As the proportion of people living in urban areas has been and still is increasing, Soils within Cities: Global approaches to their sustainable management undertakes to shed light on the role and importance of soils in cities, and stresses the need to consider and manage this unique component of the urban ecosystem on our way to build sustainable cities.
Edited on behalf of the International Union of Soil Sciences, this book is the result of a joint effort of the international SUITMA (Soils of the Urban, Traffic, Mining and Military Areas) working group of IUSS.
Thirty-four short contributions comprehensively highlight key aspects and characteristics of soils of the urban ecosystem and the problems and challenges associated with them.
The authors lay out the fundamentals of soil science applied to anthropized environments (environments degraded by human activity), including composition, properties, and functions of soils of the urban environment, their pedogenic evolution, classification and mapping.
Furthermore, contributions present examples of actual urban soil surveys conducted in the US, Poland, Germany and Russia. Approaches to managing soils of the urban environment with focus on brownfields, soil sealing and urban agriculture, and the management of soil sealing are described.
A separate chapter is dedicated to the ecosystem services urban soils can provide, including sustaining and controlling water quality and quantity, providing C and P storage capacity, supporting biodiversity, pollution problems, and pointing out ecosystem services that even contaminated industrial and mine soils are able to provide.
“Soils within Cities” is aimed at expanding our view of soils of our planet, and having them taken into consideration for human well-being. It provides city planners and managers with a special reference that can serve to offer citizens a better life in the long run.

The book Soils within Cities, edited by M.J. Levin, K.-H.J. Kim, J.L. Morel, W. Burghardt, P. Charzyński, and R.K. Shaw, is a compendium of relatively short chapters with an introduction and history of the SUITMA Working Group that was launched at the 16th World Congress of the International Union of Soil Science in 1998. Collectively, the book’s author’s come from the SUITMA Working Group and as a result the book reads more like a proceedings for a SUITMA conference, which have been held biennially since 2000, than as an edited book. It is important to note that SUITMA is an acronym for Soils of Urban, Industrial, Traffic, Mining and Military areas, which makes this volume a more expansive view of urban soils than has typically been presented in earlier books published on the subject. Additionally, an essential value of SUITMA (and this book) is that it encompasses an international perspective on urban soil research.
The book is basically organized around three major topics: (1) Characteristics, formation, classification and survey (Chapters 2.0, 3.0, 4.0 and 5.0); (2) management (Chapters 6.0 and 7.0); and (3) ecosystem services provided by urban soils (Chapters 8.0 and 9.0). Each topic has a number of relatively short subchapters that are loosely related to the overall chapter, but do not follow a common format or writing style. Therefore, on the one hand the reader will have to get by the varying styles of writing, formatting etc., but on the other hand there is a wealth of information and insight about urban soils with varying perspectives from around the world.
I found the first and third major topics to be the most compelling and informative. There have been great strides in developing classification systems for urban soils and their survey and mapping, which is clearly a success story for urban soil science and its application. It would, however, behoove the discipline to put urban soils within the context of overall anthropogenic effects, such as with cultivation and other land uses. More also could have been made of the “novelty” of urban environments and the assemblages of species that occur in urban areas with respect to soil formation, biodiversity, and ecosystem processes. For instance, the notion that urban ecosystems are “emergent” and thus can serve as “natural experiments” to study soil responses to the effects of invasive plant and animal species, or as analogues to assess the impacts of climate change on soil processes. Additionally from a practical standpoint, no mention is made of the interpretation of soil types or mapping units being described in urban landscapes. But these are only minor criticisms given the relatively recent emergence of urban soil science and SUITMA in the previous two decades. This compendium of chapters represent the most thorough overview of urban soils yet found in a single volume and I congratulate the Editors for their efforts to publish this book. More specific comments of the 3 major topics fallow.
Chapter 2.0 is the longest of all the chapters in the total number of pages and is made up of several subchapters. Together these cover the characteristics, criteria, and functioning of urban soils. Accordingly, this chapter provides the bases for discussing SUITMA soils in the remainder of the book. Subchapter 2.2 in particular provides a nice overview of anthropogenic soil criteria, which again is mostly directed at urban soil conditions and not necessarily inclusive of other types of anthropogenic influences on soil characteristics, such as with cultivated soils. In particular the authors make a good case for recognizing human-altered and human-transported (HAHT) materials to capture soil modifications in urban landscapes and how both can be recognized by assessing anthropogenic landforms. Other topics in Chapter 2.0 include a broad overview of soil contamination with examples in urban landscapes, functions of soils in urban environments, and mini-reviews of heat transfer and hydraulic properties of urban soils. These subchapters were all informative, but an overview from an ecosystem perspective would have been useful especially with reference to recent studies in the literature reporting on the nitrogen and carbon dynamics of urban soils.
Chapter 3.0 is relatively short in the number of pages, but may be the most intriguing of all the chapters. The subchapters on sealed soils and micropedology are often overlooked areas of urban soil research and the Editors should be commended on their inclusion. Of particular importance is the conceptual model depicted in Fig. 3.1, which captures the influence of human activities on the soil-forming factors and thus provides a framework for comparing urban and overall anthropogenic effects on soil formation. Unfortunately absent is a discussion of the importance of plant-soil interactions in urban soil development.
The chapters on the classification of urban soils (4.0) and urban soil surveys (5.0) represent the most important contributions of the SUITMA effort. Indeed, great strides in classification and soil mapping have been recently made with several examples from around the world presented in Chapter 5.0. These examples show how far classification systems of urban soils have come, but they also reflect the challenge of unifying classification systems on a global basis. One critique of this chapter is the common assertion that urban soils are characterized by substantial horizontal and vertical heterogeneity, which is not necessarily true for all scales of observation. Often in highly managed plant-soil systems, such as turf grasses in lawns, the heterogeneity of soil characteristics can be much lower than in a native forest or grassland system.
While the chapters covering the characteristics, formation and classification of urban soils (Chapters 2.0, 3.0, 4.0 and 5.0) were the most comprehensive and informative, the chapters relating to the ecosystem services provided by urban soils (Chapters 8.0 and 9.0) were the most interesting and innovative. For example, urban agriculture is gaining recognition for closing the gap on food security for more than half of the world’s population (Chapter 8.1), but at the same time may present a public health hazard given the risk for soil contaminants in urban areas (Chapter 8.2). A particularly innovative chapter reports on the recovery of metals from urban soils, which views soil contamination by metals as a potential source of “strategic” or economically valuable metals (Chapter 8.3).
More traditional discussions of ecosystem services were included in Chapter 9.0 with an introductory chapter (9.1) that presents a useful table showing ecosystem services provided by various categories of urban soils (roughly using categories by the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment in 2005), which interestingly do not fallow the SUITMA categories presented in an earlier chapter. The remaining chapters cover regulating services (carbon and phosphorus storage), one example of ecosystem functioning services (reservoir for biodiversity); and soils that may be heavily contaminated by trace metals, but continue to provide ecosystem services especially post-remediation. While chapter 9.1 provided a nice roadmap for the ensuing discussions of ecosystem services, a review of existing knowledge or data for each type of ecosystem service would have provided context for the excellent examples that followed. Chapter 9.0 culminates with wonderful examples of cultural services provided by urban or SUITMA soils. In particular it shows the novelty of urban or SUITMA soils and the ecosystem services they provide, especially the assertion that at a micro scale urban soils can be viewed as art and an object of beauty.
The management focused chapters (6.0 and 7.0), while in themselves represent excellent and needed discussions of soils as components of green infrastructure, waste capping systems, and land restoration, there is the unfortunate omission of an enormously important management impact in urban landscapes—namely, lawn management. Hopefully, future SUITMA publications and meetings address this environmentally important management effect on urban soils and their associated ecosystems.
In conclusion, this book is a welcome and most comprehensive overview of SUITMA and urban soils to date and demonstrates how far the discipline has come in the previous 20 years. Since this compendium reads as a proceedings for a conference on urban soils, there were gaps in the material, uneven writing styles, absence of an index, and no overall organizational structure to the book. These critiques, however, do not take away from the importance of the SUITMA working group and its biennial meetings that have galvanized the discipline and brought recognition to the importance of anthropogenic soils. Capturing the information, ideas, and knowledge that is presented in this book represents an enormously important contribution to the field and I commend the editors and authors for their efforts to do so. As such, this book represents a wonderful guide for the latest information and research on urban soils and thus would make a great information source for any course or discussion group on the subject.

Richard V. Pouyat, Emeritus Scientist, USDA Forest Service
Tilghman, MD 21671

Soil Science January/February 2018, Volume 183, Number 1

Das 34 Beiträge zu Stadtböden umfassende Buch bietet deutlich mehr als die Summe der Beiträge. Gibt es doch die Sichtweise europäischer Autoren aus Frankreich, Deutschland und Polen, aber auch die russischer, chinesischer und nordamerikanischer Verfasser wieder und zeichnet damit ein recht globales Bild der Forschung zu urbanen Böden, genauer zu SUITMA-Böden. Die als Herausgeber agierende Arbeitsgruppe der internationalen Union der Bodenwissenschaften (IUSS) SUITMA befasst sich also mit Böden (Soils) der urban, industriell, durch Bergbau (mining) und Militär geprägten Areale. Dabei wird auf 253 Seiten ein thematisch breites Spektrum bearbeitet. Die im Bereich der Grundlagen angesiedelten Themenbereiche reichen von den Eigenschaften, über die Genese, Klassifikation und Kartierung bis zum Management der Böden in den am dichtest besiedelten Bereichen der Erde. In den anwendungsorientierteren Kapiteln wird dann auf Aspekte des vorsorgenden Bodenschutzes eingegangen, wie sie bei mehr oder weniger zielgerichtet aufgeschütteten Böden zum Tragen kommen. Darüber hinaus wird auf die Problematik der Bodenversiegelung eingegangen und auch die Chancen von Urban Agriculture beleuchtet. Das Kapitel zu den Ecosystem Services rückt dann die Leistungsfähigkeit der anthropogen überprägten Böden ins richtige Licht. Abschließend geht das Fachbuch auf die Aktivitäten zur Förderung der Wahrnehmung der Böden in städtischer Umgebung ein. Gleichwohl steht die Frage nach der Umsetzung der Erkenntnisse der eher wissenschaftlich geprägten Autorenschaft in der Stadtplanung nicht im Vordergrund. Wird das in englischer Sprache verfasste Buch von Stadtplanern gelesen, können sich so allerdings wichtige Umsetzungsimpulse ergeben. Dies wird durch den moderaten Preis von 29,90 EUR erleichtert.

Andreas Lehmann, Stuttgart

Bodenschutz - Ausgabe 3/2017