Bioregional maps of Karlsruhe

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“Cartography of the living attempts to document the living as well as their traces, to generate maps based on bodies, rather than on topography, frontiers, and territorial borders.” (Terra Forma, MIT Press)

In Map 0, our first map, tries to define two terms that are essential to our research: ‘bioregion’ and ‘local’. What is bioregion? And what do we consider local?

Bioregion

A bioregion can mean many things in many different contexts, but a good starting point for us is to think of a bioregion as an area where “nature and humankind constitute an identifiable ‘community’”. Most importantly, as Justinien Tribillon writes, that means defining an area not by its political borders but by ‘natural’ borders: e.g. mountain ranges, rivers, and forests (not overlooking that those natural features might be used politically).

Brandon Letsinger defines bioregions as “not just defined by natural borders, but also by the people living there” and goes on to expand on the two main elements that constitute a bioregion, which he calls ‘scientific’ and ‘cultural’. Scientific are the unique geological and geographical qualities that define a landscape, such as plate tectonic, erosion, and soil types. Cultural features can be seen (or heard) in the unique languages spoken, the sports played, the economic activities of an area.

Superlocal

On a superlocal level, our Living Library is surrounded by the HfG Karlsruhe and the Zentrum für Kunst und Medien (Center for Art and Media), both located in Hallenbau A (Building A), a former weapons factory opened in 1922. That building in turn is located in the Südweststadt (South West) district of the city of Karlsruhe. From here the superlocal becomes local.

Local

If we take a birds-eye view and lift off from Hallenbau A, we soon see that we are surrounded first and foremost by a long plain through which the river Rhine flows. The geography of our local area is defined by a large rift valley through which the river Rhine flows. This Oberrheinebene (Upper Rhine Plain) stretches for 350 kilometers all the way from Frankfurt in the north and Basel in the south and formed about 30-50 million years ago when the European and African continents collided. Today, these flatlands contain several distinct areas, such as the Südliche Weinstraße, a wine region, and several forests mostly consisting of pine and broadleaf trees: the Hardwald, Bienwald, and Haguenau Forest. The Western and Eastern fault lines of the Upper Rhine Plain form the first boundaries of our bioregion. On our map, these boundaries are indicated by two vertical dashed lines ||||||||| .

Regional

Zooming out even further (or flying even higher to continue the metaphor), we see several natural features in the landscape that surround the Upper Rhine Plain. Across the fault line to its west lies the Pfälzerwald (Palatine Forest) which forms a northern extension of the Vosges mountain range. The Schwarzwald (Black Forest) and the Kraichgau hills form the eastern fault line. Two further lines which are invisible to see but form clear boundaries are the watersheds between the rivers Mosel (Moselle) and Rhine to the west and the Rhine and Neckar to the east. On our map, these are indicated by a dashed line — — —. Together, these watersheds form a basin, an area in which all water flows down to the Rhine river. Beyond the Upper Rhine Plain, this basin forms the boundaries our 'local' bioregion.

Because the Upper Rhine Plain extends all the way from Frankfurt to Basel and lacks distinctive natural and geological features, the northern and southern edge of our local area are harder to define. Culturally however, there are several indicators that point to some kind of boundary. Simply putting the question “Where does the local end?” to residents of Karlsruhe might for instance tell you that the city of Mannheim, about 60 kilometers north, is definitely not local. Similarly, the city of Strasbourg (or Strossburi in Alemannic, the distinctive accent spoken in the region of Elsàss of which Strasbourg is the capital) could be considered a cultural boundary when looking in the opposite direction. These ‘human’ lines, defined intuitively and therefore not indicated by lines as opposed to something like a mountain range, are the final ingredient of our bioregional spaghetti. In our map, the cultural boundaries determine the scale of the map, which happens to be more or less 50 kilometers around Karlsruhe.

Welcome to our local bioregion!

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In Map 1 we zoom in to the Karlsruhe City region, an area we call the ‘superlocal’, and feature two kinds of places: compost sites and allotment garden associations. Both proved to be important keepers of knowledge during our first workshop ‘Composting as transforming, speculating, and writing’ with guests Markus Bier, Vik Bayer, and Michael Reindel.

If we define allotment gardens as ‘informal’ places where individuals and communities practice composting, then places such as the city run Kompostierungsanlages (Compost Sites) and the Urbane Gärten Karlsruhe might be their ‘formal’ counterparts. Looking at their locations in relation to the boundaries of the urban region (the blocky grey line on the map), we can discover a relation: composting happens along the edges of the city.

To be revised.