Fall 2023
Worlding Soils: Caring for Soil Communities in Minett

Stephanie Specht, 2023.

Mine, blast, dump, crush, extract, exhaust, are the syntax of modernity as noted by Lewis Mumford, a visceral vocabulary useful to describe the destructive and creative power of capitalism over the soil. Mine, referring both to the physical site and a property relation, sums up this power perfectly. While mines are just the starting point of a commodity chain that understands soil as a mere resource, this chain extends across vast distances, resulting in the transformation of economies related to minerals into a truly planetary phenomenon, as noted by political geographer Martín Arboleda. Such landscapes of extraction —whether former or active—continue to shape material conditions of territories, soils, and communities who inhabit them. This design studio will explore mining territories in the south of Luxembourg, known also as Minett, through the perspective of soil. Operating both as an archive to the industrial dreams of extraction and growth, and a living environment inhabited by humans and non-humans alike, soil will serve as a tool for rethinking the scale, scope, temporalities, and role of planning and design. Starting from here, this design studio centres soil—a system commonly overlooked in architectural discussion and representation—as its subject, matter, and site for the analysis of histories and presents of capitalist extraction, and projection of solidary and shared futures of co-existence. Understanding underground not only as a passive recipient of political, economic, and social processes above, but as a space of resistance, as “somewhere to (dig and) plot,” the studio will frame soil beyond its resourcefulness and productivity for humans, trying instead to think what the role of design and design thinking in building soil communities could be. Extending the notion of soil communities from microbes, plants, and animals constituting earth eco-systems to include humans, Maria Puig de la Bellacasa noted that “caring for soil communities involves making a speculative effort toward the acknowledgement that the (human) carer also depends on soil’s capacity to “take care” of a number of processes that are vital to more than her existence,” arguing also that “affirming humans as being soil entangles the min substantial commonness.”

Following this line of argument, we will ask—what would it mean to build soil communities and how to break the line between the ground and the underground? What could be the role of architectural design and urban planning in building interdependencies between all those who have been shaped by the same conditions of extraction and who share life in the ruins of environmental destruction? What are the conditions for repairing brownfields and make them compatible with a healthy planet? Worlding Soil. Caring for Soil Communities in Minett is a call for what Hélène Frichot outlined as dirty theory, theory that “helps architecture think about the ordinary gestures of care, repair and maintenance that can form part of its mandate.” Following on her call to “follow the dirt,” we could ask—what are the strategies of repair needed for the building of the soil communities in the south of Luxembourg?

The studio will run in parallel with the public lecture series Worlding Soils, with guest lectures by Mio Tsuneyama, Paulo Tavares, Maria Puig de la Bellacasa, and Marina Otero Verzier, taking place during November and December 2023.