Timothy Moss (ed.): Grounding Berlin. Ecologies of a Technopolis, 1871 to the Present. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, series History of the Urban Environment, 2025, Chapter 1, pp. 31-56, ISBN 9780822948322
The book 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.
Am Montag, den 13. Oktober 2025, von 16 bis 18 Uhr stellten wir das Buch im Simmelsaal des Centre Marc Bloch in der Friedrichstraße 191 in 10117 Berlin vor; es organisierte das Berlin-Brandenburgische Colloquium für Umweltgeschichte. Von den Autorinnen und Autoren waren anwesend: Timothy Moss, Dorothee Brantz, Rita Gudermann, Marion Steiner und Nina Lorkowski. Die Veranstaltung fand hybrid und in deutscher Sprache statt.
Während der Veranstaltung konnte das Buch zum Vorzugspreis von 40 Euro erworben werden.