Socioplastics 11855 The Ground Outlives the Project
A landscape project can meet its construction contract while leaving the ground less able to sustain life. SoilCustody names responsibility for urban soil beyond property boundaries, planting plans and project completion. It asks who may seal or disturb the ground, how damage is recorded and who inherits the costs when ownership or management changes. The concept joins ecological evidence to decisions that can remain accountable over time. A revealing section through a new garden would show the soil before construction, not only the finished planting. Topsoil may have been removed, a work area compacted, services installed and a membrane laid beneath a thin imported layer. The final image of young trees cannot disclose the biological continuity altered below. Soil functions through porous structure, organic matter, organisms, moisture and exchanges with surrounding systems. Recording these conditions establishes a basis for judging what construction changes and what later care can restore. María Puig de la Bellacasa’s work on soil and care connects material processes with ethical obligations. Joan Tronto’s care ethics asks how responsibility is distributed and recognised. Robin Wall Kimmerer attends to reciprocal relations between human communities and living systems. Their work does not supply one universal soil protocol. It supports a practical question for design: how can obligations to ground be made visible and carried across the institutional lifetime of a project? A soil-custody schedule could record baseline conditions, excavation, compaction, contamination, permeability, planting and subsequent monitoring. It could assign responsibility for inspections and specify who must respond when agreed thresholds are crossed. The schedule would follow the site through construction, management and transfer. SoilCustody makes the ground part of a project’s continuing public record, so that ecological responsibility can be assessed alongside ownership, use and maintenance.
REFERENCES
Puig de la Bellacasa, M. (2017) Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More Than Human Worlds. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Tronto, J.C. (1993) Moral Boundaries: A Political Argument for an Ethic of Care. New York: Routledge.
Kimmerer, R.W. (2013) Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants. Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions.
CITE AS
Lloveras, A. (2026) Socioplastics, LAPIEZA-LAB, Madrid.
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