I looked were trees, shrubs, communal lawns and flower beds, plus multiple parks including the world’s largest inner-city open space at Tempelhofer Feld (Stephan, 2012).

The sociobiologist Edward Wilson (1984) introduced biophilia as a theory of human affinity for life and ‘nature’. Now widely incorporated in architecture as biophilic design, Wilson’s hypothesis has been supported by empirical data. Urban greenspaces have been shown to bolster the wellbeing of residents in innumerable ways; psychologically, emotionally, biophysically, socially, environmentally and beyond (Jabbar et al., 2022). Human-plant relations have been framed as interdependencies of health, whereby plants are capable of agentive socioeconomic changes that support the dynamic process of human health (Elton, 2021). Through this posthumanist perspective, humans and plants are necessarily interconnected.

Moreover, the psychological benefits of greenspaces increase with greater biodiversity (Fuller et al., 2007), attesting to an intrinsic link between the health of the ecosystem and the human. There is even a neuroanatomical basis to the pleasurable emotions experienced simply by witnessing the aesthetics of urban greenery (Kim et al., 2010). Anthropologists have therefore argued for a paradigm that frames the built environment as a hybrid phenomenon between human construction and organic plants (Ogden et al., 2019). What grows and what is built belong to a common continuum of infrastructure; leafy canopies shelter as tin rooves do. Modern scholars such as Christopher Bear (2017) critique the long-held Marxist materialist conception of nature being inherently separate from society. Although Marx did propose objectification as a process whereby humans and ‘things’ make each other, Bear defines socionature as ecosystems within which ‘nature’ and ‘culture’ as inseparable. Ecological networks therefore bind humans, non-human life, and materials together into interdependent relationships (Ingold, 2012). The Old Lady and I agree with anthropologists’ fluid conception of the inextricable relations between plants and humans.

I aim to understand the sociocultural significance of greenery permeating the urban fabric of contemporary Berlin. I will contrast my own experiences and photography with two ethnographies of Berliners’ relationships with the sociomaterialities of urban plants. Bettina Stoetzer (2022b) followed the lives of Berliners cultivating garden allotments in post-industrialist spaces. Jens Lachmund (2022) interviewed residents attending to abandoned streetside tree-pits. I aim to synthesise different dimensions of social significance that constitute the socionatural relationships between Berliners and urban greenery.

Accounting for the long political and cultural history of greenspaces in Berlin, I argue that human-plant relations can be characterised by three major dimensions. Berliners care for plants and in turn plants reciprocate care and benefits for humans. Urban greenery occupies a contested arena within which Berliners channel and negotiate their citizenship and political motivations. Plants also  contribute to imaginaries of place, identity and sustainability, but realities do not always match ideals. By analysing these three objectives of care, politics and imagination, I aim to answer the following question: How do human-plant relations contribute to socionature in Berlin?

caring: nurturing human-plant symbiosis

I sat on the rails of a disused track. Tempelhofer Feld appeared neglected, an empty field of sprouting weeds, cracked wood, rusting steel and an abandoned runway. Yet children played, teenagers skateboarded, and families barbecued. This wild space of untamed greenery was cared for not materially but socially, caring for residents in return by acting as a haven for sociality, connection and community.

How do Berliners and plants care for each other? The political scientist Joan Tronto (1993b: 104) politicised care as a moral duty central to human life, deeming care both a practice and a disposition. Tronto (1993a)identified four pillars of care as attentiveness, responsibility, capability and responsiveness. Care is also a sequence of four phases: caring about, caring for, care-giving and care-receiving (Tronto, 1998).  Tim Beatley (2023) developed an ethic of caring for trees, lamenting the felling of a tree in his neighbourhood that did not consider the wishes of others. This centralised the care of plants as a community endeavour, advocating for a paradigm of animacy that asks ‘who’ the tree is, not ‘what’.

Stoetzer’s (2022a) ethnography of allotment gardens in Berlin’s suburbs evinced many caring dimensions to people-plant relations. Home to a large immigrant population, Neukölln’s many garden allotments were politicised by authorities as spaces for multicultural integration as in other districts across Berlin.  Cem was a middle-aged father from Turkey who initiated the first vegetable patch in his shared garden. When Cem’s mother fell ill and needed his care, neighbours Serife and Mehmet took responsibility of the garden, sowing new seeds to ensure a fruitful spring.

Plants were recipients of Cem’s care and mediators of his neighbours care for him. Caring for vegetables, flowers and trees constituted caring for neighbours, growing roots in the community both botanically and socially. Garden allotments provided spaces for people to challenge resurfacing tensions in Germany that racialize Turkish immigrants as uncaring (Stoetzer, 2022a). Cem, Serife and Mehmet rejected exclusionary notions of care through forms of care beyond political discourse and governmental definitions. They embodied the rehabilitation of their landscapes, bodies and biographies, attending to the fallout from past and present pain in botanical and racial ruins.

Lachmund (2022) also researched Berliners’ hands-on approach to caring for plants. Berlin has a historic tradition of planting streetside trees in tree-pits, which many residents have taken the initiative to revegetate and maintain. Lachmund (2022: 1295) interviewed an elderly lady who expressed concern that trees “suffered” from littering and dog excrement. She planted flowers in the tree-pit outside her apartment to protect the sentient tree, benefiting bees and insects too. One man compared caring for his adopted tree-pit to having a second pet, indicating constructs of affection and responsibility. One woman described how one curated tree-pit sparked a chain reaction of other neighbours tending to other tree-pits, producing a visible fruition of care, concern and responsibility down each street over time. Lachmund noted how passers-by and strangers paid more attention to trees and street etiquette by avoiding dog fouling and littering as a result of  seeing trees being evidently cared for. Care therefore became visible, moral and communicable. This undergirded a civic neighbourhood, motivated by the collective experiences of the impacts and improvements of community-oriented care.

Although tree-pits were a visible indicator of care to strangers, the psychological benefits of exposure to greenery are boosted by active interaction and tactile engagement with plants (Dobson et al., 2021). Gardening bolsters mental wellbeing by improving community coöperation, sociality, responsibility, neighbourhood aesthetics, air quality and environmental consciousness (Litt et al., 2011). Plants reciprocate psychological, social, political and biological care for humans. Gardens are thus sites of attentiveness, transformation, companionship and more-than-human care.

Allotments and tree-pits therefore both support Tronto’s definition of care as a practice and dispositionthat comes in multiple phases. Caring about is only the beginning, Berliners must actively care for and givecare to plants. Only then can humans receive care from plants in return, be it homegrown vegetables providing sustenance or flowers encouraging cleaner behaviours from passers-by.  By enacting an ethic of care, Berliners contribute to a socionature defined by reciprocal care between humans and plants.

Political: plants as propaganda and as agentive citizens

Germany’s governmental core was surrounded by trees. The expansive Tiergarten park flanked the buildings that emblemise politics and power. The forest’s canopies safely sheltered many memorials to the victims of Nazi and Soviet persecution. Trees housed history, an arboreal reminder to today’s politicians and citizens of the pain that politics can incur.

Why can plants, trees and greenery in Berlin be so divisive? Germany has a long history of utilising plants in the nation-state mission, including Berlin’s gardens and trees as agents in political change. Both capitalist West and communist East Berlin authorities tackled unemployment during the Cold War with massive tree-planting projects (Dümpelmann, 2019). East Berlin officials deemed tree-planting as a socialist endeavour to combat the capitalist concrete of the urban environment.

Both West and East Berlin pedestalled plants’ aesthetic beauty as morale boosters, funding research into the psychological benefits of urban greenery (Dümpelmann, 2019). East Berlin authorities encouraged allotments during the Cold War to provide food and shelter to the displaced (Stoetzer, 2022a). Contemporarily, German senators have advocated allotments as sites for multicultural integration, shifting the responsibility of care for the material and social community from the state to the citizen. The care of plants therefore continues to be a nation-making endeavour in Germany, a channel through which to govern space, class and ethnicity.

Stoetzer interviewed Thomas, a Neukölln ‘native’ who campaigned for resident-led gardening and clean-ups. Thomas felt that Berliners couldn’t rely on the state to upkeep greenspaces, so he encouraged residents to take responsibility for maintaining material and social surroundings. Thomas may have followed the government’s lead on gardening initiative, but Nursen opposed the authorities’ actions vehemently. Nursen was an elderly lady who lived next to a canal, where she participated in a human-chain protest after the district council felled the trees lining the waterside. She identified as a caretaker for the animals and plants she cohabits with, feeling compelled to take action against boat companies’ profit-making plans at the cost of trees’ lives.

Tree-pit stewards equally took measures into their own hands. Lachmund (2022: 1302) interviewed a student ‘guerrilla gardener’ who sought “revolution” against the local authorities’ restrictions on tree-pit greening. He planted flowers wherever he liked, violating Treptow District’s official guidelines stipulating rules on plant distances, digging depths and more. Another student sign-posted her tree as a “political tree-pit […] planted by the citizen”, referencing the East-West Wall Border’s former signposts. A group of gardeners dug up the lawns and flower beds in front of the Treptow District administrative buildings after authorities cleared vegetated tree-pits without warning. Campaigners appeared on local television to lobby for legislative change which Treptow District eventually agreed to, nullifying the order to clear tree-pits (Lachmund, 2022).

Austerity had encouraged local districts to delegate responsibility for tree-pit maintenance to citizens, but they controlled the performativity of volunteer-gardening by formalising the administration of gardening freedoms. By actively combatting such bureaucratisation, residents participated in a material-practical meaning-making, constructing their citizenship and contesting their governability through the care of plants. Plants became agents of sociopolitical change, with the hands-on activity of gardening constituting a form of political mobilisation, a botanically-oriented civic engagement.

Both allotments and tree-pits evinced the complexity of green cities like Berlin. Relationships with plants were ambiguously political and destabilised normative assumptions of citizenship, statehood and responsibility. It was often unclear whether taking initiative to care for a vegetable patch or a street tree was a form of empowerment or accepting governability. Either way, human-plant relationships contributed to political dimensions to socionature in Berlin.

Imaginary: fantasies and realities of the emerald city

Looking down the Kurfürstendamm boulevard, ultramodern luxury brands like Prada and Mercedes loomed over the bombed ruins of the Gedächtniskirche. Without trees and bushes and flowers, the built environment would be a patchwork of contrasting histories. Greenery was the necessary fabric weaving Berlin’s different identities into a single imaginary vision of a city.

Plants contribute to Berliners’ ideals of place, society and sustainability, but is the dream of an emerald city a reality or fantasy? Plants shape physical landscapes that humans dwell in, but also human imagination. Plants have always influenced human linguistic and sociocultural imaginaries of nature, existence and reality (Nitzke and Braunbeck, 2021). German cities are known to adopt ecological policies promising visions of sustainable utopia, targeting neoliberal elite imaginaries of an environmental urbanism (Müller and Mattissek, 2018). However, many authorities fail to consider existing social inequalities and incorporate marginalised voices. Residents are often left disenfranchised with the realities that fail to meet their culturally-rooted expectations.  Authorities who implement these plans still define the city as separate from what is rural or wild, but cities are necessarily multispecies ecologies. Blurring ‘nature-culture’ boundaries is essential to priorities more-than-human encounters.

The realities of gardening allotments in Berlin proved much more unpredictable than residents had expected. Heralded as opportunities for multicultural integration, culture clashes often became the topic of heated debate among neighbouring gardeners. Thomas, the Neukölln campaigner, cut down a tree in his shared allotment without consulting his neighbours (Stoetzer, 2022a). Susanne, a student, and Nadira, a woman from Iran, were both upset by this. Others argued over whose responsibility it was to care for neglected and overgrown flower beds. Many Turkish residents objected to their German neighbours erecting fences between sections of the allotments, citing a cultural compulsion to orderly divide everything. Stoetzer found that the idea of the garden as haven was rarely the reality. The practicalities of caring for plants was often a trial-and-error saga, whilst collaborating with neighbours regularly surfaced tensions and quarrels. The ideals of having a safe greenspace within the city to connect to nature and oneself was shrouded by the worries and stresses of logistically doing so.

Adopting streetside tree-pits was equally unpredictable. Most tree-pits required sustained commitment with several attempts at replanting to ensure the survival of plants. Non-human plants adopted temperamental personalities of nuisance but shaped skillful knowers and facilitated the pleasure of their care-givers (Lachmund, 2022). However, it was not always the plants that dashed expectations. One woman’s tree-pit was cut down by the district, and in her anger, she rallied thirty neighbours around a visiting administrator. Residents were left disenfranchised with the possibilities of transforming local environments by caring for tree-pits because of these obstacles and barriers. Although residents had come to their own idealised definition of stewardship and community, the government had imposed a contrasting model of compliant citizenship. Nevertheless, these problems had connected neighbours by drawing them together around the physical locale of a tree-pit, producing a common sociality in response to the destruction of imagined affection, care and citizenship.

The philosopher Emanuele Coccia (2019) posited that plants not only occupy space but construct reality itself. By producing the very atmosphere that we all share and breathe, plants contribute to human reality at the most fundamental levels. I resonate with Coccia’s primacy of the plant, and link this to Stoetzer’s and Lachumnd’s interlocutors. Plants have the capacity to configure the ways in which humans experience themselves and each other within the urban public realm. Plants shape the material realities of the built environment, and humans in turn engage with this cognitively and practically. Berliners construct imaginaries of aesthetics and sustainability, experience anguish and frustration with neighbours and the state, yet still commit to relationships of care and affection.

Conclusion: anthropology of the grown environmenT

GEORGE: All things are beautiful, Mother. All trees, all towers, beautiful that tower-… beautiful, Mother, see? A perfect tree. Pretty isn't beautiful, Mother. Pretty is what changes, what the eye arranges is what is beautiful.

(Sondheim, 1983: 78)

Saddened by the built environments’ encroachment on the natural realm, the Old Lady is reassured by George’s comforting words. He reframes the nature-culture divide as a unison, defining beauty as the fluidity between what is built and what grows. George thinks the architectural marvels of buildings and the structural elegance of trees are equally beautiful, and I agree. The term ‘forest’ etymologically distanced the ‘natural’ realm of plants as separate from the built human ‘home’ (Coccia, 2020). Berliners’ intimacy with their plants evinces the need to break down the walls of the ‘house’ and embrace ecological fluidity. Humans, plants and animals are all one spectrum of organic life that are at home everywhere.

                  From my short stay in Berlin, I could feel how important plants were to buildings and people; without plants Berlin would not be Berlin. Stoetzer’s and Lachmund’s ethnographies evinced how essential relationships between plants and people were in producing a socionature characterised by three major dimensions. Berliners and plants care for each other through a complex nexus of affection and relational wellbeing. Berliners’ care for plants can often become a political zone of contested governability and mediate the citizen’s relationship with the state. Plants contribute to imaginaries of place, identity and sustainability which are challenged by the obstacles of reality. Plants therefore act as agentive neighbours, who interact with humans symbiotically in contributing to the socionatural experience of urban dwelling. Life in Berlin is therefore defined equally by what is built and by ‘who’ grows.

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