“It’s Only Really When I Put My Hands in the Soil That I Feel at Home” : Soil Care and Ecological Belonging in Urban Growing Practices

This article explores how practices of soil care in urban gardening contribute to a sense of ecological belonging. Human-soil belonging can be invoked with vastly opposed cultural material underpinnings and sociopolitical implications. Starting from complex fractured understandings of belonging as always intrinsically unbelonging, and based on interviews and fieldwork among diverse communities of committed urban growers from uprooted and migrant backgrounds in a city of the British East Midlands, the article looks at how material, affective, and ethical relations in soil care may offer a distinct opening to more-than-human relations of belonging to/with land. Growers repair and nourish soil guided by complex obligations toward a range of socioecological processes and creatures, connect to pasts and futures of urban land, and navigate affective and ethical ambivalences in ways that reconfigure place, identity, and more-than-human community. Attention to these experiences both troubles and reclaims ways of belonging ecologically at the heart of diverse, composite, and uneven worlds.