From the Russian Chernozem to the Valley Section: A Micro-Story of Soil

Abstract

Through a short historiographic excursion on the work of three protagonists who shared a moment of contact in the Exposition Universelle de Paris 1900, Patrick Geddes, Elisée Reclus and V. V. Dokuchaev, the following explicates the affiliation of approaches to the soil that we recognized in them, and that we found particularly enlightening for our research, that intends to re-conceptualize the relation between the diffuse city and the soil, since each addresses in its own way our two hypotheses of long-term historic rationalities and a dual scale approach to the soil. Starting from the re-activation of the long-term history of civilization based on the relationship between the agricultural soils and the city as a tool for the reading and design of the Horizontal Metropolis’ rationalities through its soil, we will then invoke the emergence of soil as a scientific object, with the appearance of its third dimension in depth and relief. Finally, we will see how the prospective and holistic approach of our three protagonists integrated the regional scale as the valid object through which to think new relationships between the city and its surrounding, blurring the limits between them, a very innovative and early conceiving of the relationship between rural and urban realms.