“GREEN FIX” AS CRISIS MANAGEMENT. OR,IN WHICH WORLD IS MALMÖ THE WORLD'S GREENEST CITY?

As economic and ecological crises evolve in combination, some policy strategies might aim at killing the two birds with one stone. One recent example can be found in Malmö, Sweden, where crisis management has operated, we propose, as a green fix. The district of Västra hamnen (Western Harbour) is at the centre of the reinvention of the city: once the home of a world‐leading shipyard, it is now a no less prominent neighbourhood of ecological virtues. Through outlining the history of Malmö in general and the Western Harbour in particular, we identify how the municipality and local capital in concert increasingly used “green” strategies in the urban policies that started as crisis management in the 1990s. Today Malmö is reckoned to be among the world's greenest cities, and we reflect on the importance of this international recognition for the city. Finally, we develop a critique of the green fix as concealing crucial factors of scale, and hence running the risk of myopia.     

From Batticaloa via Basel to Berlin. Transimperial Science in Ceylon and Beyond around 1900

ABSTRACT

Recent historiographies of ‘Science and Empire’ have successfully critiqued older euro-centric narratives. They highlighted how science was ‘co-produced’ through interactions between knowledgeable European and non-European actors in colonial ‘contact zones’, and how this ‘pidginised knowledge’ circulated through networks across various sites within the British Empire. This article shares and expands this approach. By focussing on continental European scholars in Ceylon around 1900, it argues that scientific networks were never confined to a particular empire. Science among Europeans was, rather, multi-lingual, mostly cross-disciplinary and always transimperial. Applying such an approach to the history of science in late colonial Ceylon allows us to uncover entanglements between historical processes that have for too long remained subject matters of disconnected historiographies: the emergence of Buddhist revivalism, evolutionary theories about human origins, the transformation from ‘liberal race science’ to Nazi eugenics in Germany, and the surfacing of British cultural anthropology.