BK Talks: Design with soil

Fransje Hooimeijer
Associate Professor Environmental Technology & Design, TU Delft

dr. Fransje Hooimeijer is specialized in system integration of technical conditions in urban design and interdisciplinary design. In her research and teaching she takes the perspective on the city as technical re-construction of the landscape and investigates how these conditions can be utilized better in urban design and how the systems can adapt to new technologies. The focus lies on design and planning processes and how by representation of the subsurface as engine room of the city they can be made climate proof, energy neutral, more biodiverse and of better spatial quality. She is involved in practice and research networks in and outside the Netherlands, is editor of the Journal of Delta Urbanism, edited several books and published in urbanism and engineering journals.

Jose Chung
Chair of the OGP Party in Midden Delfland

Jose Chung is chair of the local political party OGP in the municipality of Midden Delfland. She has been politically active in her area for many years promoting renewable energy and keeping Midden Delfland as an open green area. She is active in working with citizens because she feels that carry capacity from them is crucial, especially the farmers who have the closest relation to the soil.

Martina Barcelloni Corte
Architect & Assistant Professor of Landscape Urbanism at the Faculty of Architecture at U Liège

Martina Barcelloni Corte is an architect, assistant professor of Landscape Urbanism and director of the Unité de Recherche en Architecture at U Liège. She has taught and collaborated at research projects in the field of architecture and urbanism at a number of international institutions including EPF Lausanne, IUAV Venice, GSAPP Columbia University and the National University of Singapore. Her field of expertise focuses on the design of cities and territories in the face of environmental constraint and risk.

Verne Ekkel
MSc Architecture Student, TU Delft

Verne Ekkel is a graduating MSc Architecture student, currently participating in the graduation studio of Urban Architecture themed ‘Black Hill City’. The studio, located in Liège (Belgium), is researching the post-carbon landscape. In her graduation project, the landscape is being studied from a vertical perspective representing the soil, the surface and the sky.

Michael Hirschbichler
Architect/artist, Atelier Hirschbichler & TU Delft

Michael Hirschbichler works on the threshold of architecture, art and anthropology. He was a lecturer at ETH Zurich and HSLU Lucerne, the director of the Architecture Program at the Papua New Guinea University of Technology, a visiting professor at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, and is currently a postdoctoral researcher at TU Delft, Goldsmiths and Aarhus University. He is a recipient of the Rome Prize by the German Academy Villa Massimo.

Mark Niesten
Landscape architect, Deltares

Mark Niesten works as a landscape architect (WUR) at Deltares; the Dutch independent institute for applied knowledge on water and subsurface. In his current works he integrates his experience in Dutch and international spatial planning and design with Deltares’ knowledge on water and subsurface systems, to create safe and attractive living environments.

Debra Solomon
Artist and Founder of Urbaniahoeve Social Design Lab for Urban Agriculture

Since 2004, Debra Solomon’s work has concerned inter-relations with a multispecies whole, addressing biodiversity production, climate crisis mitigation, the multispecies right to the city and right to the urban metabolism. In 2019, she coined the term ‘multispecies urbanism’ which was presented at the Dutch Pavilion of the 2021 Venice Architecture Biennial (whoiswe.nl). In the pavilion she shared community-based tools such as Radical Observation methodology, soil chromatograms of the 56HA Amsterdam Zuidoost Food Forest community of praxis soil analysis, rhizotrons – living soil observation - and Urbaniahoeve’s public space food forests as environmentally democratic landscapes. This critical spatial practice is driven by reciprocal inter-species relations of care and her oeuvre is collectively produced with Urbaniahoeve – with local communities of practice, but also with and for multispecies communities: the soil organism, urban meadowlands, and urban woodlands.