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Paper short abstract

Ecopoethics informs us to stay with troubled soil, caring in situ. Techno-legal infrastructure tells us to throw away the toxic “waste”. Lack of access to laboratory data to support the affective information to care for toxic soil, leads to many questions regarding possibility of acting and ethics.

Paper long abstract

Informed by a strong affective and reciprocal bond with soil – 'ecopoethics' after Puig de la Bellacasa (2021) – small in situ Urban Soil Care Architectures have been developed on an urban architecture school campus. Instead of transporting away the top 50 cm of soil to a reception facility and bringing in treated soil on trucks, as is common practice, we want to care for the soil on site. We want to help enliven the compacted soil, invite plants and microbial life into a fairly barren landscape design.

In one spot there is found high levels of toxic hydrocarbon residue. The law says leave it alone and tell the authorities. If you start digging, remove it or seal it. Monitoring the soil toxicity on site by a consultant or sending regular samples to laboratories, is very expensive, and we don’t have the expertise to do chemical analysis. The idea of developing community low tech soil care architectures can thus be said to break down as soon as you find residues that are toxic to humans.

We are making beautiful soil chromatography, communal compost, mycoremediation experiments and sensory workshops, cultivating reciprocal soil love. But to navigate more skilfully in the soil health techno-legal sphere, we need chemical data monitoring over time to carry out appropriate slow, accessible hydrocarbon remediation strategies like mycoremediation.

Is slow, low tech soil care in urban public space still possible, also when there is chemical toxicity? Can we love the oil in the soil?