Grounding Urbanisation: Soil Practices and City-Making in the Pampas (1875–1945)

This dissertation investigates the role of the soil in the urbanisation of Buenos Aires. The exponential growth of the Argentinian capital, Buenos Aires, in the decades around 1900 was fuelled by the agricultural exploitation of the fertile soil in the surrounding grasslands, the pampas. At the same time, construction practice in Buenos Aires demonstrated the shifting understandings of the role of soil in modern cities with surface sealing and underground construction.

Through which agrarian, scientific and engineering practices did the soil drive urban growth? Which infrastructures did the soil enable and/or necessitate? How did technical and financial flows between the pampas and Buenos Aires configure both rural and urban landscapes? Addressing these questions places the soil at the centre of Argentina’s early 20th-century urban and agricultural expansion – both as a material substrate and as understood and used by humans.

This offers a way to think about the relationship between cities and their immediate countryside as an example of extractive urbanisation. This project understands the pampas and their cities as a single system, intimately connected by their shared foundation: the soil beneath them. In this way, it examines how the category of the soil can challenge dichotomies such as "urban" vs "rural" or "natural" vs "technological" in historical urban research.

The presence of German technical experts and businesses highlights the transnational entanglements in Buenos Aires’ urbanisation. The thesis analyses practices of and in the soil, taking into account their ideological background, to explore the soil’s overlooked role in urbanisation.