Dr Anastasiya Halauniova, Ms Angela Smith
Funding period: 1 September 2026 – 28 February 2028
Type of funding:
Urban Urgencies
Award Number: USF-URU-260703
Partner organisations: Durham University (United Kingdom), D2 Youth Zone Ltd (United Kingdom)
Investigators: Dr Anastasiya Halauniova, Ms Angela Smith
Team members: Ms Despoina Papadopoulou (Mazi Architects), Ms Elena Khurtova (Independent Artist), Dr Ciara Keating (Durham University)
Contact: Dr Anastasiya Halauniova
Abstract:
Urban soils are one of the most neglected parts of our environment. Although more than half of the world’s population now lives in cities and is in direct contact with urban soils—by walking on them, growing food in them, or ingesting their particles—urban soils have historically been dismissed as anthropogenic ‘non-soils’, concealed beneath layers of concrete or discarded as waste. Recently, however, growing land scarcity and climate change have led scientists and policymakers to view urban soils as ‘providers of ecosystem services’ essential to urban resilience and to ‘harness’ their properties for different economic and environmental projects. But although interventions into urban soils become more and more intensive, urban theory has yet to develop the tools to capture the role of urban soils within these changing politics. Even the growing scholarship on urban undergrounds portrays urban soils as a realm of infrastructure, territorial control, and resource extraction, rather than a vibrant site of more-than-human life, which quite literally ‘ingests’ and ‘digests’ the city.
This project addresses the longstanding neglect of urban soils by developing a social scientific framework for understanding how urban soils, as vital and heterogenous participants in urban processes, shape life both below and above ground at a time when cities are intervening in soils more intensively than ever before. In particular, it focuses on the role of post-industrial urban soils in mediating socio-environmental inequalities in Northeast England, once the ‘heart’ of the coal mining industry that fuelled industrial capitalism and urbanisation but now bears their toxic legacies. The project investigates how urban soil practitioners—including planners and builders—understand the ‘nature’ and ‘value’ of urban soils and manage them as construction materials, biodiversity resources, or waste, and how they decide which soils are repairable and which are not. Alongside these practices, the project explores how residents living with potentially contaminated soils perceive, experience, and engage with them in everyday life.
The project will work closely with a local NGO, residents living on former mining sites, an architect, and an artist to develop a unique soil-centred participatory action research programme. Through a series of soil-centred workshops and walks, it will explore how communities living on former mining sites relate to their ‘impure’ soils, and how the material properties of these soils become entangled with the enduring social and spatial inequalities that continue to shape the region. These collaborative activities will inform a publicly accessible digital zine and a public exhibition co-produced with local residents. Alongside this, the project will work in close dialogue with a soil scientist, whose expertise will contribute to a more integrated framework for understanding ‘soily’ environments while also informing locally meaningful interventions for communities living with post-industrial urban soils.
By bringing these perspectives together, the project will rethink the place of urban soils in everyday urban life and reconfigure the imaginary of urban soils—not as damaged substrates, but as vital environments that actively shape urban life across multiple spatial and temporal scales.