Ghosts and monsters: Reconstructing nature on the site of the Berlin Wall

Abstract

In this paper I seek to develop a larger argument from a small place that no longer exists. Since 2004 I regularly visited a wasteland or Brache, located on the site of the former Berlin Wall, before a process of enclosure and erasure that culminated in the construction of luxury apartments. I draw on my engagement with this temporary space, as a source of reverie and also as a site for ecological fieldwork, in order to reflect on the meaning of urban nature under the speculative dynamics of capitalist urbanisation. I consider the intersections between memory, place, and ecology as part of a wider engagement with ‘spectral ecologies’ in the urban realm. I suggest that affective interpretations of urban nature should seek to develop a conceptual dialogue between ethnographic insights and structural analysis of urban environmental change.