From Sealed Soil to Shared Stewardship: What We Learned in the First SOILTRIBES Bootcamp

The first REUSES bootcamp opened up an important question: what does it really mean to reclaim urban sealed soils?

At the beginning, the challenge focused on unsealing soils in urban areas, especially abandoned or degraded land, and restoring them to a healthier ecological state. The project already had a strong foundation through Sara Di Lonardo’s scientific work and the experience of a funded pilot in Ancona, where an abandoned area was being used as a concrete case for soil unsealing and revitalisation.

But during the bootcamp, the challenge grew into something broader, deeper and more community-centred.

The group began to see that unsealing soil is not only a technical or environmental action. It is also a social, educational and civic process. To restore soil is also to restore relationships: between children and the ground beneath their feet, between schools and their neighbourhoods, between citizens and local authorities, and between scientific knowledge and everyday public life.

A key shift emerged: the project moved from “unsealing soil” towards “unsealing relationships with land”.

This reframing brought schools to the centre of the project. Schoolyards, classrooms and outdoor learning spaces became potential living laboratories where children could explore soil, biodiversity, heat, water and climate adaptation in practical ways. Instead of treating soil restoration as something that happens only through experts and machinery, the group imagined a process where students, teachers, parents, municipalities, NGOs and technical actors could all play a role.

The boot camp also helped identify the many tensions that make this work difficult. Participants discussed environmental challenges such as floods, droughts and heat waves; socio-cultural challenges such as the undervaluing of traditional and community knowledge; political and economic barriers such as slow bureaucracy, unequal resources and short-term funding; and technological gaps around access to useful data and infrastructure.

These challenges did not weaken the proposal. Instead, they helped clarify its purpose.

The group’s emerging vision was to create resilient, eco-educated and hands-on learning communities through soil unsealing, water reuse, flood prevention and urban soil revitalisation. Education, environmental empathy and collaboration became the foundation of the project’s next phase.

Several possible outputs began to take shape: a participatory soil education model for schools, a curriculum on soil unsealing and revitalisation, workshops and demonstrations, communication tools, stakeholder dossiers, and a possible digital knowledge-sharing space for resources, case studies and community exchange.

The first bootcamp showed that REUSES has strong potential because it connects practical urban regeneration with education, democratic participation and long-term stewardship. It also showed that the project’s strength lies in its ability to bring together different actors: schools, municipalities, NGOs, researchers, technical experts, parents and children.

By the end of the process, REUSES had become much more than a soil restoration project. It had become a proposal for learning how to care for urban soils together.

The next challenge will be to transform this shared vision into a clear, usable and replicable model: one that can support schools, guide municipalities, inspire communities and make urban soil visible as a living part of climate adaptation and civic life.