In this guest post, Dr Anastasiya Halauniova describes the ideas behind Vital grounds: Valuing urban soils in the afterlife of mining, an Urban Urgencies project funded by the Urban Studies Foundation.
Urban soils are a ‘weird’ element of our environment. Unlike water, plants, and animals, urban soils are rarely considered to be part of urban nature—what Germain Meulemans (2020) addresses as the ‘backgrounding’ of urban soils—treated as an insignificant, passive surface rather than a vibrant participant in urban life. Though they provide the physical foundation for all urban life, and urban residents are in regular contact with them—walking on them, growing food in them, and ingesting their particles—urban soils are nonetheless dismissed as ‘non-soils’. Even in soil science, urban soils have been excluded from the common understanding of soil and treated instead as its opposite: an anthropogenic ‘technical substrate’, a technosol. Their dismissal is so routine that urbanisation projects excavate and dump urban soils in landfills as a matter of course, making soils account for roughly one quarter of all waste (Figure 1). At the same time, when not disposed of, urban soils are devalued in a different way: they are treated as storage for toxins—repositories into which the urban construction, the extraction of raw materials, and the production of commodities, among other activities, deposit their unwanted residues.
Today, this taken-for-granted vision is changing fast. As land grows scarce, as soil increasingly degrades, and as climate change intensifies, policymakers and scientists are starting to look at urban soils as a new kind of resource—recasting them as a bioinfrastructure for urban resilience and climate adaptation. Urban soils and their microbiomes are now put to work, as Anna Krzywoszynska (2020) evocatively puts it, for a whole range of economic and political projects, from pollution remediation to carbon storage to the extraction of critical minerals. And even soils most directly altered by the toxic economy of fossil fuels—extraction of coal and the deadly leakages it leaves behind—are not left behind by these biocapitalist processes. These urban soils, too, are slowly being reimagined as potential resources for urban growth and the ‘green’ economic development.
The project ‘Vital grounds: Valuing urban soils in the afterlife of mining’, supported by the Urban Studies Foundation ‘Urban Urgencies’ grant, starts from this juncture. It asks how the imperatives of the green transition are now generating new understandings of post-mining urban soils, and what socioecological effects these new understandings carry for communities living on them. In particular, the project focuses on the North East England, and Newcastle upon Tyne, as its telling case: during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, this place became the ‘heart’ of the coal mining that ‘fed’ steam energy and global capitalist industrialisation. Today, the soils of this region bear the toxic legacies of such fossil capital—legacies that overlap, in new and uneven ways, with longstanding class dispossession that characterises the region (Figure 2). It is through the lens of this region that our team, which comprises a sociologist, a soil scientist, an architect, an artist, and a local NGO, D2Youth, will fundamentally rethink the new global politics of urban ground.
We will achieve this goal through a series of steps. First, the project will explore how urban soil practitioners in the UK understand the role of soil in urban life and the emerging practices and controversies through which urban soils are transformed into different kinds of resources, from bioremediation workers to biodiversity units. For this purpose, we will interview developers, engineers, architects, remediation specialists, and construction workers, among many others, and map their visions of urban soil, values they attach to urban soil, and concerns they share around urban soil.
Second, the project will focus upon Newbiggin Hall Estate in Newcastle upon Tyne, a low-income, working-class neighbourhood located on a former mining site and home to descendants of former mining workers. The area has recently undergone extensive redevelopment and partial remediation of its industrial legacy. Through archival analysis and interviews with developers, consultants, environmental specialists, and residents involved in the area’s transformation, we will examine the new politics of soil remediation in contemporary cities. As land becomes increasingly scarce, cities are turning toward the redevelopment and remediation of former industrial sites, generating new spatial dynamics through interventions in and mobilisation of urban soils. The project will demonstrate that soil remediation is not a process of returning soils to an imagined ‘pristine’ condition—a condition that may not be attainable—but a process through which new regimes of value, new forms of urban governance, and new multispecies relations are produced.
Finally, the project will conduct a series of participatory action workshops and soil-centred walks with local residents to explore their relationships with urban soils and the legacies of coal mining and pollution. These activities will make visible how residents encounter and engage with urban soils, which often remain hidden or taken for granted, in their everyday lives, and how they interpret and negotiate the environmental burdens and benefits associated with soil pollution and remediation. During these activities, residents will also learn, alongside a soil scientist, how to examine their soils for pollution, and what forms of engagement with urban soils can support their health. Through this combination of soil-centred and arts-based activities—culminating in an exhibition and a digital zine documenting the methodology in detail for others to use — the project will work with residents to develop alternative imaginaries of urban soils, grounded in principles of social justice, soil care, and multispecies flourishing.
As interventions into urban soils intensify globally—creating new relations between soils, bodies, and environments in cities and beyond—and as urban soils are increasingly turned into new forms of resources, we want this project to be a stepping stone towards rethinking the place of urban soils in contemporary urbanisation. On the one hand, the project challenges the dominant, soil-absent understandings of the urban that prevail in urban theory. It introduces urban soils—even polluted, ‘damaged’ soils too often deemed abject—as vital participants in urban life that carry both lively and toxic potentials. On the other hand, the project also offers an account of the dangers of treating urban soils as living resources, critically examining the emerging efforts to ‘harness’ urban soils and their liveliness for different political and economic ends. In doing so, the project insists that recognising urban soil’s vitality is not in itself a guarantee of social and multispecies justice. Rather, what is even more important is to free the soil’s vitality from the capitalist logics that reduce liveliness to a source of exchange value, rather than a condition of collective flourishing.
References
Krzywoszynska, A. (2020). Nonhuman labor and the making of resources: Making soils a resource through microbial labor. Environmental Humanities, 12(1), 227-249.
Meulemans, G. (2020). Urban pedogeneses: The making of city soils from hard surfacing to the urban soil sciences. Environmental Humanities, 12(1), 250-266.