Kristin Poling

My research focuses on urban environmental history, especially how people understand landscapes as products of historical processes. I have published on topics including German-American environmentalism in Detroit and working-class cultures of nature in imperial Berlin. My book Germany’s Urban Frontiers: Nature and History on the Edge of the 19th Century City (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020), examines how nineteenth-century notions of progress, community, and nature shaped the changing spaces of German urban peripheries as the walls and boundaries that had so long defined central European cities disappeared. Through a series of local case studies including Leipzig, Oldenburg, and Berlin, I explore how Germans on the edge of the city confronted not only questions of planning and control, but also their own histories and futures as a community. I am currently working on projects on urban foraging practices and urban spaces for children.