Soil Trust (泥玩): Codesigning Local Soil-to-Soil Food Economies
This industry-community alliance between a local farm, hotel, welfare center, eco-hospitality foundation, and retailer is initiated by the School of Design, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University. Soil Trust experimented with eco-social agricultural formats to engage diverse, intergenerational populations in land care practices.
To sustain its regenerative farm operation, Soil Trust developed the Growers Without Borders (泥玩無國界) service learning program. Here, ethnic minority mothers, undergraduate design students, and locavore families committed to weekly farm work in return for access to harvest, upskilling, and companionship. This eco-social format allowed the implementation of soil-bound nutrient cycling of kitchen scraps from a downtown hotel that sponsored the operation.
Through this intersectoral action research, hotel staff, agriculturists, volunteers, and design students invested their time and resources toward the unifying purpose of promoting local soil health, fertilizer self-sufficiency, and quality food access to the underprivileged, thereby enacting concrete forms of urban/rural co-development.
Markus WERNLI, Principal Investigator, eco-social design
Shing Wai NG, Co-investigator, Farm Manager
Kam Fai CHAN, Co-investigator, eco-social design
Sin Ting LAM, Assistant Farm Manager
Josh Shui Wah WOLPER, Time-based documentation and social media
Hong Kong
