Re-placing soil and its mattering in more-than-human cities

ABSTRACT

What role does soil play in sustainable design interventions and can it help to reconfigure human place experiences and human-nature relations in cities? Cities are home to a host of nonhuman actors that are overlooked or under-acknowledged in design and planning practices and in everyday dwelling. Soil is one such under-acknowledged urban inhabitant. In a period where cities and their inhabitants must adapt to the challenges of a changing climate, the paper draws together theory in design, planning and geography and empirical research with designers and residents in Australian cities to re-place soil as mattering in place(making) practices, everyday urban dwelling and urban sustainability transitions. The research contributes to recent work in (post)human geography to discuss ‘soil-planty mattering’, or the active role of soils and their intra-actions with other urban matter in shaping place. Soil-planty mattering is shown to disrupt human place(making), extending cities in material, temporal and spatial ways. In these extensions, the research suggests that soils have particular potential to re-orient human relationships with nonhumans in urban realms.

KEYWORDS:

• Soil
• place
• more-than-human
• cities
• sustainable design

Acknowledgements

My thanks go to my PhD supervisors Associate Professor Cecily Maller and Associate Professor Martin Mulligan for their support and insights into this research. Also to Associate Professor Maller and Lisa De Kleyn for reviewing early versions of this article. I would also like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their generous feedback. I would like to acknowledge that this article was prepared on unceded lands of the Woi wurrung and Boon wurrung language groups of the eastern Kulin Nations.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes on contributor

Sarah A. Robertson is Research Fellow in the Centre for Urban Research at RMIT University. Sarah's research emerges from cultural and urban geographies and examines human-nonhuman relations and sustainable interventions at the residential scale.

Notes

1 I use this term to acknowledge that data is not merely collected but that its gathering is informed by, amongst other things, the methods used and the situatedness of researchers, and to acknowledge the role of research participants in this process.

2 To clarify my use of more-than-human and nonhuman, I recognise there is debate about the use of these terms when the purpose of more-than-human thinking and discussion is to move beyond these unhelpful binaries (Braidotti and Hlavajova 2018; Whatmore 2006). However, for clarity and brevity, I use the former where I wish to emphasise entanglement and use nonhuman or other-than-human where I wish to emphasise the agencies of these entities.

Additional information

Funding

This research was funded by an Australian Government Research Training Program Scholarship and an RMIT University PhD Scholarship.