Sonia Sobrino Ralston (she/her) is a spatial practitioner and researcher. Broadly, her interests lie in how landscape and architecture intersect with geopolitics and the history of technology. Her current projects focus on understanding how regimes historically attempted to establish control over landscapes using environmental media, and the alternative and dissenting systems that respond to them. Sonia recently graduated with distinction from the Harvard Graduate School of Design with a Master in Landscape Architecture, where she won the Digital Design Prize, the Landscape Architecture Thesis Prize, and the Norman T. Newton Prize. She also holds a Master of Architecture from Princeton University where she also received a certificate in Media and Modernity, and was awarded the Suzanne Kolarik Underwood Prize. Beyond this, she has worked as anassistant curator, research assistant, teaching assistant, architectural designer, exhibition designer, data visualizer, publication editor, and graphic designer at various institutions and organizations focused on spatial concerns.
Selected Work
01. Design
Utilizing Power
Directing Domains
Between 1-549
Assembly
02. Installation
Garden Party
03. Professional
metaLAB at Harvard︎︎︎
01. Design
Waste to GovernanceLOT ###
Utilizing Power
Directing Domains
Between 1-549
Assembly
02. Installation
Garden Party
03. Professional
Assistant Curator, 2022 Tallinn Architecture Biennale︎︎︎Design Collaborator,
metaLAB at Harvard︎︎︎
LOT ###
Spring 2022
Harvard GSD Landscape Architecture Core IV
Professor Rosalea Monacella

Immanent domain, imminent ecologies
We commonly think of infrastructure as the implementation of technological apparatuses, including solar energy systems or environmental sensing. The ability to be measured, gridded, and ascribed economic value is integral to the systems of land value that determine the developmental possibilities of urban property. We don’t often think the same way about plants; their presence can be retooled as economic value if they are treated as green infrastructure, but the focus on capital accumulation negates the possibilities to think with these timescales and priorities. This project aims to treat ecological actors—plants—as type of infrastructure where plants do not just add economic value to a site, but rather offer a model to redefine the values ascribed to property through their growth. In tandem with more conventional forms of infrastructural tools such as energy and environmental monitoring systems, the project as a whole aims to derive alternative systems of labour and valuation for the benefit of local people and ecosystems.
Positioned in a complex set of social, economic, and ecological entanglements, Newmarket Square is faced with a future of gentrification driven by profit which will ultimately displace labour and people to the detriment of nearby residents. Drawing from work by nearby
We commonly think of infrastructure as the implementation of technological apparatuses, including solar energy systems or environmental sensing. The ability to be measured, gridded, and ascribed economic value is integral to the systems of land value that determine the developmental possibilities of urban property. We don’t often think the same way about plants; their presence can be retooled as economic value if they are treated as green infrastructure, but the focus on capital accumulation negates the possibilities to think with these timescales and priorities. This project aims to treat ecological actors—plants—as type of infrastructure where plants do not just add economic value to a site, but rather offer a model to redefine the values ascribed to property through their growth. In tandem with more conventional forms of infrastructural tools such as energy and environmental monitoring systems, the project as a whole aims to derive alternative systems of labour and valuation for the benefit of local people and ecosystems.
Positioned in a complex set of social, economic, and ecological entanglements, Newmarket Square is faced with a future of gentrification driven by profit which will ultimately displace labour and people to the detriment of nearby residents. Drawing from work by nearby
community land trusts, this project aims to bring together ecological
infrastructure with solar and environmental monitoring infrastructure to createecological corridors held in community trust. The design offers solar infrastructure
to power a microgrid serving nearby housing, environmental monitoring to
establish measures to reduce harmful air and water contamination in a site
marked by long-term environmental racism, as well as planting that will assist
with environmental monitoring and alter the placement of solar infrastructure. On
the site of two former alleyways in the industrial area—alleys that continue to
exist as tax parcels but have since become fragmented by fences into parking
lots—these corridors first aim to adopting air rights from nearby buildings to
protect small businesses from developmental pressures. But with the planting,
growing, and dispersal of plants along the corridor on the ground, the
alteration of the tax parcels is seen as a growing, changing model that
conceives property and infrastructure as having timescales attune to
environmental and social needs as opposed to economic. In short, the ecological
corridors proposed in the former alleys of the industrial site at Newmarket
Square aim to imagine what kinds of futures are to be imagined if value and
property is considered through the infrastructure of plants.






Analysis of the site reveals complex relationships to collective ownership, toxicity, and land value change


Across the site, tax parcels of former streets remain where new industrial buildings have appeared


Plan for deployment across neighbourhood and site



Energy Grid

Toxicity Grid
Ecological Grid
Scotch pine as infrastructure



Imagined futures of the site wherein feral growth of plants alters tax parcels, senses toxicity, and responds to
solar infrastructure


Study model of the nature of air rights and their ability to be bent

Presentation of final material as stacked, entangled dossier in transparent filing cabinet