Pathways to mainstreaming rainwater harvesting in Berlin

First published as: Natàlia García Soler, Timothy Moss, Ourania Papasozomenou, Rain and the city: Pathways to mainstreaming rainwater harvesting in Berlin, Geoforum, Volume 89, 2018, pp. 96-106. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2018.01.010 This accepted manuscript version of the article stated above is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/Studies of rainwater harvesting regularly highlight the rich diversity of technologies used to collect, treat and reuse rainwater in cities, but rarely devote attention to the equally diverse visions that drive rainwater harvesting projects. 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. From a database of over 250 rainwater harvesting projects we select, analyse and compare three case studies which encapsulate 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 significantly, it shows how each scheme 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. These empirical findings are interpreted using STS concepts relating to sociotechnical imaginaries, urban infrastructures in transition and institutional obduracy and change.Peer Reviewe