ABSTRACT
The global production of human-dominated landscapes and the creation of the built environment are intimately linked to the exploitation of soil and food resources. Soil is foundational to the creation of both “urban” and “rural” ecosystems, while also continuing to yield to an increasingly unsustainable global food system. Yet both urbanization and agriculture can destroy the health of soil resources. They have been shown to alter soil horizons and cap surface soils, promote erosion, decrease organic matter, limit biological activity, and dramatically increase nutrient and contaminant fluxes. In turn, poor soil health tends to diminish soil-based ecosystem services like the capacity for food production, nutrient retention, and water storage and infiltration. This is reflected by the growth of cities, where urban markets drive dramatic inequality in food access and create increasingly segregated local food systems. This manifests both as hunger or malnutrition in low-income urban populations that rely on food purchases, and increased rates of obesity and other diet-related chronic diseases. In this article, we explore soil degradation and food insecurity as symptom of social and spatial processes that span urban-rural systems and disproportionately affect vulnerable communities. As a first step toward the novel perspectives and methods required for addressing these challenges, we place agroecology, critical geography, and soil science in conversation. Through processes of land commodification, capital production, and landscape fragmentation, urbanization enacts human-driven disturbances, heterogeneities, altered fluxes, and feedbacks which in turn determine the ecological trajectories of soils across urban-rural systems. We offer a series of dialogues among critical geography, agroecology, and soil science, interrogating issues central to the maintenance of soil and food resources: soil health, organic matter cycling, practitioner knowledge, and city-regional systems. By doing so, we hope to foster deep, critical engagement with the social and ecological issues that span urban-rural landscapes, ultimately showing how soil and food systems problematize such a distinction altogether.
