Beyond Land Use: Designing a Soil-Based Approach in Urban Planning

The  Land Transition Chair is the result of a collaboration between the Land Transition Institute and the Gustave Eiffel University Foundation. It is supported by two research laboratories at Paris-Est National School of Architecture (ENSA Paris-Est) and Paris School of Engineering (EIVP): Observatoire de la Condition Suburbaine (OCS) and Lab’Urba. It is co-directed by Mathieu Delorme, director of ENSA Paris-Est, landscape architect and urban planner, and by Youssef Diab, university professor of urban planning, head of Chairs and Prospective Studies at EIVP.

The Chair aims to put soil conservation at the heart of urban and regional issues. Its work is guided by two main principles: interdisciplinarity and the transfer of scientific knowledge to practitioners. It organises research projects on soils around four themes: understanding and representing soils; avoiding land take; reducing the impact of human activities on the soil; and repairing and restoring soil functions.

In this context, the Chair is issuing a call for papers for the conference "Beyond Land Use: Designing a Soil-Based Approach in Urban Planning" to be held at the Cité de l'architecture et du patrimoine in Paris on the 3rd and 4th of December 2026.

This conference marks the culmination of a triannual cycle of symposiums that resulted in the publication of two research publications. ("Restoring soil functions? Scientific approaches and interdisciplinary perspectives" and "Renaturing territories: what scales, what actors?").