"...mein Acker ist die Zeit", Aufsätze zur Umweltgeschichte - Oapen

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gists’ understanding of “urban ecology”. I mention here only the remarkable stateof-the-art
conference “Urban Ecology” held in 1997. 205
In terms of historic theories, it remains unclear to me what a description and
analysis of the “city”phenomenon would look like according to standards of environmental
history written from a microhistoric perspective. Would a strict theoryoriented
treatise be a narrative of the life of a municipal gardener? Or a report on
the last street tree in downtown Siena? Or a thick description of zoo visitors in
Philadelphia? A meticulous observation of pigeons in St. Mark’s Square? A video
clip of pest exterminators in one metropolis of each continent? A copy of the diary
of a microbiologist working in the waterworks of Kolkata? Chekhov’s Cherry Orchard?
Kafka’s “Metamorphosis”? Would it be simply a copy of the cadastral register
of a city? Or the history of Purrysburgh, SC (USA), founded in 1731 by and
named after Jean Pierre Purry?
As I see it, the microhistoric perspective is a widely but only implicitly used
approach in environmental history. This obviously also holds true for papers that
deal with aspects of towns, cities, and urbanization. But it appears to me that such
a complex structure as a city with its related phenomena and their side effects and
epi-phenomena can hardly be handled adequately by following monolinear analyses
that lead to a tiered model of causality or simply sweep around in a twodimensional
microcosmos instead. Thus, in my opinion, a microhistoric approach
to the “city” would resemble a biological analysis of an ecosystem, say a pond, by
following the life history of a single carp. This would be a difficult bottom-up perspective.
And the analogy is certainly short of explanatory power, since many cities
are connected in various ways and exchange materials, people, and information,
which is definitely not true for most of the ponds in the world. Moreover, it is also
certainly easier to argue top down. When it comes to cities and therefore human
societies, the actors do not necessarily follow the concepts of behaviouristic automata,
which is the standard consideration of a biological interpretation with respect
to ecosystems. Due to human will and decision-making, superimposing upon and
conditioning specifically the “city”-ecosystem, which is only one subsystem within
a multiple-city ecosystem, cities are by far the most complex ecosystems on earth.
If this is doubted, at least the multiple-city ecosystems that are tied together in the
worldwide city web must surely be considered of higher complexity than “the
tropical rain forest” or “the ocean”. Be that as it may, we are talking about a very
complex structure in the world, and one that is completely man-made.
Today approximately half of the world’s population lives in cities; by 2015 this
figure expected to reach 75 percent. In 1800 only 3 percent of the total population
205 Conference papers edited by J.Breuste, H.Feldmann, O.Uhlmann (Heidelberg: Springer, 1998).
Important future-oriented contributions are available form the Bundesamt für Bauwesen und Raumordnung,
FRG, which collected preparatory expert opinions for the “World Report on the Urban
Future for the Global Conference on the Urban Future URBAN 21” held in Berlin July 4-6, 2000
(URL: http://www.bbr.bund.de/english/index.htm, last accessed October 14, 2005)