Paper short abstract:

How to analyze a space which is not one, but many? What are the the advantages of the analytical perspective of assemblage? The presentation puts this questions on debate reflecting on research on a space in transition in the periphery of a southern German city.

Paper long abstract:

How can a landscape in transition be made to speak? To what extent do ethnographed 'biographies of a landscape' offer added value beyond a historical perspective? These are questions emerging in the context of my dissertation project, in which I am investigating a 'rurban' space (cf. Schmidt-Lauber, Wolfmayr 2020) in the west of Freiburg. In the panel, I would like to discuss these questions based on my theoretically and empirically grounded perspective on space.

On 107 hectares of fields, meadows and forest, Freiburg's new urban district Dietenbach is to be created by 2040. Transforming agricultural and recreational land into housing is controversial: In view of uncertain futures growth as a paradigm is increasingly being questioned in Freiburg, but also beyond, and from different perspectives. Drawing on the concept of assemblage, I understand Dietenbach as a multi-layered and dynamic space spanning different temporal levels and figures in an interplay of material structures and objects, imaginaries - e.g., of a sustainable, social city, or else threatened, idyllic 'nature'- , practices, such as leisure, protest and planning, and (trans-)local discourses of human and non-human actors: There is not one Dietenbach, but many, and these are continuously produced, challenged, and come into conflict with each other. For example, in the course of the transformative process, the area is (re)discovered as a natural space, medially staged, and made visible and tangible in learning and sensory practices.

To what extent could a new form of the biography of a landscape rise from the analytical perspective presented?