Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Dümpelmann, Sonja
• Munck, Bert De

Titel

Counting and caring for urban trees: Street tree surveys and citizen protest in twentieth-century West Berlin

Ist Teil von

• Politics of Urban Knowledge, 2023, p.201-228

Auflage

1

Ort / Verlag

United Kingdom: Routledge

Erscheinungsjahr

2023

Link zum Volltext

Quelle

Alma/SFX Local Collection

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• This chapter explores the role that the co-production of knowledge and 'contingent knowledge-making' (De Munck and Lachmund) by activist citizens, scientific experts, and governmental officials played in the protection, care and management of street trees in West Berlin in the 1970s and 1980s. Since the 1960s, drought, soil pollution by de-icing salts, air pollution resulting from industry and motorised traffic, and dog urine had increasingly been affecting the health of West Berlin's street trees. Withering and dying trees incited citizen protest and environmental activism. The chapter shows how this protest both built upon and led to scientific research into trees' vulnerability and resilience. It elucidates how environmental activism motivated the use of aerial photography and the experimentation with different cartographic and recording techniques for urban tree surveys. Illustrating the different techno-scientific methods and representations used by various urban actors to save street trees and improve their health, the chapter also draws attention to how they were conceived of as both 'bureaucratic trees', understood as cultivated, planted and controlled by humans, and 'real trees', imagined as lying beyond human control. Revealing the close entanglement of emotional citizen activism, purportedly objective scientific research and pragmatic urban tree management, the chapter posits that their contingent knowledge-making was a fundamental step in re-establishing West Berlin's pre-war image as a model tree city. In Berlin in September 2018, after one of the driest and hottest summers on record, Berliners and their street trees experienced two more weeks of temperatures that ranged between 25 and 30 degrees Celsius. This chapter looks more closely at the developments and events leading up to the increased protection of street trees in West Berlin in the 1980s. It explores the co-production of non-expert and expert knowledge and the 'contingent knowledge-making' of citizen activism, scientific research and urban tree management and how it provided a fundamental step in re-establishing West Berlin's pre-war image as a model tree city. As in 2018, Berliners also experienced a particularly hot and dry summer in 1976. The central issues that agitated tree lovers and environmentalists in the second half of the 1970s were soil pollution caused by de-icing salt and air pollution resulting from the exhaust fumes of motor traffic.