Raindrops keep falling on my roof: imaginaries, infrastructures and institutions shaping rainwater harvesting in Berlin

ABSTRACT

Studies of rainwater harvesting regularly highlight the rich diversity of technologies used for rainwater harvesting in cities, but rarely devote attention to the equally diverse logics driving rainwater harvesting projects (RWHPs). To rectify this omission this paper presents research from a city – Berlin – which has a long pedigree of rainwater harvesting that has given rise, over the past 30 years, to an astonishingly varied range of schemes. We analyse and compare three cases encapsulating three distinct project types prevalent in the city: public, grassroots and commercial. The paper demonstrates the nature of diversity between the three and illustrates how diverse logics of rainwater harvesting co-exist within one city. More fundamentally, it unpacks these logics using concepts of sociotechnical imaginaries, urban infrastructures in transition and institutional obduracy and change. It is demonstrated, thereby, how each project reflects a particular imaginary of why urban rainwater should be harvested, how and for whom, and how these imaginaries have emerged out of particular institutional and infrastructural contexts in the course of Berlin’s post-reunification development. The paper concludes with reflections on the implications of this conceptually grounded, cross-case comparison for environmental research and policy.

KEYWORDS:

• Rainwater harvesting
• institutions
• imaginaries
• urban infrastructure
• Berlin

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Acknowledgements

The research for this article was conducted within the project ‘UrbanRain: Urban rainwater harvesting from niche to mainstream: challenges and opportunities for planning’, funded by the Swedish research foundation Formas. The authors are most grateful for the help and advice on this paper given by the project team of UrbanRain: Lina Suleiman (project coordinator), David Saurí, Bo Olofsson, José Esteban Castro and Laura Palau.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Ourania Papasozomenou is a social scientist working on policy studies and sustainability issues, with an empirical focus on water governance and islands. She studied Environmental Science in the University of the Aegean and Integrated Natural Resource Management in the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin where she also obtained her PhD in Agricultural Economics.

Her broad area of interest is nature-society relations. In particular, Ourania’s work addresses the policy dimension of sustainability, with a specific focus on water governance, institutional change and island geographies. In her doctoral dissertation, based on insights gained from Institutionalism and Nissology, she investigated reasons for the chronically dysfunctional water sector in Greek islands and proposed measures to rectify the problem. Since 2016 she is a post-doctoral researcher at IRI THESys.

Timothy Moss holds a B.A. in European Studies (Sussex), an M.Phil. in Modern European History (Oxford) and a D.Phil in German municipal history (Oxford). He is a Senior Researcher at IRI THESys. Prior to this appointment he headed a research department at the Leibniz Institute for Regional Development and Structural Planning (IRS).

His research revolves around processes of institutional change relating to public goods and their spatiality in general, and urban infrastructure systems in particular. With his multi-disciplinary background in history and political science and 20-year experience on interdisciplinary research projects both within and beyond the social sciences he is naturally attracted to scholarship at the interface of diverse debates on this topic. In his work he draws on concepts relating to socio-technical systems, institutional change, urban and regional development, multi-level governance, global change and environmental history in order to devise novel perspectives and derive innovative insight on the dynamic relationship between infrastructures, actors and space.

Natàlia García Soler graduated in Political and Public Administration Sciences at the Autonomous University of Barcelona and in the MSc ‘Sustainable Development’ at the University of Leipzig (Germany) and Karl-Franzens-University (Austria). She has worked as a research associate in the project UrbanRain, focusing on alternative forms of storm- and rainwater management in urban spaces at the Leibniz-Institute for Research on Space and Society (IRS) in Erkner. Her research interests also include climate policy, urban governance, resources management and urban resilience. Since 2016 Natàlia is working at the Association for Rural Development Thuringia

Notes

1. For a comprehensive account and analysis of the database, please refer to García Soler, Moss, & Papasozomenou, 2018, a parallel study conducted by the authors.

2. The private-public-partnership includes the two borough administrations and five private companies, among them the Berlin Water Company (BWB) and IKEA.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Svenska Forskningsrådet Formas [259 - 2013-782].