Soil Layers and Laws – Surface Values and Deep Values of Soils in the City

How are soils made present in urban planning processes, documents, and laws? This is one of the questions we attend to in this project’s exploration of relations between people and soils in the urban landscape. In what forms are soils taken into account? In our first art & science retreat, during the walk from the Nothing Forest to the Experimental field, we began to explore such questions in relation to the recent and ongoing urban development plans in Solna at the northern edge of Stockholm. We stopped for a while in the brand new city blocks called The Laboratory and The Sculptor. There, the small grove of majestic centuries-old oaks surrounded by stone sheets and concrete reminds the passers-by of the deep values of soil’s life-supporting processes and fragile biodiversity corridors. This place that once was a forest called Nothing, has now become a new city district called Nothing.

In this post, and departing from the knotted site of the Nothing Forest, our team member Jenny Lindblad traces the place of soil in planning documents and laws. Read the full text in Swedish here.