From Jersey barriers to Cape Cod berms, Arizona crossings to the Rikers (Island) soil series, Chicago caissons to Portland cement, Stockholm tree pits to the Missouri gravel bed method – place names in material practices and techniques proliferate throughout the making of the built environment. However, how and why these techniques (and others that have lost their geographic nomenclature) emerged from specific cultural and climatic conditions – and how they circulate to new geographies through social and professional networks, rather than through marketing – is relatively underexamined. In tracing these operative practices – and deliberately bracketing off narrow economic explanations of market segmentation – I investigate alternative modes of landscape regionalism that have emerged between standardization and craft, between a globalized industry and the situated particularities of matter, ecology, and culture.

Image: Laguardia and other architectural fill soils, USDA-NCRS via Urban Soils Institute