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SUMMARY:Soil\, Death\, and Urban Governance in Late-Imperial St. Petersbur
 g (1870 – 1914) - Olga Petri (University of Cambridge)
DTSTART:20250506T120000Z
DTEND:20250506T130000Z
UID:TALK231553@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Tom Fry
DESCRIPTION:In late imperial St. Petersburg\, a mounting cemetery crisis e
 xposed the city’s unstable\, saturated ground as a political and ecologi
 cal threat. As burials overflowed and decayed into waterways\, urban gover
 nance shifted its attention downward: away from air and buildings\, toward
  the soil itself. In this paper\, I will argue that the ground—long trea
 ted as inert infrastructure—became newly visible as a material and polit
 ical actor. Central to this reorientation was the work of Vasily Dokuchaev
 \, whose theory of soil as a dynamic\, living system reshaped how the city
  imagined its environmental future. By reading St. Petersburg’s burial c
 risis through the agency of soil\, the article rethinks how imperial citie
 s confronted environmental breakdown not only in the air or the built form
 \, but in the very ground beneath them
LOCATION:Department of Geography\, Small Lecture Theatre
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