[1] Screenshot: Compacts of Mayors, Berlin (fair use). Click for full size - The Berlin Review of Books - http://berlinbooks.org/brb - Essay Review: Greening Berlin Posted By brb On March 26, 2018 @ 3:35 pm In Global Affairs,Natural History,Science & Technology,Social & Political Studies | Comments Disabled by Ingmar Lippert and Josefine Raasch In his book Greening Berlin, Jens Lachmund (2013) contributes to the growing genre of the social studies of environmental science and governance. Focusing on Berlin’s biotope-protection policy, Lachmund’s work provides an analysis of the co-emerging of ecology and urban environmental planning. By that, he adds to the recent historiography of nature conservation and landscape planning. The book is published by MIT Press in the ‘Inside Technology’ Series, which aims to combine historiographic books on technology with methodologies developed in sociological or scientific knowledge communities. Lachmund’s book fits well into this series as it ‘combines insights and methods from social studies of science and technology, from environmental sociology, from environmental history, and from urban studies to shed light on the nexus of science, politics, and the spaces of the natural environment’ (p. 5). This framing provides the background we have in mind when we review this book from the perspective of the social studies of science and technology (STS). Before turning to a discussion of Lachmund’s detailed argument, we begin our review with a brief reflection on the discourse of current (urban) environmental science and governance. Introduction Cities and urban assemblages are key sites of governance of environmental destruction as well as of hope. The United Nations’ Compact of Mayors‘ initiative for responding to climate change (launched 2014) and the European Commission’s Covenant of Majors for Climate & Energy (since 2008) are an outcome of recent policy investment in cities as significant drivers in sustainable development. Considering urban settlements in relation to humans as troubling as well as being troubled by the environment is by no means a recent fad. This is illustrated by the subprogram ‘Metropolitan Areas as Ecosystems’ in UNESCO’s Man and the Biosphere Program (ongoing since 1971) but also historically, say, by Friedrich Engels’s The Condition of the Working Class in England ([1845] 1969). In the attempts to manage and govern urban ecological and built environments and their energy infrastructures, climate change and biodiversity are deeply related to programmes of inventorisation and ‘datafication’ of the urban environment. See for example the screenshot of the Compact of Mayors subpage for Berlin: at the bottom of the page, we find the linear phases of the trajectory towards a sustainable city; by following a vague ‘commitment’ to the Compact, the city has to produce an ‘inventory’. If we think of the mayors’ initiatives, and the ‘atmosphere business’ – emissions trading – then, it seems obvious to also think of the marketisation of biodiversity (using terms such as ‘ecosystem services’ and ‘natural capital’). Yet, anyone attempting to turn urban biodiversity into ecosystem services would to well to question the emergence of urban biodiversity with Lachmund’s book. In Viitanen and Kingston’s (2014) analysis, datafying urban environmental and climate relations through smart technologies leads to outsourcing democratic and environmental resilience to the global technology sector – consider Cisco, Microsoft, Phillips or IBM. Such critical engagement is accompanied by recent theorisations within actor-network theory, which radically question the ontology of a city, its humans and non-humans, materials and semiotic relations (Blok 2013; Farías and Bender 2010): the role of the human as the ultimate arbiter of the city is deconstructed. Specifics of historically, bio-chemically and otherwise materially situated people, things, plants, animals, what they do to and/or with each other, are foregrounded as emerging and shaped by urban and environmental matters. This perspective resonates with understanding the human not as an abstract entity living on and exploiting Earth, but rather as unequally participating in myriad complicated ways in emerging local-planetary and unruly processes, occasionally addressed as Gaia (Stengers 2015; Haraway 2016; Latour 2017). What urban nature and ecology is, is not self-evident in this discourse. That it is neither something we can simply leave to administration nor the market alone, clearly emerges in Jens Lachmund’s Greening Berlin (2013). For Lachmund presents us with the shifts in how urban nature was conceptualised across different scientific-administrative-political configurations, ranging from late 19th century Kaiserreich and the Weimar years to post-World War II, and (here focusing on West Berlin) well into post-1990 reunified Berlin. He details how in the different configurations, different kinds of natures have been imagined and brought into being (e.g. Naturmonumente, biodiversity). Lachmund’s approaches his topic historically, retracing carefully how the term urban ecology has been enrolled and mobilised to bring into being, or refer to, three different kinds of discursive entities. Using the city of Berlin as the focus of his study, he locates and reconstructs the specific building and shaping of the subdiscipline of ecology at the Department of Ecology at Berlin’s Technical University (Technische Universität Berlin), associated with professor Herbert Sukopp. Lachmund also details how Sukopp’s urban ecology moved into urban planning discourse: The scientific urban ecology changed when it was translated into administrative practices, generating not only different kinds of claims about the environment but also new ‘environmental entities’ (p. 68). Administration’s urban ecology, finally, was discursively distinct from http://berlinbooks.org/brb/2018/03/essay-review-greening-berlin/print/ 1 of 5 29/08/2018, 21:14