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The expression ‘pre-accession’, formally appearing for the first time in the Conclusions of the Essen European Council of December 1994, is now firmly established in the terminological practice of the EU enlargement discourse, and is generally used as an adjective and occasionally even as a noun. Since 1994 ‘pre-accession strategies’, ‘pre-accession instruments’, ‘enhanced pre-accession strategies’, and so on and so forth have been developed. In the current EU enlargement scenario ‘pre-accession’ policies indeed play a much more predominant role than in previous enlargements of the European Community. In past enlargement practice, pre-accession strategies, as such, were virtually or even completely lacking.

Chapter 1 documents the emergence of urbanized nature in the Ruhr through local elites’ changing response to a housing crisis precipitated by industrialization, with a focus on Krupp and the city of Essen. The chapter first argues that while the Ruhr had effectively urbanized (materially and socially) by the late nineteenth century, it had not yet urbanized imaginatively. It takes as evidence of this the fact that Krupp and other industrial barons initially responded to the housing crisis by building company housing in the form of colonies (Kolonien) that, in providing access to gardens and animals for subsistence purposes, reflected traditionally agrarian forms of daily life and social relationships in the landscape. The chapter then documents an imaginative turn to the city among local elites, arguing that the proximate cause of these actors’ urban turn was not local physical conditions, but competition and a desire for influence, as they began to see themselves as part of an international urban network. It also demonstrates that once local elites identified the city as a desirable social and spatial form for the Ruhr, they turned to urbanized nature in the form of the garden city as a means to create it.

Chapter 2 shows how urbanized nature was put to work, materially, through the construction of garden cities in the Ruhr, focusing on Krupp’s Margarethenhöhe in Essen. While the colonies provided access to nature for subsistence purposes, at Margarethenhöhe animal keeping and subsistence agriculture were forbidden. Instead, the chapter documents gardens and green space being used and understood in the contemporary sense: bearing indirect moral and affective goods, rather than direct, material ones, and fulfilling an urban-aspirational, rather than rural-preservationist, vision of society. The chapter illustrates nature’s new uses at Margarethenhöhe through Krupp’s changing understanding of its company housing from fiefdom to suburb, of its green space from a site of labor to leisure, and of its residents from peasants to urban citizens. It also documents how this emergent view of nature spread throughout the region and to the public sector. Finally, it argues that these new perceptions of nature found affinities with new liberal forms of managerial power and control. While greening was understood in terms of the provision of public goods, it had also become a new managerial technology that imposed new norms of behavior and citizenship as it transformed cities as physical and social spaces.

This chapter examines the history of the Bund, a socialist reform group that saved several Jews from death in the German city of Essen during World War II. Established in Essen in 1924 by Artur Jacobs and graduates of his adult education classes, the Bund adopted a dual program of campaigning for a better society and experimenting with new ways of living, or ‘life reform’. The Bund was more of a circle of friends than a formal organisation, and a large number of its members came through the youth movement. This chapter considers what motivated the Bund to rescue the Jews in Essen, the sources of its courage and cohesion, and how it escaped detection by the Nazis. It argues that Jacobs and the Bund are classic examples of how certain kinds of group structures and ideological assumptions could turn quite ordinary individuals into rescuers.