Grounding Berlin - University of Pittsburgh Press

Grounding Berlin

Ecologies of a Technopolis, 1871 to the Present

Berlin was a particularly dynamic and disrupted city in the twentieth century. Here, the concept of infrastructure as a medium of continuity has to prove itself. The eminent authors of this volume present a broad panorama of approaches, actors, and areas of conflict. This gives color and depth to the history of an exemplary ‘technopolis.’

Dirk van Laak, University of Leipzig

This collection explores the pioneering contribution of Berlin to urban technology and urban ecology in Europe and around the world over the past 150 years. Following the 1871 unification of Germany, Berlin experienced rapid industrialization and urbanization. Providing the necessary energy, water, waste removal, and land required massive interventions in the city and its surrounding region. As Berlin transformed nature in the name of urban modernism, it earned a global reputation as a technopolis. This reputation for innovation in urban technology was fanned in the Weimar Republic and revived—in very different ways—in West Berlin to cope with political isolation after 1949, to embrace a sustainability agenda in the early years of the reunified city, and to decarbonize the city today. Berlin is an instructive case study to understand the ambitions and tensions involved in transforming environments through technology across highly diverse political regimes. More broadly, the book advances envirotech history as a productive lens on shifting relationships between society, nature, and technology in cities.

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Grounding Berlin fills an essential gap in Berlin’s history: how to understand the complex intertwining of its multiple ecologies and networked technologies in making the modern technopolis. Grounding Berlin provides the essential guide to the often hidden ‘ecotechnical’ dynamics, relations, and controversies in constructing Berlin’s atmospheric, surface, volumetric, and underground spaces.

Simon Marvin, University of Sheffield

384 Pages, 6 x 9 in.

June, 2025

isbn : 9780822948322

Series

History of the Urban Environment

Subjects

History / Europe / Germany

about the editor

Timothy Moss is senior researcher at the Integrative Research Institute on Transformations of Human-Environment Systems (IRI THESys) at the Humboldt University of Berlin and an honorary professor at the Leibniz University Hannover.

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