Susanne Trumpf and Ivan Valin have published in the OASE Journals’ #110 issue ‘A project of the soil’. The paper with the title ‘Taxon|Archive|Lab – Library: Soils for the regeneration of the urban landscape’ investigates the potential to reclaim urban soils as a dynamic resource in remaking the city for a more sustainable future. Student-led archival exercises, and open-ended material experimentations around TAL-L are described as a foundation to restore deep knowledge about soils within the landscape architectural education.
Archival sheet for student soil samples
From the OASE call:
For a long time, the theme of soil – as matter, not as territory – has been the quasi exclusive subject of agriculture, geography and soil science. Only in the last few decades, due to a rapidly growing awareness of climate change, has soil increasingly come into focus in urban design, in particular as a matter that can also provide ecosystem services in urban environments.
The editors of OASE 110 believe that soils, although degraded and fragmented, call to be looked upon with a new gaze. They should be rearticulated in a new project aimed at the construction of a shared, productive and inhabited nature, containing different elements of urbanity and offering – at the same time – a more resilient and sustainable environment for all.
Inspired by Bernardo Secchi’s 1986 text ‘Progetto di Suolo’, this issue of OASE makes a critical analysis of how soil – as an intermediary package that connects surface and subsurface – can further connect to the practices of urbanism and urban design, and how it can guide those practices in exploring new agendas.
