1248 | 725 | The Refiguration of the Modern Conservation Regime: Space, Change and Botanical Knowledge | Jamie-Scott Baxter, Séverine Marguin

Botanical garden museums are undergoing profound transformations. At the beginning of the 21st century, refigurative processes associated with climate change, decolonisation, and advances in digital technology have led to a shift in the positioning of botanical gardens from Humboldtian collectors of nature to protectors of biodiversity and with this, caught between impulses of preservation and change. _x000D_
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In this paper, we examine this shift through a sociospatial perspective at Berlin’s Botanical Garden and Museum. Pursuing this investigation on two analytical levels, we analysed how the Berlin Botanical Garden is adapting to, or indeed struggling with a shifting conservation mission which necessarily includes heritage preservation, biodiversity protection, and energy conservation. Secondly, we consider in what ways these struggles signify a shift in the conservation regime itself, as the modernist logic upon which it emerged and spread is destabilising in the Anthropocene. To this end, we deployed the concept of staging nature as a way to describe and rethink the specific spatial ordering of botanical glasshouses and gardens as a multiplicity of social and ecological forces undergirded by colonial histories and Western scientific practices. _x000D_
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This opens the door to speculations on new ways of thinking natureculture in conservation, not only in extensive heritage landscapes but in everyday urban spaces which, as our study shows, are shaped and governed by institutions, actors, practices, and technologies concerned with the protection, preservation and control over human artefacts and nonhuman life, and how the inherited siloed approach of separating out these modes of conservation is clearly untenable._x000D_

Jamie-Scott Baxter, Séverine Marguin
Technical University Berlin

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ID Abstract: 725