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 global population now lives in cities and is in direct contact with urban soils, urban soils have historically been dismissed as anthropogenic ‘non-soils’ and made hidden beneath layers of concrete or discarded as waste. Recently, however, rapid urbanisation and climate change have led scientists and policymakers to turn their attention to urban soils as providers of ‘ecosystem services’ essential to urban resilience. But although engagements with urban soils are intensifying, 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 and develops a sociological framework that recognises urban soils as active participants of urban processes that shape life below and above ground. In particular, it focuses on post-industrial urban soils and socio-environmental inequalities in the Northeast England, once the ‘heart’ of the coal mining industry that ‘fed’ industrial capitalism and urbanisation but that now bears its toxic legacies. The project therefore examines how urban soil practitioners—including planners and builders—understand and manage urban soils as either resources or waste, while also exploring how residents living with potentially contaminated post-industrial soils perceive, experience, and engage with them in everyday life. Through a series of soil-centred workshops and walks, the project explores how communities living on former mining sites relate to their ‘impure’ soils, and how the material properties of these soils intertwine with enduring social and spatial inequalities that shape the region. By bringing these aspects together, the project offers a new understanding of urban soils as active mediums of urban social relations in the aftermath of mining.