Sandra JASPER, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Germany
This paper seeks to examine the role of urban soil as a critical layer in the context of the global environmental crisis. For a long time, soil maps have marked urban areas as grey space indicating an understanding of urban soil as inert base that presents a mere backdrop to the social life of cities. Over the past two decades, the urban grounds are increasingly recognized in their role as vital ecosystems, biodiverse or lively matter. Social scientists have started to trace the development of urban soil science as a sub-disciplinary field in specific urban contexts and have critically addressed the negative environmental effects of exploiting city soils. However, these scholars seem to agree that the long-term neglect of urban soil in science and politics has left urban dwellers with a lack of ‘soil awareness’, a decoupling of the social worlds of cities from the layer below the sealed surface. Berlin is both an experimental field for urban soil science and also a focal point for spatial practices engaging with urban soil. This paper takes the city of Berlin as a starting point to question the idea of ‘soil blindness’ by tracing key moments in the city’s history of confronting urban soil, from the memories of ‘rubble women’ to contemporary artistic and activist appropriations of contaminated soils to-be regenerated. These examples reveal that rather than being disconnected from social worlds, urban soils are rich repositories of urban life from which various memories and alternative socio-ecological futures can be gleaned. Furthermore, the paper critically discusses recent new materialist readings of soil that have highlighted its agency or vitality. Such neo-vitalist conceptions of soil in environmental research neglect the historiographic aspects to the origins of neo-vitalism and the role that soil itself has played in the history of early twentieth-century environmental ideas, and warrant further critical investigation.
Mots clés : urban soil|neo-vitalism|environmental crisis|urban nature
A103535SJ