Planning urban infrastructures across Berlin’s turbulent modern history

Abstract

In his talk, Tim Moss unpacks what urban infrastructure planning can mean – as a concept and as a practice – using the experience of Berlin’s infrastructure history as a generative case. Berlin is a city rich in imagined and contested socio-technical futures across the 20th century. It has also witnessed periods of great uncertainty, crisis, and instability that have posed severe challenges to professional agency. He explores a variety of future-oriented interventions from the Weimar Republic, the Nazi era, socialist East Berlin, insular West Berlin, and the reunited city to illustrate diverse modes of infrastructure planning that reach far beyond standardized, formal planning procedures. He uses this ‘technopolitics’ of infrastructure planning to consider how histories of infrastructure can be rendered relevant to today’s challenges.

About the lecturer

Tim is a 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 Leibniz University Hannover. His research is distinctive for connecting historical studies of infrastructure with contemporary debates on socio-technical and urban transitions.