Architecture has a Soil Problem
L'architecture a un problème de sol
Clara Journal, thematic issue, no. 13
Revue Clara, dossier thématique, n°13
Published on Wednesday, November 26, 2025
Abstract
From the digging of foundations to the sealing of surfaces, architectural practice typically treats soil as ‘dirt’—as matter out of place — an interchangeable substance devoid of specificity, meaning, or vitality. Soils are too often reduced to a passive background for human activity, an empty canvas to build upon rather than a living milieu to design with, within or through. This ignorance indirectly contributes to their depletion and demise. What would it mean to resist this thanatological path and instead reconceptualize both soil and architecture through their entanglements, in relation to the pedogenetic processes they co-produce ?
Announcement
Argument
Architecture has a soil problem. Not only epistemologically—through the discipline’s limited frameworks to understand, analyze, or work with soil—but also ontologically, in the very way it conceives of soil in the first place. From the digging of foundations to the sealing of surfaces, architectural practice typically treats soil as ‘dirt’—as matter out of place (Palmer, 2015)—an interchangeable substance devoid of specificity, meaning, or vitality. Soils are too often reduced to a passive background for human activity, an empty canvas to build upon rather than a living milieu to design with, within or through. This ignorance indirectly contributes to their depletion and demise. What would it mean to resist this thanatological path and instead reconceptualize both soil and architecture through their entanglements, in relation to the pedogenetic processes they co-produce ?
Recent scholarship has challenged this neglect. Authors such as Puig de la Bellacasa (2017) and Krzywoszynska, Banwart and Blacker (2020) show how soils are bound up with meanings, relationships, and responsibilities that extend beyond their material and biochemical functions. Design-oriented perspectives have also sought to reconceptualize soil through the lens of urban metabolism (Barles et al., 1999), as the material basis to reframe the urban project (Peleman et al., 2021), or as an ecosystem anticipating geosocial relations (Bonhevi-Rosich & Denizen, 2025). Together, these literatures point to the entangled relations between soil and design, while also showing how these relations have often been structured through extraction and neglect. It’s clear that soil matters to design, but how should soil matter to architecture ?
Soils do not simply ‘receive’ architecture, they condition it. Everything that goes up takes root in the underground, shaping the design of foundations and other infrastructures. In turn, architecture is not simply placed on soil, it takes part in its formation processes. Existing structures collapse and disintegrate ; the ground we inhabit today is partially composed of yesterday’s constructions, transformed into rubble, mixed with older soils, and forming new anthropogenic layers (Zalasiewicz et al., 2017). These layers are composed of highly diverse materials of disparate origins and qualities, unevenly distributed into a continuously shifting mantle of soil (Ibanez & Boixadera, 2002). They reveal architecture’s metabolic substrate inasmuch as they announce the decomposition of the next architecture. Yet this forever becoming remains largely invisible in disciplinary practice.
The disciplines of Architecture and Soil Science ought to advance together toward a shared praxis : a mode of inquiry and design that understands both soils and built structures as co-constitutive agents in pedogenetic processes. Both seek a synthesis between theory and practice, but neither one includes the other within its conception of the scope of that practice. Architecture does not ‘see’ soil, which for it is only a plinth or raw material, and soil science is equally blind : it does not ‘see’ the urban environment as a soil-based environment, appearing as a hole on the soil map. The city limit is the boundary that marks the place where soil science’s ability to classify and rigorously describe soil ends, prolonging its traditional predicament between ‘human as outsider’ or ‘human as insider’ (Dudal et al., 2002), thus failing to include other-than-natural processes in soil taxonomy.
We are convinced that soil science journals could benefit from an architecture issue, but in this issue of Clara we wish to mirror the question : architecture needs a soil issue, an issue to map the blind spots that occlude our ability to think architecturally with, within or through soil.
What is the problem ?
Much of what architecture fails to understand about soil is closely tied to what it fails to understand about climate change, as both climate change, and the life of the soil operate on a systemic and interconnected level. To understand the soil is to understand the climate, and to truly address climate change, architecture must first learn to see the soil beneath its feet. Architectural criticism has rarely, if ever, started from the perspective of soil—attending to its conditions, entanglements and demands, rather than working around or despite them. This issue of Clara proposes a shift : to think with, within or through soil, to ask what soil requires of architecture and what architecture yet has to learn from soils. We invite authors to consider soils as active agents in architectural becoming : not only from a regenerative aesthetics or earth-derived materials standpoint, but by confronting soil (as well as architecture) as a geosocial formation.
We are particularly interested in propositions that foreground not only success stories, but processes of experimentation, trial and error, and learning too. Research that offers food for thought, opening pathways to new ways of doing beyond the business-as-usual, engaging directly with excavated soils and complex site conditions, aiming to reconceptualize architecture not as a ‘terminus’ of soil, but as its ongoing condition.
1. Soil is agency
Soil is not a static thing but a site of perpetual becoming that emerges from the uncertain, complex intra-action of geological and human processes (Barad, 2007), further embodying both unexpected possibilities and the haunting legacies of past disturbances (Tsing, 2017). To rethink soil as an active, relational agent that affects, conditions, or co-produces outcomes opens up new ways of engaging with tricky issues such as life and non-life, artificial and natural, good and bad, pure and contaminated. Soil destabilizes the metaphysical categories of Western thought. It is both and neither, a material where the fundamental alchemical transformations that underlie all life processes take place. It is where shit is transformed into food, where toxicity is transformed into nutrition, where death and decomposition become germination and emergence.
The question, then, is how architecture can align itself with these processes of transformation rather than foreclose them. How might architecture participate in the becoming of soil, in its pedogenesis ? What do buildings and their associated practices leave behind, or more precisely, below ? How do these remains register our relationship to the living environment ? What kinds of futures do they shape (Mitman et al., 2018) ?
2. Soil is metabolism
Architecture has long exhibited a blind spot toward its own material and ecological conditions of possibility. It often fails to acknowledge the environmental cost, as well as the material or human contingencies of the metabolic processes it requires to exist (Hutton, 2017). In most environmental assessments, attention is limited to the site of construction, while the landscapes of extraction that make construction possible remain largely invisible. Yet every act of building transforms more than one place : it consumes and displaces geological materials, linking one terrain to another, near or distant.
If the sites where soils are eroded, degraded, or erased to sustain construction elsewhere can also be understood as forms of architecture, and if the residues of building and demolition are eventually metabolized into new soils, then architectural practice must be reconsidered as a metabolic act. Such an act produces flows, exchanges, and afterlives that return us to soil, understood as an active infrastructure sustaining cycles of life and decay. How do construction processes reveal architecture’s assumptions about soil ? How do built structures establish distinct relationships with soils, near and remote ? How do reuse projects negotiate existing soil conditions ?
3. Soil is deep time
Understanding the constant transformation soils undergo necessitates considering multiple temporalities, ranging from deep geological time to the more immediate temporal horizons of urban and architectural development. Cities never cease to sink into the soils they generate (Barles et al., 1999), soils that can have long memories accumulated over time while derived from distinct architectures : stone takes centuries to weather, while wood or earth-based materials decompose swiftly. Beneath this surface, in what Anne Whiston Spirn (1985) named the ‘deep structure’, the biological processes of the surface connect with the geological processes below, continuing to exert a powerful influence upon the built landscape. As Puig de la Bellacasa (2015) reminds us, caring for soil requires attunement to these slow, interdependent, and often imperceptible temporalities.
This raises key questions : how do geological, ecological, and human temporalities intersect in soil-architecture entanglements ? How can architecture engage with soil’s millennial formation processes, but also with its sudden rejuvenation or disturbance excavation triggers ? And how might architects’ site analysis methods reveal (or obscure) soil conditions ? What (hi)stories should we re-examine ?
4. Soil is desire
Our relationship with soil is never neutral. The desire to act upon it (to build, extract, cultivate, or unseal) shapes the forms of knowledge we produce about it (Bonvehi-Rosich and Denizen, 2025). What we want from soil determines how we come to understand it, and that understanding, in turn, carries traces of those original desires. Like many Earth sciences, Western soil science has historically been shaped by the ambitions of extractivist and colonial projects seeking to expand and control territory. These desires have left their epistemological imprint on the soil knowledges we inherit today.
Architecture, too, rarely acknowledges the cultural and imperial biases or the political-economic assumptions that underlie its engagement with the soil. Re-examining the relationship between soil knowledge and soil-based desire exposes the partial epistemological frameworks we use to understand the material world. To know soil differently, we must cultivate different desires toward it and, to a certain extent, decolonize our soil-based desire. Which other wisdoms and forms of knowledge creation do we need to help us reimagining how, why and for (or with) whom we build ? How the ‘absences’ left out by the dominant Western science can emancipate soils and lead the way to “new modes of intervention that rejoin the affective and the scientific, the sacred and the technical, and that weave together a form of resistance that does not disentangle the conjoined violence of industrialism, positivism, patriarchy, colonialism, and capitalism” (Salazar et al., 2020 : 31) ?
Architecture has a soil problem or rather, several interrelated problems or predicaments that must be addressed. In this call for contributions, we identify four and use them as analytical frameworks to renew the way we think about soil, inviting submissions that may (A) deepen our understanding of these problems through scholarly or visual interventions, or (B) present case studies of built projects that suggest ways of confronting or transforming them.
If the first three problems elaborated above focus on soil becoming and material flows, the fourth looks more specifically at the political ecologies western-born soil sciences contribute to establish and operate within, as well as the exploitation and devastation they have contributed to in the Global South. This distinct focus does not limit the kinds of contributions we seek : from papers and visual essays that critique mining and mineral extraction as themselves architectural acts, or which help us understand de-colonial soil practices, to research that considers the full life cycle of projects, both architectural and urban (e.g. urban systems riddling the underground or urban metabolic systems like wastewater treatment, municipal compost, and urban forestry).
Submissions may address any moment in the lifecycle of a project : from site preparations and ground testing to occupation (e.g. soil sealing, the covering up of soils, the excavation of soil on-site), design and construction, decay or maintenance, etc. But also, post-construction realities : dismantling, recycling, and the transformation—or ‘soil becoming’—of built artefacts over time. We are particularly interested in methodological approaches to studying soil-architecture entanglements, today and in the past, alongside case-based analyses that unearth how architectural processes participate in, resist, or ignore the slow violence of soil exhaustion.
While the call has been written in a Western context, we strongly welcome contributions that broaden the discussion to include other climatic and cultural perspectives.
Submission guidelines
Contributions may take the form of academic papers or visual essays. Proposals for contributions should be submitted to clara.archi@ulb.be by 30/01/2026 and must include an anonymized PDF file with :
For academic papers :
- a long abstract of 1000 words ;
- a title (even if temporary).
For visual essays :
- a short presentation of 500 words outlining your conceptual approach, intentions, and the graphic methods or techniques employed—this text should help the peer reviewers asses the quality and relevance of the contribution ;
- 3 to 5 figures or images that visually convey your ideas and creative direction ;
- each figure or image may be accompanied by a title and/or caption (up to 100 words) ;
- a title (even if temporary).
The submission email should include the following information :
- the contributor(s)’ name(s) and academic affiliation (if applicable),
- a short bio of maximum 100 words/author.
Proposals for contributions may be submitted in English or in French.
- 30/01/2026 Submission of abstracts by email to clara.archi[at]ulb.be, following the instructions hereabove. The pre-selection process will happen according to the abstracts’ quality and thematic relevance.
- Mid-February 2026 Notification of acceptance.
- Mid-June 2026 Submission of full papers (max. 50.000 characters) by email to clara.archi [at] ulb.be and start of double peer-reviewing process.
- September 2026 Feedback and comments from reviewers.
- November 2026 Submission of final papers. Start of the editing process.
- Spring 2027 Launching of Clara #13.
NB : Authors must secure publishing rights for all images intended for use in their paper between the notification of acceptance (February 2026) and the submission of the final version (November 2026). The editorial team bears no responsibility for the acquisition of these rights or associated fees.
Guest Editors
- Seth Denizen
Seth Denizen is a researcher and design practitioner trained in landscape architecture, evolutionary biology, and human geography. His published work is multidisciplinary, addressing art and design, soil science, urban geography, and agriculture. He holds a doctorate in geography from the University of California, Berkeley, where he studied the political ecology of soil in the Mexico City-Mezquital Valley hydrological system. In 2019 he was a recipient of the SOM Foundation Research Prize and has previously taught at Harvard, Berkeley, the University of Hong Kong, and Princeton, where he was a Princeton-Mellon Fellow in Architecture, Urbanism, and the Humanities. He is an assistant professor at the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts, and his current (2025) book with Montserrat Bonvehi-Rosich is published by Harvard Design Press : Thinking Through Soil : wastewater agriculture in the Mezquital Valley.
- Jolein Bergers
Jolein Bergers is a researcher and design practitioner working at the interstices of architecture, urbanism, and landscape architecture. Her recent PhD (Tracing, Articulating, Weaving Multispecies Knowledges of Brussels’ Contested Urban Natures) introduced a Rubber Boots Design Anthropology, an experimental methodology that blends fieldwork methods from ecological, anthropological and design sciences to investigate how urban natures are co-produced. Her work engages with posthuman perspectives and explores alternative forms of knowledge production grounded in situated practices of activist actors, including those with an attention for urban soils as a contested resource. She currently works with Blikveld (the Flemish association for landscape architecture) and Plant en Houtgoed, where she leads innovation and co-creative design projects focusing on urban soils.
- Nadia Casabella
Nadia Casabella is an architect and urban planner. She is a lecturer at the Faculty of Architecture La Cambre- Horta, Université libre de Bruxelles (ULB), and the co-founder of 1010au, an interdisciplinary architecture and urban planning practice based in Brussels. Her career blends teaching, research, and professional practice, focusing on the links between infrastructures and ecologies in their sociotechnical dimensions. Since recently, her work has delved into the onto-epistemologies underpinning the separation between city and nature, through the initiation of research projects like SUPER TERRAM (Innoviris Co-Create, 2021-23), which treats urban soils as ecosystems, and NERU (Erasmus+, 2022-2025), which approaches rural areas in Europe from premodern environmental practices and cosmologies. She is part of the Editorial Committee of the indexed journal BAC - Boletín Académico. Revista de investigación y arquitectura contemporánea and is currently writing her PhD exploring the soil as a renewed urban design horizon.
- Ananda Kohlbrenner
Ananda Kohlbrenner holds an interdisciplinary academic background in social sciences (Unil), history (ULB), and urban planning (UCLouvain). Her research sits at the intersection of environmental history, science and technology studies (STS), and political ecology. She has previously explored the long-term politics of rain and wastewater in Brussels (PIRVE project, ULB–UPMC Paris 6), as well as participatory approaches to urban flooding in the region (Brusseau project, Co-Create, Innoviris). Currently, her work investigates urban soils and the forms of life they sustain (Super Terram project, Co-Create, Innoviris). She is a researcher at the LoUIsE research centre, where she is involved in the New Ruralities project (Erasmus+).
About Clara
Clara is a peer-reviewed scholarly journal in architecture dedicated to topics, research methods and tools specific to the field. Each issue comprises a main thematic section proposed by guest editors, and two additional sections : Archives, with articles based on the exploration of archi- val documents, and Position(s), with articles that take a stance on current developments or events in architecture. The latest and forthcoming issues of Clara address architectural criticism (#7), the architecture and landscapes of agrarianism (#8), intermediality in architecture (#9), collective housing (#10), the ethics of detailing (#11) and architects and planners cooperatives (#12). To know more about the journal : https://clararevue.ulb.be/CLARA/about.
Subjects
- Urban studies (Main category)
- Society > Geography > Urban geography
- Mind and language > Representation > Heritage
- Society > History > Urban history
- Society > Sociology > Urban sociology
- Society > Geography > Geography: society and territory
- Mind and language > Representation > Architecture
- Society > Geography > Nature, landscape and environment
Date(s)
- Friday, January 30, 2026
Attached files
Keywords
- sol, architecture, agentivité, construction, environnement
Contact(s)
- Pauline Lefebvre
courriel : clara [dot] archi [at] ulb [dot] be
Reference Urls
Information source
- Valentine Debizet
courriel : clara [dot] archi [at] ulb [dot] be
License
This announcement is licensed under the terms of Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal.
To cite this announcement
« Architecture has a Soil Problem », Call for papers, Calenda, Published on Wednesday, November 26, 2025, https://doi.org/10.58079/157lb
