Spaces & Flows: Ninth International Conference on Urban and ExtraUrban Studies

Abstract

Recent years have seen increasing interest in the role of green space in cities, from both an environmental and a social justice standpoint. The promotion of “green infrastructure” or “nature-based solutions” as regional responses to accumulating repercussions of planetary urbanization and climate change, on the one hand, and localized issues such as social inequality, vulnerability, and environmental injustice/racism on the other, has prompted a rich body of research examining these actual and potential interconnections. While many have emphasized the role of urban nature or green space in improving urban quality of life, others have raised questions concerning its distribution and the unevenness of benefits relative to different populations existing within urban regions. In this paper, we focus on the question of green space distribution and function in two cities from the Western industrialized world: Berlin, Germany, and Detroit, Michigan USA. Many parallels may be drawn between Berlin and Detroit, some facile and others more meaningful. For example, Berlin and Detroit are both recognized as centers of electronic music, they are both seen as fashionably gritty, and both have benefited from an influx of artists and others seeking affordable rents and the sometimes ghostly allure of post-industrial spaces. But the parallels run deeper than these superficial similarities. Berlin was devastated by two World Wars and decades of enforced political, economic, and cultural division following the occupation of East Berlin by the Soviet Union. These historical traumas and painful memories are reflected in the city’s landscape today. For forty years West Berlin was effectively a democratic island within communist East Germany, while Detroit after 1970 effectively became an impoverished Black island within a wealthy, majority-White metropolitan region. These are far from equivalent situations, but each has had a significant impact on the landscape and ecology of the city. We utilize Berlin and Detroit not only to pose questions of each other, but to lay out a comparative framework intended to guide other cities dealing with the long term social and environmental consequences of enforced political division and ethnic and spatial segregation. We first demonstrate that this social and historical trauma has a corollary in the physical landscape as well as in social and demographic measures. Borrowing from the Theorized Urban Gradient (TUG) model developed by Qureshi, Haase and Coles (2014), we compare Berlin and Detroit using a key set of ecological indicators that correlate with the legacy of sociospatial trauma, applying this comparison to the cities overall and to specific neighborhoods which might be seen as relative “winners” or “losers” in the process of post-traumatic recovery. We then forward an argument towards incorporating environmental degradation and restoration into discussions of social equity and recovery from historical trauma, proposing that green space should be seen as both a reflection of past harms and a means of healing them. Finally, we offer a concept of “green reparations” that may serve as an alternative framework to asocial concepts of “green infrastructure” and as a direct challenge to the potential creeping growth of “green gentrification.”