Urban soils as a strategic infrastructure in sustainable urban planning
In the on-going EU-funded URSOILL Research and Innovation project, iUE leads the co-creation of 5 Living Labs for healthy urban soil. The project, which started in September 2025, recently produced the results from a discovery phase focused on understanding the local ecosystems of the 5 Living Labs.
At iUE we believe that urban soils are a strategic urban infrastructure: urban soils are not as passive or residual land components, they are deeply intertwined with multiple urban functions (environmental performance, land use, and long-term resilience), but they remain insufficiently integrated into planning frameworks.
In URSOILL, together with Politecnico di Milano, we implemented a structured discovery phase that brings together environmental, spatial, and socio-economic perspectives within a broader co-creation process. This phase helped to position soil as a critical layer of urban systems and supported the development and implementation of soil health solutions across the Living Lab experimental sites.
The resulting baseline “Stakeholder mapping and baseline analysis of local ecosystems” demonstrates that:
» soils cut across institutional silos and require the involvement of a wide range of actors shaping land use, environmental management, and urban development;
» identifying stakeholders, their roles, and their relative influence helps ensure that soil-related challenges are addressed through coordinated, cross-sectoral collaboration rather than fragmented actions;
» remediation and specific solutions are important to address polluted sites and allow their redevelopment, however the role of city-making in limiting land take and soil degradation in the first place is just as critical: preventing soil degradation and land take before it occurs should be a central objective.
The resulting baseline “Stakeholder mapping and baseline analysis of local ecosystems” demonstrates that:
» soils cut across institutional silos and require the involvement of a wide range of actors shaping land use, environmental management, and urban development;
» identifying stakeholders, their roles, and their relative influence helps ensure that soil-related challenges are addressed through coordinated, cross-sectoral collaboration rather than fragmented actions;
» remediation and specific solutions are important to address polluted sites and allow their redevelopment, however the role of city-making in limiting land take and soil degradation in the first place is just as critical: preventing soil degradation and land take before it occurs should be a central objective.
What are the key topics of interest emerging from URSOILL Living Labs:
» Soil sealing is a major pressure in urban areas, directly affecting soil functions and ecosystem services: while desealing is gaining attention, it comes with trade-offs with the potential exposure to or diffusion of pollution, requiring more integrated planning and risk-aware approaches.
» The reuse of excavated urban soils is difficult: regulatory frameworks often classify soil as waste, creating administrative and financial barriers to their reuse. This constrains circular practices and reduces the potential to retain soil resources within urban systems and avoid further land take.
» Nature-based approaches to soil health are not consistently understood or prioritised compared to conventional technical solutions: perceived longer timeframes and less immediate visibility can limit adoption, even though they tend to deliver broader and more durable benefits in terms of resilience and ecosystem services.
» Access to soil data is uneven across cities, limiting soil-informed decision-making, however improved data / sampling availability can also reveal contamination issues and trigger mandatory remediation.
» Soil remediation is often legally required when pollution is identified, but it can be prohibitively expensive, creating barriers to action and slowing down redevelopment. This raises several questions around responsibility, financing, and trade-offs in land-use decisions. For example, whether highly contaminated sites are left sealed or assigned uses that minimise risk rather than fully restoring soil functions?
» Systematic awareness of soil functions remains limited among many urban stakeholders: translating technical soil knowledge into everyday urban practices (which is the focus of our other project SPADES).
Towards long-term stewardship and maintenance of soil health in urban planning
Beyond initial interventions, maintaining soil health over time remains a challenge in dynamic urban environments:
» how could degradation have been avoided in the first place?
» how can improved soil conditions be maintained over time?
» and how can these experiences contribute to more structural changes in how cities understand and manage soil?
Beyond initial interventions, maintaining soil health over time remains a challenge in dynamic urban environments:
» how could degradation have been avoided in the first place?
» how can improved soil conditions be maintained over time?
» and how can these experiences contribute to more structural changes in how cities understand and manage soil?
URSOILL interventions will primarily address the remediation of degraded urban soils, but through its Living Lab approach we also aim to underline the importance of preventing soil degradation and land take at their source and propose a shift away from reactive responses toward more proactive, forward-looking approaches aligned with sustainable urbanisation goals.
We will soon propose a new learning platform to more actively engage with city-making professionals interested in better understanding soil and its health in their processes.