Urbanizing soil

Berlin Teufelsberg as leaky archive

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”.