Urbanizing Soil

Kemmer L, Jasper S (2024)

Publication Type: Journal article

Publication year: 2024

Journal

Berliner Blätter Berlin : Gesellschaft für Ethnographie (GfE) und dem Institut für Europäische Ethnologie der Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin

DOI: 10.18452/28588

Abstract

In this contribution, we argue that the material process of urbanizing soil is not limited to the transformation of a “natural” into an “urban” element. Rather, soil is produced in and from cities. This is exemplified through the case of Teufelsberg, a rubble mound in the southwest of Berlin, created from 26 cubic metres of city rubble from the early 1950s onwards. We accompany soil scientists on an excursion to trace the scientific debates and troubles around classifying urban soil, studies about sulphate leaching from bricks, and recent ideas of resignifying the experimental rubble mound as a soil monument of both scientific and cultural significance. The Teufelsberg process of rubble pedogenesis confronts us with an imaginary of soils as leaky archives of human activity. Through their hybridity as both material and lively, organic and technogenic, rubble soils trouble imaginaries of elemental “purity”.

Authors with CRIS profile

Sandra Jasper

Involved external institutions

Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin DE Germany (DE)

How to cite

APA:

Kemmer, L., & Jasper, S. (2024). Urbanizing Soil. Berliner Blätter. https://doi.org/10.18452/28588

MLA:

Kemmer, Laura, and Sandra Jasper. "Urbanizing Soil." Berliner Blätter (2024).

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