Extractive logics thrive on alienation. Assembling Ground: Terrestrial Pedagogies for a Regenerative Urbanism explores how methods of observing, representing and designing through ground offer an alternative to extractive relationships between the surface and subsurface. A pedagogy focused on the terrestrial builds from representing ground as an assemblage, deep fieldwork, and detail-scale study of processes and relationships of building ground. Working across urban-rural conditions in the Wallkill Valley of New York, student projects explored methods of unbuilding, collaborating and ground-making as fundamental tools to transform human-ground relationships to build more regenerative, ameliorative futures.

This essay was published in JAE 79:1 Spring 2025, Architecture Beyond Extraction.