Healthy Soil Scape

The Healthy Soil Scape imagines what putting healthy soils at the centre of urban landscapes could look like. It considers the ways in which humans and non-humans look after each other through the medium of soil, and how these caring relationships can be strengthened - for example, through separating out and redistributing the vast amounts of organic ‘waste’ produced by cities, to people growing healthy food and building soils at the same time. 

Healthy soils provide benefits which stretch in time and space beyond their current geographical location - through carbon capture, flooding prevention, water management, food production, supporting biodiversity, and so on. Soils should be viewed in a similar way to air and water, as something which it is in everyone’s interest to actively take care of. Plants grown in healthy soils result in more nutritious food for people, by providing essential elements and micronutrients, and healthy soils can store more carbon. The processes, such as excavation, pollution or depletion of nutrients which cause damage to existing soils must be stopped, and these soils helped to recover, as well as new soils being created. Humans can actively support the microbiome and structure of the soil by growing using agroecological methods, and building soils locally as opposed to importing soils extracted from ecosystems often under threat elsewhere (e.g. through peat-based compost). However, with many people in urban areas alienated from the land, growing food, and soil, general knowledge about and connection with local soils are often limited, even amongst growers. Work is therefore needed to deepen people’s understanding of soil, and the life it supports, in all its complexity, and how to care for it. 

As centres of population and consumption, cities produce large volumes of organic ‘waste’, which could be used to rebuild soils through compost. Currently, many streams of organic matter which could be useful for building soils and growing food are lost to sewage infrastructure, digested to make ‘biogas’, or combined with other forms of waste and incinerated or dumped in landfill. Further research into the benefits of particular ‘waste’ streams (as is being undertaken in Rosario), and new logistics of ‘waste’ processing and redistribution, are needed to reconnect organic ‘waste’ with people who can utilise it to build soils. Related to the point above, discussions about using urban organic ‘waste’ flows for food production are very often dominated by an urban perspective in which farmers’ perspectives are of secondary importance. Such discussions often start from existing urban waste flows and then seek to optimise or adjust them to make them 'suitable' for reuse in food-producing practices. However, this does not necessarily correspond to the needs and wishes of agroecological farmers. They are often only interested in a very limited amount of carefully collected and very specific types of nutrients - from urban environments or elsewhere - which meet the principles of their approach to farming (e.g. vegan or organically certified). This has been one of the difficulties for Quantum Waste, a partner in this project (discussed further below) - matching the compost they could produce from organic urban waste, to a product sought by agroecological growers. Discussions about resourcing nutrients in (peri)urban environments should start much more from the specific needs of agroecological actors and then look at how to find, produce, collect, store and make them available in an appropriate way.

The Healthy Soil-Scape hopes to inspire cities to place soil at the centre of their thinking and action, to enable healthier and more socially and environmentally just spaces to emerge. Soil connects to food growing, political mobilisation, public health, and the climate and biodiversity emergencies amongst many other issues, and protecting, remediating and building healthy soils for humans and non-humans should be prioritised over the long term.

One way to begin doing this is by building people’s connections with their local soils, making them visible as living ecosystems, not just ‘dirt’ underfoot - investigating their history, getting our hands dirty, building our knowledge of soil biology and chemistry through low-tech testing methods, tasting the food grown in local soils, and nurturing a sense of collective responsibility to act to safeguard and steward them. In this way, soils could be appreciated as ‘of somewhere’ and not simply something to be brought in in bags when required. This idea links to both the Productive Housing Estate (looking at complementary relationships between housing and food growing spaces) and Farming the Fragmented Land, treating soils as being of a place, seeking to better understand their specific characteristics, and making strategic decisions about the best things to grow there, whilst also seeing them as part of a larger whole. 

‘Soil carers’ - the people who take action to care for soils - also require support to be able to undertake the work they do, particularly within urban environments. This might include affordable accommodation for growers, agricultural subsidies for agroecologically grown food, universal basic income, an expansion of ‘Healthy Start’ style voucher programmes to ensure that everyone can afford to buy local, agroecologically grown food, or increased access to land for food growing (e.g. through the expansion of allotment sites). Soil care work will need to happen at two levels - building and maintaining soils used for agroecological growing already, and remediating other damaged soils to a standard suitable for agroecological growing. The soil recovery initiatives in Rosario’s Urban Agriculture Programme mentioned above are an example of how the latter can be undertaken at a municipal scale - it would not be economically sustainable for agroecological growers to take on all the work of remediating soils whilst also needing already-healthy soils to grow food for sale in.

As with other commons, good stewardship of soils depends upon people’s rights and responsibilities around them being collectively agreed upon - this could occur at many levels, from international to the hyper-local, and urban areas may want to consider the governance structures which should be put in place to create a ‘healthy soil-scape’. This might include community soil workshops, neighbourhood composting schemes, municipality-wide soil charters developed by citizens’ assemblies, and changes to local procurement and waste management services - and the examples above show elements of these are already in place in the case cities of London, Riga, Rosario and Brussels. The idea of ‘nutrient sovereignty’ might be a useful frame for these activities and their governance - drawing on the concept of food sovereignty, nutrient sovereignty asks what arrangements would need to be in place for people to exercise a right to recycle nutrients for purposes such as food growing. It also places the emphasis on communities having autonomy over their nutrient and soil systems, as opposed to relying on intermediaries for information or technical solutions designed in and for other contexts. 

Changes to waste processing and planning legislation may be amongst those required, so that community composting, and composting at a larger scale, for the purpose of agroecological growing, are supported. Planning processes should consider the effect of soil health on proposed activities, in line with other commitments, for example around climate change mitigation, in doing so tying national policies to concrete local actions. Securing planning permission for the necessary infrastructure to develop a composting facility on the edge of London (using organic waste from the city, and supplying this product to growers on and off-site) proved very difficult for Quantum Waste. Their planning application was rejected as no evidence of agricultural activities was provided for the site, but these activities could not be initiated without the construction of infrastructure, which required planning permission. Local and national governments should take a more holistic view across departments to support the building of healthy soils, to begin to overcome issues like this.

A number of strategies could facilitate further implementation of these new realities, some of which have emerged more clearly through the COVID pandemic:

• Net zero policy objectives and climate emergencies declared by organisations/cities/local authorities/countries

• ‘Local living’ narratives and new community solidarities (e.g. mutual aid networks) mobilised through living under lockdowns 

• Engaging with the fragmented regulation on soils to develop a unified framework

• EU research placing soil centrally in the next EU Framework Programme cycle (post-Horizon 2020)

• In the UK, soil health is included in the ‘public money for public goods’ concept guiding post-Brexit agricultural and environmental policy

• Aligning soil care with other environmental priorities such as water and air quality

It is clear that the Healthy Soil Scape will require the mobilization of many different type of actors. We identify the following as the main agents to take the lead:

• Communities reclaiming nutrients and soil health knowledge as the beginning of deepening their relationships with local soils

• Research and training organisations developing appropriate pedagogical programmes and knowledge exchange initiatives to support re-skilling

• Local authorities providing infrastructure and space for, and prioritising, community composting

• Dedicated businesses/service providers adapting the needs of agroecological soil carers, for example have centrally organised and processed organic waste to make a product useful for agroecological growers, and is then distributed to them

Soils are a complex network of living and non-living beings, and deepening our understanding of and relationships with them will require dedicated and emergent thinking and action over the long term, not quick, oversimplified technical fixes. However, with a constellation of actors above and below ground working together, we can reimagine what cities and their soils can be, from the garden to the landscape scale.