Hello friends and colleagues,
I am in residence at the Urban Soils Institute / Swale House on Governor’s Island this week and last: I finally find time to write again! While here I am investigating methods for representing urban soils, exploring carbon/terrain connections, and making new earthly models. Below I share some of my findings, and I make a case for exploring soil-climate relations as a matter of design.
We who live on earth are densely entwined. We eat and arrive in the bellies of others, sharing minerals made ready through gravity and weather. Nudging, emitting, surrounding, we connect (each moment, every day).
Climate change amplifies this entwinement, but strangely. Distant shifts come close, criss-crossing scales of perception. Automobiles make forest fires; factories create floods. No eating, this; rather a long-chain series of transformations, its logic so lengthy one struggles to follow the thread.
The very term we use for this complexity puts climate at the center of change. And recent events – weather, temperatures, storms and floods – show it to be so. But this framing also evades the source. Belching smoke does not originate at the factory. Carbon is set loose by industry, yes; but first it is displaced.
Terrain is where the change begins. Oil, coal, and gas lie deep beneath our feet: earthly carbon slow-cooked, collected over millennia on the surface of the earth. Organism-bodies accreted, layered, squeezed tight through time. To make industrial-scale energy, humans suck and dig and frack these ancient materials, then release their remains into air. Extraction makes power and waste.
Terrain can also take carbon back in; undisturbed, it does so readily. But as the machinery of industrialized consumption/production consumes deep carbon, it inhibits ground re-uptake as well: churning up soils (development), depleting them (industrial agriculture), sealing them (urbanization). By abusing terrain, we make it harder for carbon to settle into ground.
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On Governor’s Island, I walk from the ferry to Swale House. Old yellow houses arc the edge of a long, treed lawn. I cross beneath ample sycamores, glimpse new-fallen chestnuts, crunch acorns beneath my feet. I am here to visualize urban soils and their connections to climate; I am here to focus, study, experiment, and dream.
I am here because my students struggled to represent soil. These were landscape architecture students, in a studio course. I wanted them to explore how Montreal’s urban landscapes could sequester carbon more effectively. Scientists are still sorting out how soils hold carbon – a surprising lot remains unknown – but some things are clear. Healthy soils can sequester carbon well, even in cities: park soils in Paris and New York are richer in carbon than nearby farms, richer even than nearby forests. Central Park’s soil microbiomes are extraordinarily diverse – another sign of good carbon stocking, for microbiota can break organic matter into carbon and move it further down (left on the surface biomass degrades into the atmosphere, contributing carbon not to soil but to air). Sealing soils, meanwhile, ends their livingness; it also holds historic carbon deposits in. In short: principles and practices can be found, even amongst unknowns.
Given this, I still don’t entirely understand why students struggled as they did to engage space beneath the section line. It’s true that gaps in knowledge required guessing; a feeling of uncertainty prevailed. It’s also true that their struggle was mine; I failed to quell their uneasiness at reaching well beyond the known. And perhaps we faced something else still (though I confess this is pure conjecture on my part). I suspect they struggled to show soil because it is magic.
That is to say: soil is an edge-state, a site of transformation. Tactile, mushy, immediate and unbound, it is a site of ongoing material alteration from death into life. This is at once obvious and thoroughly mysterious. Alchemy in many small touches between beings close and different, mostly hidden from view.
Here at the Urban Soils Institute, then, I work a threshold between science-based pragmatics and art-based magic. The latter is not ready for words (though some images can be found here).
Pragmatics, though, I can write about. There are ways to hold carbon more tightly within the earth, and to do so in cities: stocking biochar in tree pits, nourishing soils so they hold carbon well, selecting plant mixes effective at taking carbon deep, simply unsealing (uncovering) urban ground.
There are precedents for visualizing ground as well, such as soil profiles – pedology’s sectional views. As with some of the earliest cross-section drawings, renaissance depictions of ruins and dissected cadavers, this representational method works a boundary between liveliness and dissolution, peeking into a body with parts removed. Soil profiles show structural components: one must be trained to deduce the livingness within. Designers can learn from them, especially if we introduce other things: plant root diagrams (their forms and depths); macro and micro biotic communities; a visualization of carbon. Can all this be knit together in a way that enables new design understandings and interventions? I think so.
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There is more work to be done; for now I leave you with this. Carbon cycles through an earth very full. There is ground beneath your feet – be it “sealed,” or lively, or something in-between. In the world, this ground is a full space often ignored. On the page it is an empty space, ready to be filled.
Enormous thanks to everyone at the Urban Soils Institute - with extra gratitude to Margaret Boozer and Richard Shaw - for the space, soil information, and welcome into the USI community. Thanks also to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and Université de Montréal for related funding.
I am not alone among designers of the built environment in thinking and engaging soils. I suspect - and hope - that this is the beginning of a larger shift, in which designers attend more to carbon and its ground.