Urban Pedogeneses. The Making of City Soils from Hard Surfacing to the Urban Soil Sciences

Germain Meulemans (1, 2)

1 CAK-CRHST - Centre Alexandre Koyré - Centre de Recherche en Histoire des Sciences et des Techniques
2 IFRIS - Institut francilien recherche, innovation et société

This article examines the rise of urban soils as a topic of scientific inquiry and ecological engineering in France, and questions how new framings of soil as a material that can be designed reconfigure relationships between urban life and soils in a context of fast-growing cities. As a counterpoint to the current situation, the article first examines how the hard-surfacing of Paris, in the nineteenth century, sought to background the vital qualities of soils in urban areas, making their absence seem perfectly stable and natural. It then shows how the new urban soil science moved away from classical descriptive approaches to soils, and set out to fabricate soils as a research experiment on anthropo-pedogenesis. In the French context, urban soil scientists soon formed new bonds with the worlds of urbanism, administration, and waste management, reframing their approach as a technical response to issues brought by sprawling cities, backgrounding soils again under a trope centered on the management of soil services. These stories allow to critically inhabit soil scientists' claim that humans participate in pedogenesis by examining the specific conditions in which modern modes of being in the world and urban soils become entangled or disentangled in modern metropolis.

Mots clés: anthropology; urban soils; surfaces; pedogenesis; ecological engineering

Domaines: Anthropologie sociale et ethnologie; Etudes de l'environnement; Histoire, Philosophie et Sociologie des sciences

Germain Meulemans. Urban Pedogeneses. The Making of City Soils from Hard Surfacing to the Urban Soil Sciences. Environmental Humanities, 2020, 12 (1), pp.250-266. ⟨10.1215/22011919-8142330⟩. ⟨hal-02882863⟩