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Short abstract

Hamburg’s flowering meadows show how urban lawns become experimental sites for biodiversity. Through maintenance practices, seed sourcing, and novel mowing techniques, practitioners co-produce new ecological regimes, making green spaces contested sites of knowledge production.

Long abstract

Across many European cities, municipal lawns are being transformed into flowering meadows in response to biodiversity concerns. In Hamburg, initiatives such as Natürlich Hamburg! promote ecological mowing regimes and reseeding with plant mixtures designed to support insects and other species. While often framed as straightforward ecological improvements, the practices through which these meadows are assembled reveal more complex relations.

This contribution traces the emergence of 'ecological' mowing through a multi-sited ethnography of maintenance practices, conservation initiatives, and supporting technoscientific infrastructures. Practitioners experiment with low-impact mowing technologies adapted from alpine agriculture and develop novel material and metabolic relations to counter high fertilizer loads, which threaten many pre-industrial species assemblages. Urban meadows are de-fertilized by biomass removal and by opening new material pathways that allow these assemblages to persist.

These initiatives are not simple transfers of rural conservation practices into cities. Rather, they emerge through a differentiated community of conservationists, ecologists, landscape architects, municipal crews, and administrators co-designing new maintenance regimes. As they negotiate ecological goals, technical constraints, and public expectations, urban lawns become sites where the meadow is enacted as a contested epistemic object—for example, through regularly mown 'acceptance strips' that frame taller vegetation and signal intentional care.

This empirical study demonstrates how urban green spaces function as epistemic frontiers, where agricultural conservation models, urban infrastructures, and ecological processes are experimentally recombined to produce novel urban ecologies.