ABSTRACT
The platform function of the soil has historically stood in contradiction with other soil functions such as food production, water filtration, and climate regulation.1 As physical foundation for human infrastructure, buildings, roads, dumps, and city skylines, the soil platform stands as antithesis to the natural environment. However, recent research in the Amazon has proven this needn't be so.2 As Paulo Tavares has argued, Amazonia is a cultural landscape that has been shaped by human intervention for millennia: “indigenous modes of inhabitation, both in the pre-colonial past and in the modern present, not only leave profound marks in the landscape but also play an essential role in shaping the forest ecology … The botanical structure and species composition of the Earth's largest biodiversity refuge is to a great extent a heritage of indigenous design.”3 By envisioning the forest as city, an inhabited space with a long history of infrastructural planning, we might conversely be able to envision the city as a multilayered forest rather than a platform for solely human needs. In a series of e-mails and a Skype call I (Toland) interviewed Tavares about his work to preserve parts of the Amazon forest as architectural heritage. In a parallel interview, Antonio Guerra shared his insight as a geographer and geomorphologist about the present state of soil degradation in Brazil, which is to a very large extent the result of colonial destruction of indigenous forest infrastructures. By investigating the cultural histories of spatial planning practice and governance, a completely different picture of the soil platform function emerges.
