Francesca Pegorer

A beautiful place: Postmigrant trajectories in and around Berlin’s Tempelhofer Feld

  • Anthropology
  • Cultural Studies
  • Demography
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Tempelhofer Feld, in Berlin, Germany, is a large urban park located in the south of the city. Returned to the residents as a public green area in the early 2000s, the park has since become increasingly popular. Plans for a development of the area (including turning part of the area into a residential compound) have been consistently met with strong opposition. This paper looks at how regular users (with a background of migration) engage with the park, across a variety of activities and social constellations. Even though, to a casual observer, the park doesn’t seem to offer much more than a flat sequence of grassy lawns and asphalt lanes, there is, among regulars, a strong consensus on the beauty of the place. It’s an experiential (as opposed to contemplative) beauty, that enhances people’s sense of emplacement, of being present in space, as well as their affective entanglement with it. Through their relationship with the park, and among themselves, the research participants reorient themselves as Berlin residents, negotiating and reconfiguring the often narrow confines of their situation as migrants.

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