Artful-Geoscience: Co-Creating Urban Subsurface Futures? A discussion and an invitation.

The urban subsurface is key to developing sustainable urban futures (SDG 11). Yet, as is well acknowledged, geoscientists face many challenges in engaging stakeholders and communities with the urban subsurface, as well as the challenges associated wtih fragmented data sources, knowledge gaps, citizen ‘oversight,’ and challenging subsurface cultural associations (Bricker et al. 2017, 2019). In this paper we present a case for the value of the intersections between geoscience and creative practices (from visual methods to participatory arts) in helping to address some of these challenges. To make our case we present preliminary findings from a collaboration between geoscientists and science communicators based at the British Geological Survey, and a cultural geographer experienced in researching and creating art-science collaborations. We explore three things:

We close our discussion with an invitation to join us in forming a network exploring the potential of art-geoscience collaborations for understanding, using and preserving the urban subsurface.