WPSC 2026 - World Planning Schools Congress
June 29 - July 3, 2026, Finland (Helsinki, Espoo, Tampere)
Peripheral Visions - Rethinking Planning
SPECIAL SESSION 16:
Urbanised grounds - plural perspectives on land and soil
Urban(ised) grounds – as collective term for land, territory, earth, soil (...) – are embedded in multiple contestations resulting from their treatment as resources that can be owned, exploited, and managed. At the same time, they embody living systems and materialities that are the basis for hope, futuring, and collective possibilities. Ideas that challenge the view of urban land as a resource for extraction and commodification have emerged from different political, cultural, philosophical, and engineering traditions. These include critical urban studies, postcolonial and decolonial perspectives, land reclamation movements, housing activists and environmental adaptation studies. In engaging with the materiality of the ground, fields such as soil sciences, urban ecology, urban hydrology, environmental sciences, agroecology, and regenerative architecture and urban design have been laying foundations for rethinking its critical role in enabling alternatives to climate (and urban) crises.
This special session underlines the need to join forces, disciplinary and otherwise, to rethink planning with and through urban(ised) grounds. It explores perspectives that challenge the bird’s-eye view embodied in dominant planning and land management approaches, the commodifying gaze upon urban land that favours profit over justice or equity, and the anthropocentric visions that drive extractive practices on urban(ised) grounds.
Contributions may cover one or more of the following themes:
- Understandings of urban ground/land/soil from multiple spatial and material perspectives, which may include soil-sensitive and water-wise approaches to planning and urban design
- The role of urban land/soils in the territorialisation of planning approaches
- Links between urban(ised) grounds and territorial democracy
- Urban grounds not only as ecological resources and places for blue-green infrastructure towards climate adaptation, but as co-constitutive in more-than-human infrastructural relations
- Urban soils as tellers/signifiers of extractive translocal relations. This may include linking extractive practices across contexts, following translocal relations through soil research, and exploring care-based regenerative relations as alternatives
The deadline for sending abstracts is November 11th, 2025
Applications (max. 300 words and up to 6 keywords) should be made directly through the WPSC 2026 website.
Session organisers:
Anke Hagemann, Chair of International Urbanism and Design | Habitat Unit, TU Berlin
Natacha Quintero González, Chair of International Urbanism and Design | Habitat Unit, TU Berlin
Johanna Hoerning, Chair of Sociology of Space, TU Berlin
Antoine Vialle, Chair for Transitioning Urban Ecosystems,
Eva Paton, Chair of Ecohydrology, TU Berlin
Download Poster here