Sandra Bartoli
When does a human-constructed place go beyond the human, and how necessary is this transgression? To look at the built environment from the perspective of natural history allows one to explore the city as a system and construct of the natural and human together; furthermore, it introduces the notion of the city (of tomorrow) as a producer of resources and not as the machine of consumption we are used to assuming. Tiergarten, 210 hectares of forest in the middle of Berlin and the oldest park in the city, is an example of a place where many aspects of ecology, urbanism, heritage, daily culture, and politics are simultaneously present and evidently interfering with each other — to the point of bothering each other — in a way that transgresses established urban norms both spatial and societal. Over time, Tiergarten has become an island of anomalies that can be read as the radical expression of what is most urban and public in the city. Among many characteristics of Tiergarten is that here human history and natural history are constructed together to shape a model for future environments in an ever-expanding sea of urbanisation. This paper ranges from Tiergarten's transgression as a key to shift established ways of talking about what is considered urban to elements of the biotope map of West Berlin, a far-sighted document of 1984 proposing to understand the city as a system of ecological processes that makes of wilderness a sanctioned agent of the urban environment, ultimately dissolving the alleged antagonism between city and nature.