Presentation
Work published resulting from the Bernardo Secchi Day 2015
The ground has remained long buried during the construction of cities. Lost among the foundations of our infrastructures, under the cellars of our buildings or the coating of our streets, it remains a resource that is too often ignored by urban modernity, which has historically positioned itself against rurality and its cult of the soil.
Critical of this denial, Bernardo Secchi has repeatedly maintained that town planning must be based on a real “land project”. Included in the works of the great Italian town planner, The soil of cities summarises a multidisciplinary debate that takes another look at the issue of soil starting from its elementary dimensions: archeology, architecture, geography, history, landscape, pedology, philosophy, town planning. The soil registers our trade with the Earth, in a material as well as a symbolic way.
The fourteen contributions in this volume thus offer descriptions and original representations that renew our view of the city and confirm this observation that is now unavoidable: soil is at the heart of urban and territorial projects and is therefore a key element of the 21st-century ecological transition.
Contributions
Monica Bianchetti Del Grano, Marine Durand, David H. Haney, Elena Havlicek, Laurent Hodebert, Timo Rabat, Halimatou Mama Awal, Panos Mantziaras, Sébastien Marot, Germain Ceulemans, Pierre Pinon, David Ripoll, Nicolas Tixier, Adrian Torres Astaburuaga, Paola Viganò, Axel Zutz.