The Invention of the Ruderal Area. Urban Ecology and the Struggle ...

ailway areas further wastelands existed that attracted ecologists’ interest in the late
1970s.
At least partly, the turn of West-Berlin’s ecology to the city can be
explained by the geopolitical situation. Due to the deprivation from its hinterland,
many field ecologists tended to concentrate on their own city when doing practical
fieldwork. A central role was thereby played by Sukopp who, in 1969, became a
professor at the Technical University where he subsequently established (together
with two other professors) a distinct department for ecology in 1972/73. Beginning
with his 1958 dissertation thesis (a study of the fens within the Berlin Grunewald),
Sukopp’s research had been nearly exclusively devoted to West-Berlin. His positions
as a professor and not only enabled him to continue his research on the Berlin flora
and to formulate a more systematic approach to the study of urban nature but also to
act as a political entrepreneur; creating networks between scientists, organizing
material and institutional resources and making claims on policy and planning issues.
Within a few years Sukopp, along with a growing number of students and assistant
professors who worked with him, had become the most renowned representatives of
German urban ecology.
It was the goal of these studies to characterize the vegetation and to make
sense of the direction in which it would further develop, i.e. so-called succession.
Ecologists considered the vegetation of these sites as a special type, the ‘ruderal
vegetation’ and the wastelands themselves were later called ‘ruderal areas’ or ‘ruderal
biotopes’. As Scholz (Scholz 1956) had stated in his thesis in 1956, it was
characterized by the abundance of neophytes, often of Southern origin, that benefited
from the environmental conditions of the city, especially the warmer climate. In the
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