Future Soilscapes: [Re]grounding the Marseille commons Part 2 Project 2025 Thomas FoleyEmma Nesbitt University College Cork | Ireland Future Soilscapes: [Re]Grounding the Marseille Commons proposes an architectural strategy to transform a derelict post-industrial site in Marseille’s Quartiers Nord into a renewed urban commons. The design unfolds through three interdependent architectural bodies: the Purification Chambers, the Sanctum Labs, and the Cultural Commons, set within a multi-scalar reconfiguration of the site’s landscape.The site, scarred by infrastructural abandonment, socio-political neglect, and contamination, sits above the buried Aygalades River, which was once a vital artery for the city’s northern districts. The project reclaims this concealed waterway as both a spatial and symbolic catalyst for repairing the north of Marseille’s fractured urban fabric.Drawing from structuralist anthropology, ethnographic fieldwork, counter-mapping, and material experimentation, the proposal positions architecture not only as built forms but as a rites of passage. Each architectural body operates as a ceremonial mediator between raw ecologies and cultivated commons, between neglected materials and renewed systems of care.By entwining ecological remediation with collective ritual, Future Soilscapes advances a vision of architecture as both a social practice and an environmental act, re-grounding the city in reciprocal relationships with its soils, water, and communities. Tutor(s)