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Short abstract:

By investigating the relationship between soil science and design practice through analysis of landscape architectural projects, this paper provides insights into dominant ways of making anthropogenic soils as well as revealing possibilities for alternative configurations.

Long abstract:

No longer merely a stable substrate supporting the city's surface, today an optimal urban soil is one that provides valuable ecosystem services. It is a sponge—or maybe a sink—metabolizing waste, absorbing stormwater, and supporting vegetation. Such soils are designed, the result of collaborations between landscape architects and soil scientists. As part of development schemes and infrastructure projects, designers attempt to establish living soils to provide certain aesthetic and ecosystem services. And yet, the more lively the ground becomes, the less predictable the results. The design of soil is thus always what Annmarie Mol would call a negotiation with a more-than-human community. And while designed soils play an important role in catalyzing and justifying novel forms of green development, design simultaneously provides tools for making soils otherwise. By understanding soils as malleable, contingent, and unpredictable, design practice can contribute to conceptualizing and theorizing soil in ways that enable much-needed transformations.

This conference paper links design practice to the soil humanities an empirical case study investigating soil specifications. It explores the relationship between soil scientists and designers in the context of a contested project transforming Manhattan's riverfront into a park-cum-flood protection infrastructure. The project sets in motion a choreography of lively materials, linking the center to the extractive zones at the urban periphery. The paper explores how the production of designed grounds mobilizes a heterogenous geography of sand mines, imperiled agricultural land, quarries, and waste disposal sites.