Rooted in Soil: a relational approach to spatial planning and design with soil

Description

Like the social sciences and humanities, the field of spatial planning and design is increasingly turning its attention to soil as a condition for sustainable, climate-adaptive environments. Yet soil is commonly approached instrumentally, framed as a passive substrate, a resource, or a provider of ecosystem services. Within this framing, planning and design projects tend to seek generalizable guidelines, rules of thumb, or design toolboxes that allow soil to be incorporated without sustained engagement. To support this approach, planners and designers often rely on technical consultation with “soil experts,” resulting in planning and design decisions based on abstracted knowledge that overlooks the contextual, social, and ecological roles soils play in our environments.
This research addresses this gap by engaging with soils through hands-on methods in an interdisciplinary collaboration between spatial designers and ethnographers, drawing on soil humanities scholarship. It explores how planners and designers might obtain and operationalize soil knowledge when working in community-led food gardens, where relationships with soil are explicitly enacted.
Over five months, the research team collaborates with two gardening communities in Rotterdam and the Green Heart, participating in gardening activities and observing how people cultivate soil. Insights from these collaborations are translated into “soil characters,” a visual library of the living and non-living elements that shape soil formation. These characters are organized into relational diagrams that reveal soil formation as a socially and materially entangled process. By making these relationships explicit, the project enables collective reflection on how they might be reorganized and how our practices might be reoriented in relation to soil.
By foregrounding relational, site-specific, hands-on knowledge, this research demonstrates how spatial planning and design might operationalize soil humanities scholarship. It hereby contributes to spatial planning and design approaches that treat soils not as technical substrates, but as dynamic ecologies shaped through complex processes and interactions.

Period	15 Apr 2026
Event title	STS NL CONFERENCE: KNOWLEDGE & TECHNOLOGY IN TIMES OF GLOBAL CRISES
Event type	Conference
Location	Enschede, NetherlandsShow on map
Degree of Recognition	International