Urban soils: troubles, visibilities and opportunities

Presenting author: Sophie Gosch (University of Melbourne)

Other author: Dr Vanessa Lamb (University of Melbourne)

Sand is foundational for urban development and therefore, essential for construction (concrete and fill). Recently, however, there are urgent calls to attend to this overlooked resource as it has been deemed to be "running out" (Torres et al 2017). In this presentation, rather than take sand as a "natural resource" for granted, we interrogate the socio-ecological processes and transformations critical to sand becoming a resource. We employed a 'follow the thing' methodology (Cook 2004), following sand in Victoria, Australia from survey, to extraction, through to consumption and recycling. Fieldwork was conducted (both remotely and limited in person) between June and August 2020, including interviews supplemented with naturalistic observation and review of secondary literature.

By 'following' sand, we outline how a range of human and non-human actors are involved in sand 'becoming' a natural resource, as well as material transformations key to its commodification. A new insight that we identify is the significance of time and temporal rhythms that undergird sand's transformations from 'soil' to 'skyscraper'. By focusing on banal sand and its 'more than human' relations we also aim to contribute to debates on the less visible foundations of cities and urban development. 

Cook, I., 2004. Follow the thing: Papaya. Antipode 36(4), pp.642-664.

Torres, A., Brandt, J., Lear, K. and Liu, J., 2017. A looming tragedy of the sand commons. Science, 357(6355), pp.970-971.

Presenting author: David Kelly (Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology)

Soil remembers injustice. Through the cyclical process of burial and unearthing in the name of urban progress, soil obscures and reveals settler-colonialism's legacies and ongoing renewals. Whilst often represented in spectacular forms of violence and experienced in the quotidian scenarios of life for Indigenous peoples, the scale of settler-colonialism's impact is routinely forgotten. Soil is a material that captures the continuity of imperial intervention and surreptitiously forces moments to think about historical and contemporary injustice. Ann Stoler calls such material imperial debris, which are "the less perceptible effects of imperial interventions" that settle into "the social and material ecologies in which people live and survive" (2013, p. 4).

Soil embodies the effects of empire and tells a story of life and death's duration under protracted imperialism. But in the unearthing of soil toxic histories, soil can interrupt what often feels like the seamless march of settler futurity. This paper presents an examination of two urban renewal case studies in Melbourne, and demonstrates how soil pauses progress and forces a mode of dwelling that sits uncomfortably in the static debris of extraction, displacement and injustice. 

Presenting author: Cecily Maller (Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology)

The Western human/nature binary means that 'nature' is considered messy, dirty, unruly and the antithesis of what it means to be human, and a false dichotomy separates human bodies from their environments and habitats. Acknowledging that some microorganisms can cause disease and death, an obsession with sterilisation and hyper cleanliness is harming the microbiomes that play essential roles in human digestive and immune systems, and damages environmental microbiomes - or the ecosystems comprised of microorganisms and other species present in all environments, including urban ones. Although human bodies comprise a multitude of microorganisms, materials and matters, microbiomes have only recently been recognised as essential to many aspects of human and environmental health. Where once so-called 'dirty environments' were synonymous with disease and illhealth, ultra clean environments are now understood as unhealthy.

The paper argues that the environments people inhabit are always multi-species, more-than-human, places. The problem is that most current thinking and practice fails to recognise this. In order to bring the microbial world into sharper focus, focusing on soil, this paper uses a range of relational, more-than-human thinking and theories to reconsider everyday life as comprised of human-microbial naturecultures, interconnected with and co-constitutive of the places in which they occur. 

Presenting author: Thomas Lee (University of Technology, Sydney)

Other author: Rachael Wakefield-Rann (University of Technology, Sydney)

This paper discusses soil as an open-ended design problem, in other words, as something the exact nature of which is in significant part contingent on the tools, images, narratives and concepts invented to make it explicit. The technological, spatial and visual imaginary of soil is explored with reference to soil-sensing technologies, practices, mental models and metaphors. Particular focus is given to the tension between metaphors, visual representations, and mental models that are designed to account for the complexity and dynamism of soil behaviour and characteristics, and constraints associated with finite spheres of action concerned with immediate utility and viability. A conjectural narrative scenario focused on the way knowledge is experienced at a perceptual, cognitive and imaginative level is used to show a way beyond the easy oppositions between techno-scientific abstractions, on the one hand, and modes of sensing in alternative registers broadly associated with the celebration of life, the life-giving or the poetic, on the other hand. The scenario explores how subsoil and soil porosity might become areas of cultural concern, bringing together science, design and the humanities. 

Presenting author: Sarah Robertson (Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology)

Soils are too often forgotten or dismissed in urban theory (Kryzywoszynsk 2019), planning and development practices. Soils are a vital part of and vital to life on land, and significant in responding to socioecological challenges and injustices. Yet soils and their biodiversity are being degraded by human practices; sealed beneath human infrastructure and depleted of their potential, e.g. to support food production and store carbon. Soils are "easily appropriated" (Lay 2016) and their labouring is often taken-for-granted (Krzywoszynska 2020).

This paper discusses the ways soils (are understood to) act in, on and with cities. It suggests discourses of soil-human-city relations that serve as a heuristic to begin framing discussions around more careful human engagements with urban soils - soil as hidden urban infrastructure; soils as techno-fix or eco-saviour; soils as unknown urban underground; and soils and dispossession. We argue that bringing these discourses to light can productively shape research and conversations about urban soil care.