Reconfiguring Ground: Temporalities and Properties of Substance

Abstract

This article explores the interplay between essential and accidental properties of substance as social and environmental interactions within the evolving urban landscape of Amsterdam’s Nieuw-West. Tracing these transformations from peat bog to polder, through the 1930s Extension Plan, its mid-20th-century construction, and its present-day form, the article examines how land construction and inhabitation shape environmental and human histories, written through geological, ecological, built, and social taskspaces. Each iteration of figure-ground reconfigures relationships, influencing the intersecting and symbiotic actions of taskspaces and urban/natural processes.

Drawing on Aristotle’s metaphysics, Ingold’s deep surface, and the temporality of landscape, this article examines how taskspaces—embodied actions of habitation (urbanization, wear, maintenance, adaptation) and environmental processes (weather, ecology, soil)—function as symbiotic relational forces affecting the climate, situating locally our planetary condition. These interactions reside within the dynamic tension between process and substance, where material formations and social structures emerge through time. It traces Nieuw-West’s foundations from reclamation and extraction to its hybrid formation as a garden city and modernist suburban structure, highlighting the ongoing tensions between social and ecological displacement. By grounding the epistemology of substance, the article reveals narratives of fragmentation—both ecological and social—embedded in urban development.

Critiquing the ongoing urban densification that extends Nieuw-West’s early commodification and imposed efficiencies, the article instead advocates for a dynamic approach—one that reconnects built and natural environments through collective social practices. By reimagining social contracts as continuums of care and ownership, it highlights the terrestrial, strengthening relationships that reactivate collective environmental imagination, bridging ecological and social disconnections, and enhancing both resilience and agency.