Fertile cities: More-than-human fertility and the urban fertilityscapes of the Berlin sewage fields

Abstract

The article examines the dialectics between more-than-human fertility and urban development, exploring the historical case of the Berlin sewage fields. In doing so, it contributes to more-than-human urban geographies in three ways. First, it points out a current move beyond the idea of “living cities” that foregrounds the biological and temporal edges of more-than-human life. Following this, the article discusses more-than-human fertility as a so far underexplored edge of life and conceptualizes it as spatiotemporal arrangement of both living beings and non-living materialities. Finally, it introduces the concept of urban fertilityscapes and applies it to the case of the Berlin sewage fields, which from the late 19th to the late 20th century combined wastewater disposal with agricultural nutrient (re)use. Drawing on a qualitative content analysis of archival documents and scientific literature, the article demonstrates how the Berlin fertilityscape unfolds across wastewater infrastructures, more-than-human metabolisms, political-economic rationalities and affective atmospheres. The findings reveal that fertilityscapes generate inherent tensions between imperatives to intensify production and the metabolic capacities of more-than-human arrangements, creating instability in which the becoming of life drives urban development just as forcefully as its non-becoming.