Gardening urban soils

Facing climate change, soils play a central role as they provide a wide range of ecosystem services that are essential to the implementation of both mitigation and adaptation strategies. To respond to this scientific and societal challenge, the potential of soils situated within agglomeration areas (referred here as urban soils, they include not only highly anthropized soils, but also pseudo-natural soils and soils under agricultural uses), is still poorly known.

Beyond the necessity to protect the natural and arable land and especially when targeting mitigation and adaptation to climate change, there is consequently a need for transitioning to integrative and practice-oriented approaches to the urban context. It is therefore urgent to grow an innovative and transdisciplinary body of knowledge and knowhow in order to plan, design, and maintain cities in a sustainable way. This is an opportunity to actively enhance the social-environmental performances of urban soils and provide solutions for global and local climate change adaptation and mitigation.

Targeting solutions for climate change adaptation and mitigation in the frame of urban requalification projects, this action-oriented project focuses on the integrated management of organic matter and carbon sequestration in urban soils through urban gardening, i.e. various practices of urban agriculture and other urban landscape maintenance practices. Based on a case study in the Lausanne-Morges agglomeration and followed by a complementary field campaign in the Zurich agglomeration, the methodology will enable new a understanding of the varying potential in urban soils for organic carbon sequestration (OCS) and forecasting of the soil OCS enhancement potential in urban requalification.