Variations on a Theme: Temporality, Cities and the Environment

Global Environment, vol. 16, pp. 258–290

Abstract

Abstract One and six times. More-than-human time, deep time, past and future time, time control(led), waiting time, imagined time, before and after. One and six times - one and many times. One in multiple layers of (inter-)disciplinary vantage points on urban time(s) from a historian, an archaeologist, a geoscientist, an architect, a landscape architect, an urban planner. We cannot ever deal with only one time. We will always be faced with the challenge of integrating the geological and the biological, the historical human and more-than-human, the artefact and the material, the simultaneity of before and after, of experience and expectation, into one, very subjective and ever-changing, urban experience as we walk, breathe, live and study the city. Any city.

Authors 5

1. Dorothee Rummel

   Bauhaus-Universität Weimar · Technical University of Munich

   Affiliation as printed

   Junior Professor for Urban and Regional Design (Stadt Raum Entwerfen) at the Faculty of Architecture and Urbanism at Bauhaus-University Weimar since 2022. Before receiving the call to Bauhaus- University, Dorothee taught and researched urban and rural topics as Chair of Sustainable Urbanism at Technical University Munich for more than 10 years and was lecturer at the Institute for Urban Design and City Theory of Munich’s University of Applied Sciences. She is an architect and urban designer, studied

2. Simone M. Müller

   University of Augsburg

   Affiliation as printed

   Heisenberg Professor for Global Environmental History and Environmental Humanities at the University of Augsburg, Germany. She works at the intersection of globalisation processes, the economy–ecology nexus, toxicity and the age of the Anthropocene. Her research has received numerous awards and fellowships, including from the Smithsonian Institution, the Science History Institute, the University of Pennsylvania and the German Research Foundation

3. Karen G. Holmberg
   Affiliation as printed

   Archaeologist and volcanologist who specialises in volcanic contexts to examine the long-term experiences humans have had with environments that change unpredictably. She is interested in how the past can aid understanding of the environmental challenges and crises of the 21st century, particularly in the Global South. Her work has received awards and fellowships from Fulbright, Mellon, Wenner-Gren, Creating Earth Futures, Make Our Planet Great Again and the This is Not a Drill award through the

4. Avi Sharma

   University of Chicago · Technische Universität Berlin

   Affiliation as printed

   Senior Research Fellow and Assistant Professor at the Center for Metropolitan Studies (TU Berlin). He has a Ph.D. in Global and European History from the University of Chicago. Sharma is currently working on a German Research Council (DFG) funded project on Urban Seasonality. Seasons are both temporary and recurrent; they mediate between environment and ecology; climate and the weather; social organisation and everyday experience. How, though, does seasonality affect the administration of forced

5. Talitta Reitz

   Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society · Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München

   Affiliation as printed

   Brazilian landscape architect, urban planner, and Ph.D. candidate in environmental humanities at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society. Currently, she works at the LMU-Munich as a lecturer at the Department of English and American Studies and a project coordinator at the Center for International Health. Her doctoral research focuses on the environmental history of cycling cities, exploring the relationships between cycling cultures, urban planning and environmental history