Tracing Patterns in Chicago's Urban Soils

The Kim-Park Program for the Study of the Book is pleased to present Tracing Patterns in Chicago's Urban Soils with Andrew James Leith.

Material and spatial characteristics of quotidian urban landscapes offer key evidence of complex socio-historical relationships that continue to impact communities today. Chief amongst these relationships in Chicago is the impact of urban renewal. Andrew Leith is a fifth-year doctoral candidate in the Anthropology Department at Northwestern University with 20 years of community-engagement, museological, and archaeological experience in Chicago. His ongoing dissertation research involves archaeological investigation of anthropogenic soils in Chicago’s post-industrial landscapes. In this student research spotlight, Andrew will share about his project, Growing Futures in Long Shadows: Soil Health in Chicagoland’s Post-Industrial Community Gardens. The aims of this project are to identify where heavy metals are present in urban soils, the socio-historical origins of heavy metal soil toxicity, and how contemporary communities are contending with the legacy of toxic soils through the lens of community gardening. Andrew’s analysis employs a range of interdisciplinary methods including ICP-OES and pXRF soil testing, archaeological excavation, and participant observation, combining social, archaeological, and archival data, while visualizing relationships through mapping techniques.

This presentation will consider how the soils in Chicago’s parks, boulevards, and community gardens provide a range of evidence of the disproportionate distribution of social and environmental injustice over time. Patterns in these physical traces can relate the embodied experiences of confinement and displacement to abstract political and economic factors. In some cases, as the product of their histories, the sites of these struggles have become distinctively suited to functioning in the present as points of grassroots convergence. This is particularly relevant today because many urban Chicagoland community gardens, especially those in marginalized communities, are both the product of intergenerational power asymmetries and a burgeoning form of grassroots response in which gardening is addressing nutritional needs as well as a range of social advocacy.

This event is open to all with registration and will be held in The Hanna Holborn Gray Special Collections Research Center in Regenstein Library.

Event attendees without a University of Chicago ID may obtain a library entry pass on arrival by checking in at Regenstein Library’s entry desk and presenting a current, government-issued photo ID, such as a driver’s license, CityKey, state ID, or passport to confirm identity. Get more visitor information.

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Host or Publisher Kim-Park Program for the Study of the Book