Contents
The city as a botanical field 6
Matthew Gandy and Sandra Jasper
Part 1 Histories and taxonomies 16
Signs of life: interview with Herbert Sukopp 18
The metabolic city and the city of biotopes: Paul Duvigneaud and Herbert Sukopp 22
Urban granaries, planetary thresholds Nigel Clark 30
The flora of bombed areas (an allegorical key) 38
Seth Denizen
Vegetation as testimony: botanical traces of the urban past Moritz von der Lippe 46
The curious disappearance of the Ennore Creek Bhavani Raman 54
Phoenix canariensis in Lisbon's new ecologies: a postphenomenological tracing of a palm tree in a disused gasworks Daniel Paiva 62
Urban plants and colonial durabilities Henrik Ernstson 71
Ailanthus altissima, or the botanical afterlives of European power Bettina Stoetzer 82
Seeing, surveying, and sorting urban trees: the 1970s street tree project in Dresden
Sonja Dumpelmann 91
Vertical ecologies: the balcony biotopes of Berlin Dorothee Brantz 100
Drying greens, commons, and the possibilities of the botanical (in one quiet corner of London) 107
Marcus Nyman
Part 2
Botanizing the asphalt 120
The flight of seeds Mara Polgovsky Ezcurra 122
Dandelions at work: a street corner tale of ecosystem services Alexandra R. Toland 131
Plants in the urban night Bergit Arends 139
Toxic tour: Houston's environmental apartheid and institutional liberation 146
T J Demos
Queering the transect Matthew Gandy 161
Walking with plants: disrupting the material logics of degrado at the banks of Turin's Stura river Lucilla Barchetta 170
Following mosquitoes into an urban forest Nida Rehman
Rhizome city: tracing knotweed through the soils of Brussels
Livia Cahn 185
196
Part 3 The art of urban flora 196
Lois Weinberger
Zheng Bo
Mona Caron
Yan Wang Preston
Uriel Orlow
Part 4 Experiments in non-design
Framing urban landscapes: interview with Susanne Hauser 216
Acoustic botany: listening to nature in a former airfield Sandra Jasper 221
There life in dead wood: tracing a more-than human urbanity in the spontaneous nature
of Gothenburg 229
Mathilda Rosengren
From undead commodities to lively labourers : (re)valuing vegetal life, reclaiming the power to design-with plants 237
Marion Ernwein
Tracing the urban pastoral in Tallinn: Leo Marx, Karl Marx, and urban political aesthetics
Maros Krivy
Tokyo ecology: the Akabane Nature Observation Park 253
Kumiko Kiuchi
Red leaves 266
Suili Xiao
Part 5 Cartographic imaginations 272
Urban plants: a window on how ecology becomes evolution 274
Peter Del Tredici
Discovering and mapping urban plants Mark Spencer 282
Mapping the urban flora of Berlin Birgit Seitz 293
Nature is for everyone: investigating attitudes to urban biodiversity Leonie Fischer 300
Urban cemeteries in Berlin and beyond: life in the grounds of the dead 305
Ingo Kowarik
Contributors 314
Acknowledgments 322