Grounding Berlin - (History of the Urban Environment) by Timothy Moss (Hardcover)

About the Book

A Historical Survey of Environmental and Infrastructure Politics in Berlin

Book Synopsis

Grounding Berlin explores the city's pioneering contributions 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 for understanding 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 for studying shifting relationships between society, nature, and technology in cities.

Review Quotes

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

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

About the Author

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.