The City of Nature Women and the Making of Green Space in Eighteenth-Century Amsterdam and Berlin

The long eighteenth century marked a transformative moment in the history of urban life when the age-old fantasy of a green city, a “city of nature,” was first translated into a tangible reality, involving men and women from across the class spectrum in its making. In this period, people also began to form a notion of urban nature as a family of related spatial typologies. This created new, imaginary links between cities and opened novel avenues of cultural exchange, such as those that developed between Amsterdam and Berlin. The City of Nature charts the shared landscape of green spaces that evolved in these two cities and shows this common ground to have been an inherently inequitable terrain in which hierarchies of gender and class became manifest. I argue that the process of urban greening as it unfolded in the long eighteenth century stood in relation to parallel shifts in gender ideologies and in the lived relations between men and women. The City of Nature shows that in the gardens, promenades, parks, and peri-urban landscapes of eighteenth-century Amsterdam and Berlin, the burgeoning gendered social positions of the modern age were cultivated – and contested – through everyday acts, discourse, and design. While the study reveals the city of nature to have been no less patriarchal in its set-up than the “grey” city, it makes the case that green spaces provided an important avenue for women to interfere in the urban landscape and to make space on their own terms.