Soil food webs play a central role in the successful restoration of critical ecosystem processes. Yet, we lack an understanding of how these highly diverse and functionally complex belowground communities reassemble in forests undergoing restoration, and the factors responsible for varying trajectories of soil community reassembly. Even more poorly understood is the reassembly of soil invertebrates across multiple trophic levels after disturbance. Moreover, any potential effect of ecological succession on food web structural properties (connectance and maximum trophic level) and its implications on soil invertebrate trophic functions remains poorly understood. In this PhD thesis, I investigate the effect of restoration age and biotic and abiotic characteristics of restored forests on the reassembly of soil invertebrate communities across different trophic groups. I also explore the effect of the aforementioned predictors on soil food web structure and associated ecosystem functioning. I sampled soil invertebrate communities from 70 urban restored forests, as well as three unrestored and three remnant urban forests. All forest sites were distributed across eight cities in Aotearoa, New Zealand and were historically occupied by native vegetation until cleared for either agriculture or urban development. The sites were then planted with native woody species between six and 60 years prior to this research, forming a chronosequence of forest succession. In addition to soil invertebrates, vegetation data (e.g., mean tree diameter, tree species richness) and site characteristics (e.g., litter depth, soil temperature) were also collected from these forests. I identified the soil invertebrates into major size-based functional groups (i.e., microfauna, mesofauna and macrofauna) and further into trophic levels: detritivores, fungivores, herbivores, omnivores and predators. Additionally, I quantified the abundance, biomass and mean body mass of all soil invertebrates. Finally, I constructed 70 local food webs across the restored forest sites and quantified the flux of energy between different feeding groups and their food sources to estimate five important ecosystem functions in soil food webs: detritivory, bacterivory, fungivory, herbivory and predation. I analysed the relative importance of restored forest age and environmental variables as predictors of variation in soil invertebrate communities. I found that restoration age, in itself, had no discernible effect on the abundance, biomass or mean body size of soil invertebrate communities. Instead, site characteristics like mean tree diameter, tree species richness, litter depth and soil temperature were the main drivers of variability in soil communities. Notably, these factors influenced larger macrofauna and mesofauna more than nematodes. However, when I modelled the effects of restoration age on soil communities in a structural equation modelling framework, taking into account bottom-up effects from plant communities to invertebrate predators, restoration age was shown to have indirect effects on the biomass of mesofauna decomposers, omnivores and nematode predators. Finally, by investigating shifts in food web structure and resulting changes in energy fluxes across trophic levels, I found that forest restoration age did not directly influence either the structure (connectance, maximum trophic level) or the five examined trophic functions of the soil food webs. Instead, effects of forest restoration age occurred through changes in vegetation characteristics as forest succession progresses. My results suggests that forest age is not a direct major driver of the reassembly of soil invertebrate communities. Instead, mean tree diameter, tree species richness, litter depth, and soil temperature play important roles in the process. My results show the significance of planting trees that can grow large, promoting species diversity and allowing leaf litter to accumulate naturally to support soil invertebrate community of different trophic functions. Through my results, I also show how the aforementioned vegetation characteristics can contribute to flow of energy in the soil food web. In addition to demonstrating how crucial food web structural properties are to energy flow via trophic interactions such as detritivory, fungivory and predation, this research also highlights the interconnectedness of above and belowground ecosystems. Taken together, my findings suggest that urban restoration efforts should focus on promoting these beneficial vegetation characteristics, alongside considering food web complexity, to optimize trophic functions performed by soil food webs.