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Paper short abstract

This paper traces how learning emerges through socio-material engagements with contaminated sediments and spontaneous ecologies at the urban water infrastructure of Floating Berlin. It argues that sedimentary dynamics actively shape how humans and more-than-humans cohabit and learn with the site.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines how learning and cohabitation emerge “from the ground up“ by tracing socio-material engagements with contaminated sediments at Floating Berlin, a natureculture learning site situated in a rainwater retention basin adjacent to Berlin’s Tempelhof Airport. Constructed in the 1930s as hydrotechnical infrastructure and built on rubble, sands and muddy sediments, the site materializes layered histories of wartime destruction, post-war reconstruction, urban development and shifting governance structures. It functions as a sedimented assemblage and archive of infrastructural, political and environmental change.

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, I conceptualize the basin as a “feral landscape“ (Bubandt and Tsing, 2018), where managed infrastructure operates simultaneously as regulatory apparatus and urban ecological entity. Although sediments washed into the basin contain heavy metals and persistent organic pollutants above safety thresholds, spontaneous ecologies such as algae, reeds, amphibians, microbes have emerged from this contaminated matter. Cyclical transformations — algal blooms and collapse, sediment accumulation and decomposition — produce non-linear ecological rhythms in which degeneration and partial regeneration are mutually entangled, unsettling modern ideas of ecological purity. These processes blur distinctions between nature and infrastructure, life and decay.

I argue that these sedimentary dynamics actively shape how humans and more-than-humans cohabit and learn with the site. Learning unfolds through sustained exposure to fluctuating material conditions and what I term “situated co-becoming“: a long-term process of relational attunement through care, attention and material encounters. By thinking and learning from contaminated sediments, the paper contributes to an earthly anthropology attentive to deep material times and urban infrastructural ecologies.