Unsettled temporalities: Deep-time governance and the politics of construction grounds

The soil movements of construction form terrains of colliding temporalities. In southern Finland, clayey soils rendered surplus through construction are increasingly framed through the circular economy. Dominated by the tempos of construction timelines, urban growth and regulatory cycles, clay is increasingly forced into ever-accelerating capitalist rhythms. Drawing on scholarship on deep time and soil–human relations, this article examines how conflicts over these soils are not merely logistical or regulatory; they also reveal a temporal mismatch between the tempos of industrialised construction and geological rhythms. My findings show how dominant time practices compress geological temporalities, reinforcing anthropocentric and extractive logics. Additionally, the indeterminacy of clay complicates efforts to incorporate it into emerging frameworks of deep-time governance. As a political and temporal orientation for environmental governance, I propose a nuanced deep-time literacy, one that can recognise temporal dissonance, attend to the agencies of earthly matter and reframe soil rendered surplus, not as residue to be managed but as sites of ongoing negotiations around deep-time resistance and relations. The article contributes to a growing effort to reframe soil–human relations not as a managerial frontier for sustainability but as a terrain of ethical entanglement, ontological frictions and potential policy reorientation.