15.10.2020
Antoine Vialle - URBAN SOILS MAPPING: CASE WEST LAUSANNE

Motivated by ever-increasing soil degradation and artificialisation due to past and present urban growth dynamics, the current trend of spatial planning policies at the European and Swiss levels is promoting increased soil protection, by avoiding new developments on agricultural—natural land, and by reorienting development towards existing urban areas that must be densified and restructured. This objective, which is formulated as “inward urbanisation”, not only puts pressure on the soils situated within urban areas, which are cast as priority development targets, but also give a strategic role to this significant component of anthropogenic ecosystems, the multifunctionality of which must be considered as a crucial driver facing cities’ forthcoming social-ecological transition.
However, urban soils are insufficiently studied as a long-term record of environmental history and heavy anthropisation. In this context, the originality of this research is to consider urbanisation not only as consuming and degrading, but also as transforming and producing soils, and to provide a methodology for the study of anthropedogenesis as a coevolution process of urban forms and soil functionalities, both in historical—retrospective and projective ways. Spatial development and urbanisation appear therefore not only as a threat to soil capital, but also as a key lever on which it is possible to act in order to valorise this resource.

Such a narrative integrates various facets of land use, including one-off construction techniques and recurring maintenance practices, planning tools, and morphologies, into a specific ‘project for the ground’ which brought forth the mixed mesh of the Swiss Plateau ‘city-territory.’ Ultimately, in light of the ongoing planning policies, the dynamic vision conveyed by these intertwined soil–urbanisation coevolution trajectories outlines opportunities and strategies and for the regeneration of the resource deposit made up of both West Lausanne’s urban fabric and its soils. Such opportunities and strategies, which aim at a sustainable implementation of the inward urbanisation principle, rest in the understanding of both West Lausanne city-territory and its urban soils as ‘palimpsests’ forming a dynamic system.

Antoine Vialle is Architect (2007) and Former Fellow of the French Academy in Rome—Villa Medici (2010–11). He has been Scientific Assistant and Lecturer in various schools since 2011 and is currently developing a PhD on the soils of the Swiss city-territory at the EPFL Laboratory of Urbanism with Profs. Paola Viganò (EPFL Lab U) and Éric Verrecchia (UNIL IDYST). In 2019, he was Doctoral Visiting Student at the MIT Leventhal Center for Advanced Urbanism in Cambridge, MA.

The lecture is part of the talk series MY EARTH within the core course Architecture of Territory: Territorial Design in Histories, Theories, and Projects.

CONCEPT AND REALISATION
Chair of Architecture and Territorial Planning, ETH Zurich Department of Architecture
Prof. Milica Topalović
Dr. Charlotte Malterre-Barthes
Metaxia Markaki
Dr. Gyler Mydyti
Dr. Nazlı Tümerdem

VIDEO EDITING
Qianer Zhu

GRAPHIC DESIGN
Goda Budvytyte

BOOK BINDING
Michiel Gieben

This lecture series sets up an agenda for widening the disciplinary field of architecture and urbanism from their focus on the city, or the urban in the narrow sense, to wider territorial scales, which correspond to the increasing scales of contemporary urbanisation. It discusses the concepts of territory and urbanisation, and their implications for the work of architects and urbanists.

MY EARTH
Within the program, five guest speakers are invited to open up perspectives on territory as Earth and the manifold meanings it embodies: Earth as a living world, a world-system, earth as soil, as land, as field, and even as dirt. By looking at the Earth and its ecologies, the guest speakers will propose novel and urgent approaches to territory and urbanisation: from “Gaia-graphy” of Earth’s critical zones, and emergence of urban soil mapping as tool in urban design, to working with “dirt” in order to develop an ethics of care and maintenance for precarious environments.

The course will enable students to critically discuss concepts of territory and urbanisation. It will invite students to revisit the history of architects’ work engaging with the problematic of urbanising territories and territorial organisation. The goal is to motivate and equip students to engage with territory in the present day and age, by setting out our contemporary urban agenda. The lectures are animated by a series of visual and conceptual exercises, usually on A4 sheets of paper. All original student contributions will be collected and bound together, creating a unique book-object. Some of the exercises are graded and count as proof of completion.