Searching for Ecological Connectivity in Calgary's Suburbs

Searching for Ecological Connectivity in Calgary’s Suburbs

M. P. Knapik

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Searching for Ecological Connectivity in Calgary’s Suburbs

Matthew P. Knapik

Prepared in partial fulfilment of the requirements of the Masters of Environmental Design (Urban Design) in the Faculty of Environmental Design, University of Calgary.

supervisor: Dr. David Monteyne June 7 2012

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Abstract As society transitions to a post-industrial domain, the world is drawn increasingly along urban lines: cities and their regions now shape the destiny of the planet.

These urban systems face increasing demands on their performance. In addition to the assumption that they will offer safe and efficient infrastructures, effective distributions of work, home, and play, and quality of life, cites are increasingly expected to demonstrate a range of ecological capabilities. These include supporting habitat, growing food, regulating air, water, and micro climates, and reducing energy consumption.

In the face of this pressure, outdated suburban neighbourhoods dominate the Canadian landscape. In what ways could suburban space sponsor an ecologically integrated city?

The project posits a high-performance pattern of suburban organization that sets out a more balanced and integrated mix of hard and soft infrastructures, with the aim of integrating, expressing, and capturing their collective ecological capacity.

Connectivity among soft infrastructures emerges as a key variable.

The notion of a high-performance suburban textile is evaluated in a large study area (approximately 80km2) in northwest Calgary, identifying spatial patterns that offer unique opportunities to refit suburban space.

The project employs GIS corridor analysis to identify potential intra-suburban connections between key natural patches that would increase the connectivity of soft infrastructures. More detailed challenges and opportunities arise from a closer reading of six scenarios from the corridor analysis. Conditions common to all scenarios including pinched/obstructed corridors, backyard clusters, major/ minor crossing points, and dual-alignments.

The project concludes with a series of design sketches that begin to explore the more detailed re-fitting of suburban space to enhance ecological connectivity.

Keywords Urban design, Urban Ecology, Infrastructure Design, Design Theory, GIS, Open Space, Urban Planning, Landscape Ecology, Suburbs

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Acknowledgements I would like to extend my sincerest thanks to the many people who contibuted to the final form of this project, and to those who made life rich throughout the process.

To my supervisor, Dr. David Monteyne, for his patience, insights, and ability to keep my project’s hairs and infinitives unsplit.

To my external advisor, Greg Chernoff, for his map-geekery and for offering me a place on his soap box.

To Dr. Noel Keough, for his thoughtful reading and contributions to the final draft.

To Graham Livesey, without whom this project would have long ago forayed into less interesting and less relevant territory.

To the staff at EVDS, for their kindness, accomodation, and advocacy throughout the process.

To The Faculty of Environmental Design and the University of Calgary, for the generous financial support.

To my family, and especially my parents, who have given me love and support throughout my entire educational journey.

To my friends, who gave me the perfect blend of ribbing and encouragement.

And to Genevieve, who filled me with love and food, and offerred brilliance, patience, and endless distraction.

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Table of Contents

Prologue

11

Chapter One: Continuous City

15

Chapter Two: A High-Performance Suburb

35

Chapter Three: Calgary’s Suburbs

74

Chapter Four: City Defrag

103

Chapter Five: The Challenges and Opportunities of Connection

152

Chapter Six: Sketches and Conclusion

186

References

211

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P

Prologue

What if the suburbs were our greatest hope for helping cities respond to the challenges of the next century?

This question may appear as little more than baited provocation, but take a moment to examine the nerve it strikes. It is a nerve that runs deep through space, history, and into a collective future. What the suburbs are, as well as what they represent, has been a subject of much study, critique, and lived experience.

Of the eighty percent of Canadians who are now urban dwellers, almost half live in low-density, suburban developments (Turcotte, 2008). This means that close to 40% of Canadians now live in suburbs -- more than any other development type.

The continued predominance of suburban form finds dissonance with an increasing body of anti-suburban sentiment among both academic and popular observers. Advocates of suburbs can be found in both of these spheres, to be sure, but generally speaking, they have become a familiar villain in the narrative of the city. Returning to the provocation: suburbs are rarely invoked as a source of hope.

This pessimism is more than a missed opportunity. If the city-builders of the next century fail to address all components of the built environment with optimism and appreciation, they risk precluding a host of potential avenues of change. And growing evidence suggests that impending demands on cities will arrive with a magnitude that will necessitate the broadest possible toolkit (see Grimm et al., 2008; Niemela, 1999).

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Prologue

What if the suburbs were our greatest hope? What if they had to be?

The impending transformation of cities is a story rife with doom. But it can, and should, be re-framed as an opportunity to reform and evolve outdated systems of settlement. People must build in their collective imaginations both exciting longterm visions and productive intermediate shapes for cities: shapes that may not solve every challenge (or even one challenge completely), but that shake common perceptions, draw out new opportunities, and carve out toe-holds to propel urban space forward.

In this light, readdressing and reshaping the suburbs as legitimate and contributing components of Canada’s urban system is one of the greatest imperatives of urban design today.

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Prologue

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1

Chapter One: Continuous City

Stinging critiques of suburban space are present across many disciplines, painting a bleak and convincing picture of the ruinous role suburbs play in human civilization. Underlying much of this critique, however, there lies an etymological demon. The latin “sub” directly translates to “below”, not “outside”. In fact, the 17th century use of the term “suburban” did not reference spatial relationships at all (perhaps then they would be called the “exoburbs”). They rather referenced the suburb-dweller’s lack of social sophistication when compared to their more urbane cousins in the city. To this day, “Suburban” remains by definition “contemptibly dull and ordinary” (OED online, 2010). So from the very start, there exists a category of city space whose lexical identity is (i) tied by dependant relationship to a centralized “other”, and (ii) stupid. While the common use of “suburb” has evolved, there remains today a strong cleft of identity between the city and its periphery. Few products could hope for an equitable evaluation under such conditions (apples will always taste better than subapples).

Counter-arguments in favour of suburbanism are often feebly populist (“but people like them”), and at worst are coloured by short-term development agendas.

There are a few notable outliers -- see in particular Kenneth Jackson’s classic book Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States (1987) and Richard Ingersoll’s Sprawltown: Looking for the City on Its Edges (2006) -- but the suburbs largely remain a villain in narratives of the city.

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Deploying an unappreciative post-development growth boundary.

Re-aligning development incentives. | 16 |

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Chapter 1: Continuous City

Within the massive collection of suburban critiques, proposed solutions generally fall between two extremes.

On one extreme, strategies are reliant on an unrealistic kind of utopian revolution in which the city is quickly and willfully transformed: Imagine for a moment that the more radical suburban critics saw such revolutionary visions through.

A nation-wide policy is announced. The suburbs are too costly and will be dismantled over a period of three years. Residents have been asked to move back into the city. Around the cores stand hundreds of shiny vacant towers, built by those eager to capitalize on the impending demand. On the first of the month, military helicopters circling the perimeter of the urban zone open their bambi buckets and draw broad lines of bright yellow paint onto the city below, drawing a new boundary for the city. Or perhaps it would be more insidious: a kind of reverse siege. The Municipal Department of Suburban Mitigation has shut off the water supply to the city’s perimeter, citing an increasingly costly and inefficient infrastructure. If you want flushable toilets, you better move toward the core.

Some municipalities have anticipated the growth of suburbs at the edge of their cities and launched a range preemptive strikes. Measures such as green belts and growth boundaries have been deployed by cities around the world in an attempt to curb or limit outward development -- see notably Portland (Jun, 2004), Melbourne (Buxton, 2003), and Seoul (Lee, 1998). The case of Portland in particular demonstrates the tremendous costs (legally, economically, politically) that can be brought to bear by a greenbelt; city-builders there clearly anticipate that future decisions in the greenbelt’s absence would be no less taxing.

At the other end of the spectrum, hope is more practically placed in the hands of increasing fuel prices and an impending energy crisis. These critics invest their hopes in the demand-side of the equation. The death of the car. Peak oil.

The spatial economy of the suburbs will collapse in a cloud of stucco dust and inflatable snowmen and Armour All (see, for one of many examples, Roberts 2004). Some aspects of this scenario are indeed inevitable. And while the shifting energy economy may lead to a steady “tightening” within cities, it represents a

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Chapter 1: Continuous City

crisis that will inflict pain on the entire urban system — even the urban core. It is not, in other words, something to count on or hope for. Waiting for a crisis or utopia, be it political or economic, is not a strategy.

Both of these extremes see the erasure of suburban space as the only answer to the suburban problem, and both play up the false duality of urban and suburban space.

Instead, urban scholars must understand urbanity as a continuous phenomenon, and implicated in a collective future. Cities may, like water-starved plants, slowly shed parts that hurt the whole, but if the goal is to build a resilient city-system that flourishes into the future, visions must not exclude arbitrary categories and “lesser”urbanisms. This change must be a slow revolution, and so city-builders must hold in their arsenal visions for productive intermediate evolutions of suburban space. And this is where appreciation must come into play.

Appreciative Inquiry and the Suburbs “Appreciative inquiry” is a term used in organizational philosophy that seeks to build upon the strengths of complex systems, rather than focusing on solving their problems. It is born from an acknowledgement that the inquiry models of traditional Science are insufficient when addressing complex assemblies.

According to early proponents of the model, appreciative inquiry is a response to the “unquestioned commitment [of action research] to a secularized problemoriented view of the world and thus to the subsequent loss of our capacity as researchers and participants to marvel, and in marvelling to embrace, the miracle and mystery of social organization” (Cooperrider and Srivastva, 1987, p. 130). By re-framing the “problem” of suburbs in a way that allows people to build on its strengths, on its “miracles and mysteries”, scholars and designers can overcome the culture of critique and disappointment, and begin to intervene in ways that support broader goals.

Appreciation is particularly important when you are dealing with a complex system that has deeply embedded social structures. In order for people to feel ownership — rather than alienation — within a change process, their current contributions must be recognized, and they must be invited into the process as

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Biology

City

Measurement & Process

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Chapter 1: Continuous City

collaborators. Reductionist “yellow-paint” strategies simply will not work. So as a departure point, this project poses a different, appreciative question: what are the suburbs doing really well?

Appreciative approaches to suburban space should not be confused with strategies that protect suburbs or advocate on-going suburban development. Appreciation here is only employed in the explicit presence of change.

The City Improper For centuries, the field of biology has wrestled with the task of establishing criteria for what counts as “alive”. More recently, the eminent biophysicist Harold Morowitz has asserted that “life”, due to its reliance on a complex system of sustained energy flows, is better understood as “a property of planets rather than of individual organisms” (qtd in Capra, 2004). This essential re-framing shifts focus to the process over the product: a relationship-based, ecological understanding.

As one inspects the constant flow of material, energy, and information through the contemporary city, it becomes clear that cities — which, much like “life”, have traditionally been examined in isolation — can in fact only be understood in the context of the complex systems that support them. “Urbanness” one could say, is a property of far-reaching landscapes rather than of individual municipalities.

What can the urbanist learn from this story? Instead of classifying terrain as urban or rural, dead or alive, urbanists can begin to ask the broader and more relevant question of how they engage and shape the process of urbanness in many different implicated landscapes. French philosopher Gilles Deleuze might have identified this as a shift from a relationship of interiority (the suburbs can only be understood as constituent members of an urban city — “subs” of the “urb”) to a relationship of exteriority (what are the potential expressions of the suburban zone, when engaged in other contexts?). Barriers to this kind of understanding are built directly into an inherently interiority-style language that describes the city “proper” as a fully constituted and delineated entity, relating distinctively to itself.

By removing the troublesome notion of the suburban zone as a sub-par peripheral component of a proper urbanity (to follow the biological metaphor: a type of quasi-life), one can begin to look for the important roles — social, economic,

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Influenza Virus. Electron microscope image. Viruses exhibit some life-like characteristics.

Image credit: Frederick A. Murphy.

Lake side. Houses surround a pond in a country-residential development northeast of Calgary, Alberta. (Bing Maps) | 21 |

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Chapter 1: Continuous City

ecological — that a lower-intensity urbanism can play in the larger system of urbanness. Here, the suburban condition achieves its legitimacy, and perhaps even a redemptive role in the transformation of the city.

Blanket Urbanization In his 1970 book The Urban Revolution — only translated to English in 2003 — French philosopher Henri Lefebvre suggests that society is experiencing complete urbanization. At this point in his thinking, Lefebvre is building toward a Marxist re-writing of space, and frames urbanization as a global social phenomenon that supersedes industrial society (1970). Lefebvre does not present the “urban” as a space that contradicts or will ever fully supplant industrial or agrarian spaces.

Instead, he characterizes full urbanization as “each place and each moment existing only within a whole, through contrasts and oppositions that connect it to, and distinguish it from, other places and moments” (p. 37). Here the reading of the city begins to shift away from abstract classifications toward a continuity, in which each place is implicated in a global field of placeness. The functional reaches of urban systems, and the reach of the social space of urbanization, form an overlapping blanket that envelopes the entire world. The biologist’s struggle to classify is once again shared by the urbanist, who cannot rely on the classic divisions of space seen in well-established geographic models.

This theoretical struggle is reflected in the last century of thinking within urban geography. Earlier models -- including Christaller’s Central Place Theory (1966), Mackintosh (1923) and Innis’s (1972) Staples Thesis, and Dickinson and others’ Regionalism & City-Region models (1947) -- established the interdependency of urban places and the land that surrounds them. Further literature, including Friedmann and Miller’s The Urban Field (1965) began to challenge the usefulness of an urban-rural distinction. More recently, d’Andrea’s work on regions of continuous urbanism in Italy has presented a striking applied example in which the physical presence of an urban-rural divide has been almost completely dissolved (2000). While not all landscapes have experienced the physical presence of continuous urbanism imaged in d’Andrea’s accounts, urban continuity is increasingly evident in urban regions and metropolitan-clusters throughout the

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Calgary’s City “Edge”

A New Network of Capital. This satellite image of North America at night endorses the idea that human systems form a continuous blanket punctuated by urban centres. | 23 |

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Lakeness in Minnesota

Urbanness in northwest Calgary | 24 |

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Chapter 1: Continuous City

world. This is not to say that all world space is a city, or that describing individual cities as discrete entities is problematic. Rather, space is framed principally by its implication in city systems and the world’s capital is centralized along urban lines.

This idea does not only affect understanding and theory -- it has strong implications for measurement. There is an anecdote in geographic methods known as the Minnesota Lakes Problem. In this story, a researcher is confronted with the problematic task of counting the lakes in Minnesota — a point of pride, perhaps. Trouble quickly emerges as it becomes clear that some lakes connect in the spring melt, others change their shoreline continuously, and some outright appear and disappear through the years. Lakes, when it comes right down to it, are not particularly discrete phenomena. One cannot count them with integers.

The researcher’s solution, and the story’s lesson, is the application of a “lakeness” field over the entire landscape, allowing for a more accurate understanding of what is really a continuous phenomenon. In this model, the land is divided into a regular grid, and each square is assigned a measure based on that point’s degree of lakeness, from one to five. The new type of data produces a wildly different answer to the opening question: given a point in Minnesota, the odds of it being “moderately laken” are around 2%. Not quite as catchy for a license plate, but ultimately a more representative catalogue.

Like Minnesotan lakes, cities are difficult to trace. Simply drawing a hard line between urban, suburban, and rural space is not an adequate representation of the complexity at the perimeter of any city. A new classification of “urbanness” is required to help reveal gradients (or show where they are lacking). This project will contribute an idea and a method in support of this re-classification.

Why Reframe the Suburbs?

The first part of this chapter established an appreciative tone for addressing the suburbs, and went on to re-frame suburban space and its potential expressions.

The second part will explore the broad challenges that will confront cities over the next fifty years. What imperatives will demand a response from suburban space?

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A section of northwest Calgary circa 1955

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The same section circa 2010

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Chapter 1: Continuous City

A Context of Change Harsh critics of the suburbs may take a problem-based approach, but their sense of urgency around re-building cities to meet future needs is not misplaced (see Mirza, 2007). Over the next thirty years, the renovation of urban space will be focused on several critical issues: i. Population Increase In its latest Population Prospects report, the United Nations has predicted that the world population by 2100 will reach 10.1 billion (2011). This is close to one billion more people than previous projections — the difference equivalent to a staggering one thousand additional cities of one million people. According to the projection, this will not occur in additional cities or rural areas, but overwhelmingly in existing urban settlements and the developing world (xiii). Mega cities will become even larger, and medium-sized cities will become mega cities. And this population will bring with it an intense demand on urban infrastructures, resources, and energy. ii. Energy Transition There will be a shift in the sources, use, and cost of energy. While there is some debate about exact timing, oil production will peak in the next century and the world will undergo a massive energy transition (Newman et al., 2009). This impact will not be felt evenly between world regions, or within the space of individual cities, with economically disadvantaged and fuel-dependent areas bearing the brunt of the change (Arico, 2007). Urban space will be re-shaped at both large and small scales by the energy transition, as overall spatial patterns and daily practices evolve. iii. Local Ecologies New attention will emerge toward natural ecologies within and around cities. This focus is distinct from global-scale environmental degradation, but the two are closely linked (Grimm et al., 2008). The turn toward local ecological performance around cities is concerned with the health of air and water, vegetation, and animal species, with particular attention to the functions these processes offer to human settlement. There is presently a mix of rationalizations for investment in these ecologies, with new attempts at financial valuation challenging a traditional

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reliance on ethical arguments (Andre et al., 2011). For example, where ethical arguments might preserve an urban wetland because of its inherent natural value and critical role in supporting endangered species, valuative approaches would focus on the dollar value of the services rendered by the wetland to human settlement (say, filtering fresh water or controlling pests). Even if the great project of monetization fails to bring about its own economically-oriented change, the role of ecological systems within cities will gain an increased foot-hold in the minds of both city-builders and the public.

Suburban Implications Population Growth It is almost impossible to separate the suburbs from discussions of growth. It is now widely acknowledged that the world’s projected population growth must fit into existing cities in new and creative ways (United Nations, 2011), and that the cost of current models of urban growth (to infrastructure budgets, to local ecologies, to global natural systems) is unsustainable (Martinez-Alier, 2003). Citybuilders must rethink what growth (and shrinkage) capacity they are building into the current and future space of cities. The suburbs are frequently referenced in these discussions for two primary reasons. First, they represent the predominant model of present growth in North American cities, and therefore are a common representation of what is considered “new” and “creative”. Second, they inhabit an increasingly valuable ring around city cores: a space prime for intensification, densification, deconstruction, and other urban experimentation. As a departure point, and a ubiquitous condition, the suburbs will significantly transform — and be transformed by — the growth of cities in the next century.

Energy Transition The current pattern of development in North American suburbs is highly vehicledependent, which makes suburban space particularly susceptible to fluctuations in the energy market. As fuel prices increase, this will have the cascading effect of increasing the value of urban land closer to core centres. Those living farther from core centres (and therefore more dependent on vehicle use) increasingly will tend to be at an economic disadvantage. This will function only to reduce the

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Chapter 1: Continuous City

mobility of economically vulnerable populations, and create a spatial imbalance with troubling precedent. In cities in which the outlying areas already represent poorer residents, the effects of the energy transition will simply compound current conditions.

While the form and location of the suburbs makes them precarious, this instability can be read alternately as a positive driver of change. There is increasing attention to decentralized energy systems, growing use of more efficient transportation modes, and expansion of high-speed communication networks. These trends all add up to create new conditions in which suburban space may evolve productive relationships with their urban cores.

Local Ecologies Research has now linked the ecology of urban regions to impacts at the global scale (Grimm et al., 2008). As cities expand their regions, the urban perimeter (and its inhabitants) will become conceptually and geometrically more significant.

The suburbs inhabit and give shape to the edge zone of most Canadian cities — and this edge zone is a rich space of interaction that determines in many ways the well-being of local natural systems (McDonnell & Pickett, 1990). This zone is also often home to significant conserved natural spaces, which have a clear role as anchors in the local ecological network (Forman, 2008). While efforts to enhance local ecologies will increase throughout all types of urban space, city-builders will take particular interest in the opportunities sponsored by the suburbs.

Two Stories Confronting the diverse challenges faced by cities can sometimes seem like an impossible order. The rate and magnitude of change is staggering, and the entire project of global re-fit sits in the shadow of a grim end-of-days scenario. The final part of this chapter tells two stories that highlight appreciative approaches and complex change. The aim of these stories is more than simple reassurance; they capture moments in which innovation, appreciation, courage, and talent were drawn together to create an outcome that was different and better. They are not about cities, but they should be on the minds of city-builders everywhere.

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Chapter 1: Continuous City

What is Working? - A Lesson from Space In 1970, NASA launched the Apollo 13 lunar mission. The seventh mission aimed at landing humans on the moon, it encountered trouble two days after take-off.

The explosion of an oxygen tank crippled the spacecraft, forcing cancellation of the mission and threatening the module’s safe return to earth (Lovell & Kluger, 2006). This event was the source of the now famous quote “Houston: we’ve had a problem” (p. 95). While many on the mission team were quick to begin sorting out the cause of the problem, what had been disabled, and who’s fault it was, the flight commander asked a very different question: what is working? In response to this inquiry, the Apollo 13 flight team ingeniously re-appropriated other functioning systems to bring the crew safely back to earth (Lovell & Kluger 2006). Although the root causes of the accident were eventually examined in detail, the productive action was not built off of an understanding of the problem.

Instead, the simple question — “what is working?” — drew successfully from an appreciative standpoint.

Like the Apollo 13 spacecraft, the city can be seen as a craft with damaged systems, problematically drifting away from a desired future. The Modernist methods of problem solving have not addressed the problem, and the mission is increasingly critical: how can city-builders harness the suburbs to help steer the city in the right direction?

Complex Change - a Lesson from the Toyota Production System In the wake of World War II and the Korean War of the 1950s, Japan embarked on a remarkable restructuring of its industrial sector. The aim was to bring manufacturing processes to a level competitive with established manufacturing nations (chiefly the United States, Russia, and Germany). The Toyota company, having recently changed their operations from textiles to automobiles, tasked themselves with catching up to the well-established, Detroit-based, American automotive industry within three years (Ohno, 1982). Under the creative direction of executive Taiichi Ohno, the company reduced inefficiencies, re-structured the systemic flow of goods, and quickly achieved their competitive production goals.

The process left a legacy of manufacturing ingenuities that remain relevant to this day (Spear & Bowen, 1999). What resonates from this story in the context

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The Apollo 13 Crest. (NASA)

Ad for the Toyota Tiara (1964). The Tiara was one of the first Toyota vehicles designed to broadly compete in American markets. | 32 |

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Chapter 1: Continuous City

of cities, however, is not the particular genius of the transformation, but the rate and attitude with which it was undertaken. The story of Toyota demonstrates a revolution in consciousness, but this did not come without what Ohno refers to as “the talent and courage to rethink what we call common sense”(Ohno, 1988, p.

30). By asking “why” five times in succession when confronted with a problem, Ohno quickly broke down the barriers of conventional thinking and made space for the rate of change necessary given the imperatives of economy and time.

The challenges faced by today’s city-builders echoes many of those presented by Toyota executives sixty years ago: they must quickly evolve large, complex systems to confront new demands in the face of outside pressures. And so the question arises: how much does conventional thinking form a barrier in this task? And how can people mobilize their talent and courage to rethink what they consider a city to be?

Project Road Map To respond to the issues and imperatives outlined in this chapter, the present Masters Degree Project will (i) establish a conceptual framework for analyzing the suburbs, (ii) posit a desired patterning for suburban space within this framework, and (iii) develop a research tool to aid in the transformation of an existing study area toward this desired pattern.

The project will not present an urban design or master-plan for the study area, nor will it re-design specific sites to any degree of detail. It will discuss the implications of the research tool, and present a series of generalized design sketches, but the focus of this project is its conceptual framework and analysis tool. The tool will aid urban design, but also a variety of urban planning domains (principally parks and infrastructure), neighbourhood redevelopment processes, and environmental science.

A more detailed design application of this project’s conceptual framework will be explored in a connected Masters Degree Project in Architecture.

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Chapter 1: Continuous City

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2

Chapter Two: A High-Performance Suburb

City of Flows The spatial character and functional performance of cities emerges from a collection of flows on the landscape. Flows including traffic, water, glacial ice, information, electricity, money, sewage, wildlife, pedestrians, housing, and nutrients all follow courses driven by their own economies and time scales.

From the narrowest power line to the most diffuse subsurface waterway, these flows cross, overlap, conflict, and unite, producing urban space. In this light, city space can be understood as a complex textile: a thickly layered patchwork of threads, felts, knits, strands, and patches that represent the diverse matrix of both engineered and natural flows.

Textiles are afforded particular performances both by their constituent threads and the manner in which these threads are woven. Consider for a moment three textiles: a fishing net, a knit sweater, and a Gore-tex raincoat.

Net The desired performances of a fishing net are relatively simple: it needs to be loose enough to allow the smooth passage of water, but strong and tight enough to act as a barrier to fish. A strong, thin nylon line is typically used in modern nets, and it is knotted together coarsely to create a fabric with these properties. Too tight a weave and you cannot move the net through the water -- too loose and your dinner slips through. While the material is important, the weave pattern is the defining factor in the net’s performance.

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Chapter 2: High Performance Suburbs

Sweater A knit sweater is typically made of a single type of thread: wool. The wool itself contains naturally water-resistant and insulating properties -- regardless of the particular knit pattern employed, the use of wool leads to a warm and waterresistant garment. Sweater knitters employ a wide variety of knit patterns in the creation of wool garments, and each of these patterns results in particular performances, for example: lightness, elasticity, strength, signification, or style.

When a fisherman desires a warm, handsome, water-resistant sweater that does not restrict movement, such a garment is made possible by both the properties of wool and the patterns in which it is woven. While the knit pattern here impacts the qualities of the garment to a degree, the material is the predominant factor influencing its performance.

Gore-tex Coat Unlike a sweater or a net, Gore-tex fabric is made up multiple strand types, including a thin Teflon sheet and dense nylon fibres. Neither of these fibres alone achieves the final performances of the Gore-tex textile: durability, breathability, and water-resistance. However, when combined in layers, with a punctured Teflon layer inside a sandwich of tightly woven nylon, the emergent material suddenly allows the transmission of water vapour (sweat) but not water droplets (rain).

Here, the system relies on both the constituent materials and their particular arrangement to achieve the final suite of performances.

The City as Performance Textile The textile of a city is highly varied in both the combinations of threads and the manner in which they are interwoven -- here a tight network of parks create a dense felt, there highways form a coarse net. As in the examples above, city textiles are responding to a set of desired performances that reflect internal and external pressures. Connectivity, ground-water permeability, cleanliness, efficiency, beauty, legibility, and liveability are just a small sample of the many properties sought for urban space. And this list is expanding (see further illustration in Knox & Taylor, 1995). Growing acknowledgement about the relevance of urban systems (and particularly their link to global effects) is placing upon cities an increasingly

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Net

Sweater

Gore-tex

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complex suite of performance demands (Grimm et al., 2008). People are placing their hope in local movements and locally administered urban space to address global challenges (Marcotullio & McGranahan, 2007).

Imagine yourself selecting a coat. As the forecast becomes less predictable and more extreme, you will turn toward garments made with higher-performance fabrics. In a similar way, suburban space is looking toward a future that is less predictable and more extreme. To thrive in this new context, city-builders must work to establish a higher-performance suburban textile -- a material in which the city’s constituent flows are aligned, crossed, separated, and interwoven with specificity and intention. The question becomes: what drives the composition of this textile?

Ecology as a Driver Given the task of weaving, knitting, pressing and felting a new suburban space, one must first look to the desired performances of the resulting material. Chapter One set out a broad forecast for change in cities, citing population growth, shifts in the source and use of energy, and a new integration of ecology. These three forecasts are closely linked in suburban space: the energy expenditure of infrastructure cannot be invoked without referencing density, the distribution of settlement is linked to local ecology, and ecological processes are themselves an energetic infrastructure with the capacity to articulate development and reduce reliance on outdated energy sources.

As in any complex system, this challenge has a range of potential entry-points.

This project will take the third domain -- ecological processes in urban space -- as its driver in re-shaping the suburbs. Such a focus is not deployed with the intent of ignoring the problem’s complexity, but rather as a means to uncover orders and economies that have been under-examined in more traditional suburban retrofit strategies. As argued by Breuste et al., “the lack of research [in landscape ecology within cities] has resulted in ecology contributing little to solving urban environmental problems or providing understanding for planning and management” (2008, p. 1139; for additional recognition of the research gap, see Grimm et al., 2008, Collins et al., 2000; Niemela, 1999).

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The next section of Chapter Two will explore the academic evolution of ecological research and locate the present document within the domain of urban ecology research today.

Ecology in Cities In order to refit existing suburban space along ecological lines, it is important to understand the evolution of ecology’s relationship to the city and design of cities.

Contemporary urban ecology draws both from the origins of ecology as an idea, as well as that idea’s path through a range of disciplines over the last two centuries.

Roots of Ecology Ecology, broadly defined as the relationship between organisms and their environments (Gaston, 2010), has its roots in ancient explorations of natural history that trace back to Greek philosophers (Worster, 1979). And while there are writings that support the idea of interlinked natural systems that stretch back for hundreds of years (see for example Gilbert White’s The Natural History of Selbourne, ed. 1851), the word itself emerged less than two centuries ago from the naturalist traditions of the 19th century. German researcher Ernst Haeckel, a student of renowned naturalist Charles Darwin, coined the word “Oecologie” in an attempt to bring together a scientific world that was increasingly splitting into narrow specializations (Worster, 1979). He constructed oecologie from the word “oikos”, a Greek term meaning “household”. In this way, Haeckel gathered all of the world’s organisms within a single meta-system, exhibiting its own operations and economy. It is no coincidence that oikos also forms the root of “economy”, a term formerly framed as the collective interactions and activities of a nation’s households (Worster, 1979).

Sociology: ‘the Other Urban Ecology’ Around the turn of the 20th century, prominent sociologists began to use the term “urban ecology” to describe aspects of their research into human organizations within cities. They borrowed from the naturalists the notion that these systems were organized in complex relationships, but did not focus in any way on the interaction between urban space or urban practices and natural systems. When

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this project uses the term “urban ecology”, it is not referring to a complex sociological structure within the city, but to the relationship between urban settlements and natural systems.

A New Imperative The concept of ecology remained on the margins of mainstream debate until the depression of the 1930s, when the dustbowl of the North American plains rendered society’s practical reliance on healthy ecologies in stark terms. In a 1936 report entitled The Future of the Great Plains, the Great Plains Committee wrote that “the present situation in the Great Plains area is the result of human modification of natural conditions”, adding that “nature has established a balance in the Great Plains by what in human terms would be called the method of trial and error” (p.

2). Following the 1930s, the collection of disparate conservation groups across the United States and Canada grew substantially and began to orient toward a more ecological understanding of the relationships between human development and the continent’s natural systems.

Silent Spring and the Rise of Environmentalism By the mid-twentieth century, and especially following the publication of Rachel Carson’s well-known book Silent Spring in 1962, the idea that the earth’s natural landscapes were being dangerously and irrevocably altered by human activity began to gain popular traction. Conservationism increasingly was institutionalized in North America in both governmental and non-governmental organizations.

The United States saw the establishment of The Nature Conservancy (1951) and passed The Wilderness Act (1964), and Canada saw the formation of the Canadian chapter of the Sierra Club (1963), and approved the first National Parks System Plan (1970). It was in this time that a new, ecologically oriented ethic of practice would begin to emerge within the world of design.

Ecology and the Design of Cities One of the most important and enduring works to arise from the environmental zeitgeist of the 1960s was Ian McHarg’s Design With Nature (1969). McHarg’s sharply critical examination of urban planning and development practices in the context of ecological health anticipated the damaging impact that urbanization

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Excerpt from the cover of The Future of the Great Plains

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and suburbanization would have on natural systems over the following fifty years.

Indeed, in McHarg’s preface to the 1992 edition, he suggests that his predictions, which were seen as inflammatory at the time, have proven to be drastically conservative (1992, p. v).

In Design With Nature, McHarg forms an argument against what he refers to as a world that “consists solely of a dialogue between men, or men and God, while nature is a faintly decorative backdrop to the human play” (p. 24). He speaks with conviction against the predominant Western ideals that shape urban development and society’s relationship to nature: Show me a man-oriented society in which it is believed that reality exists only because man can perceive it, that the cosmos is a structure erected to support man on his pinnacle, that man exclusively is divine and given dominion over all things, indeed that God is made in the image of man, and I will predict the nature of its cities and their landscapes. […] This is the image of the anthropomorphic, anthropocentric man; he seeks not unity with nature but conquest. Yet unity he finally finds, but only when his arrogance and ignorance are stilled and he lies dead under the greensward” (p. 24).

In place of this anthropocentric framework, McHarg posits a new multidisciplinary method in which a broad range of influencing variables (both social and natural) are measured and assigned values. These values are combined in layered “suitability” maps that draw a developable city space structured along the path of most benefit and least harm. While there have been few ecological studies as thorough and thoughtful as McHarg’s pre-development analyses, he has left a lasting legacy in the idea that the complex principles of ecology can be applied, in a layered fashion, to site and land-use planning.

The 1980s: Granite Gardens and Landscape Ecology Although Ian McHarg introduced the design world to a principled ecological approach to urban planning and design, his ideas would only later undergo a more complete reckoning. Landscape architect Anne Spirn’s The Granite Garden: Urban Nature and Human Design (1984) advocated powerfully for re-framing the

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relationship between the city and “nature”, noting that “the health and wellness of city residents depend upon the efficient provision of sufficient energy, water, food, and other resources, and on the safe disposal of wastes” (p. 242). Her message was that nature in urban spaces was unique, valuable, and must be actively constructed and cultivated.

The 1986 publication of Landscape Ecology by Richard T. T. Forman and Michel Godron is widely regarded as a pivotal moment in the (re)integration of ecological methods into the planning, design, and management of developed space.

Landscape Ecology brought together a broad and deep range of references from many associated environmental disciplines. The authors charted flows between these systems and carefully analyzed their spatial structure and its impact on ecological process and form. In many ways, Forman’s work echoes that of Haeckel in its quest to overcome disciplinary boundaries and to assert the importance of a more holistic understanding of landscape processes.

One of Forman’s key contributions was a collection of basic principles that affect the performance of spatial elements in ecological systems. In a later paper, Forman would outline of these general principles. Among those he illustrates, the patch-corridor matrix, large natural vegetation patches, patch shape, landscape resistance, landscape change, and mosaic sequence (Forman, 1995) have clear implications for the manner in which human settlement is shaped.

However, while Forman’s work had a tremendous impact on the disciplines of landscape management, conservation areas, and proposed development within a natural matrix, few ecologists sought to explore the application of these ideas inside the bounds of an existing city. Fourteen years after the publication of Landscape Ecology and sixteen years after Granite Garden, Collins et al. concluded that “a mere 0.4 percent — 25 of 6,157 — of the papers published in nine leading ecological journals in the past five years dealt with cities or urban species” (2000, p. 416). While ecological thought and technique had permeated increasingly through the natural sciences, ecologists hesitated to approach the city. Collins states: “Human-dominated ecosystems represent a problem for the field [of Ecology]” (p. 416). At the same time, there remained little bridging of ecological thinking into the city-building disciplines of architecture, landscape architecture, urban design, planning, or engineering.

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Urban Ecology (Reprise) In the last decade, there has been significant renewed interest in the ability of ecological methods to drive the shape of urban space. Researchers and designers now increasingly recognize that “in cities people mobilize some nutrients and deplete others, create habitats that never before existed, divert water, increase temperatures, and, by intent or by accident, manipulate the community of other species found within city boundaries and beyond” (Collins et al., 2000, p. 416).

As the authors of the Great Plains Report reflected on the mass disruption to the American prairie caused by agricultural transformation, they offered a significant (and prescient) choice: “The white man has disturbed [the natural] balance; he must restore it or devise a new one of his own” (1936, p. 2). It has become clear in recent years that restoration is largely a mirage, and the latter of these two options is the path upon which development must be set. It is not difficult to see how the idea that humans shape new ecologies created a clear point of entry for design. If traditional ecology was concerned with the protection of natural space, and the direction of development away from natural spaces of the highest value, it is now irrevocably about the construction and maintenance of new, integrated ecologies that draw relationships between human settlements and the myriad natural systems within which they are sited. Much of the ecological research that occurs in less-urban space can retain an observer’s stance, but few projects can engage an urban ecology without conspicuous intervention. Anne Spirn had said in plain language what many disciplines were now accepting into their own practices: “The city is part of nature” (1984 p. 4).

In the recently published Urban Ecology (2010), Kevin Gaston outlines seven things that have fueled the recent rise of urban ecology. He cites (i) recognition that human-dominated ecosystems cover the globe, (ii) a growing urbanized population, (iii) the connection between urban-regional decisions and largescale effects, (iv) the demonstrated impact of the natural world on human health and wellbeing, (v) that urban ecologies form a novel type of ecology, (vi) that multi-disciplinary methods are a basic reality of explorations around urban ecology, and (vii) that cities tend to be located in areas of particular ecological richness (p. 2). These seven variables highlight the breadth and momentum of the movement toward understanding and working with cities as ecological realities.

Now that the ecological toolset is spreading through the design disciplines (see for

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example Forman’s latest publication Urban Regions, written explicitly for urban planners and urban designers), and the issues of urbanization and environmental degradation are convincingly linked, cities increasingly will enter the methods of ecologists, and ecology will become a much larger and more naturalized part of the design disciplines.

Ecological Goods and Services Recent cross-disciplinary research into the contributions of natural systems to human environments has found traction among decision-makers in the form of “ecological services” or “natural capital”. These models provide a framework by which the functions of natural space can be categorized (and ultimately valuated in dollars) according to the contribution they make to human society. Said another way, natural elements can be valuated by calculating the cost of achieving the same levels of service via mechanized means. Under this system, the value of an urban tree could be calculated as the sum of its cultural and aesthetic contributions (increasing property value); its carbon storage (creating credit in the carbon market); its cooling of nearby buildings (offsetting air conditioning costs); its anti-erosion properties (preventing costly earthworks); and its role as habitat for other organisms like birds and bees, which act as pest controls (reduced nuisance and disease) and serve as pollinators that increase the health of nearby trees. As this example illustrates, the precise application of a complex notion like ecological goods and services continues to pose a challenge. However, an increasing number of studies are overcoming this challenge and publishing valuations of a range of ecosystem services. In a comprehensive study of wetland valuation completed by Brander et al in 2006, North American wetlands performed an average of $3000 of services per hectare per year. In Alberta, research has placed this number at upwards of $19000 per hectare (Kimmel, 2005). In these and many other cases, the economic argument is helping assert the important role of natural systems in the space of human settlement.

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The Present Research In the broadest sense, the current project participates in a surge of work exploring urban ecology from the perspective of the design disciplines. It draws from the lineage of ecological principles, and actively mixes techniques drawn from both landscape ecology and urban design. In its suburban focus, however, the project addresses two more specific and compelling issues: First, the suburbs form something of a disciplinary double-frontier. Sitting between the city proper and the natural and agricultural space surrounding the metropolis, they are not the natural home of the urbanist or the ecologist, though they contain elements familiar to both groups of practitioners. In this way they are a rich and under used site for urban ecological experimentation. In their article “Ecosystem Structure and Function Along Urban-Rural Gradients: An Unexploited Opportunity for Ecology”, ecologists McDonnell and Pickett take a tentative step toward the city. Not anticipating the impending immersion of their discipline into the gritty urban streets, they state that the “study of the metropolis as an ecosystem, including its human inhabitants and institutions, would be a radical expansion of ecology. The study of natural areas along urban-rural gradients is an application of an existing ecological research strategy to a new situation” (1990, p. 1232). One can almost picture the researchers perched on the city’s edge, peering in curiously and pondering such a radical expansion. In a similar light, and at a similar time, urban designer Roger Trancik’s book Finding Lost Space (1986) showed a tentativeness toward intervening in that outer ring of the city: “Designers of the physical environment […] can contribute significantly toward the restructuring of the urban core. Lost spaces, under used and deteriorating, provide exceptional opportunities to reshape an urban center, so that it attracts people back downtown and counteracts sprawl and suburbanization”. Although the need for change at the city edge remains in focus, Trancik’s mechanism is ultimately situated in a safe and familiar realm.

The current project is made further relevant by its suburban focus in that is addressing the potentials of an already-developed city space; setting itself apart from much of the ecological work done outside of the soon-to-be developed city perimeter. The question of how to confront built landscapes in this domain reaches back to McHarg, who in the last section of Design With Nature asks a critical question: “It has been shown that the ecological method is efficacious

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in confronting a rural metropolitan region in prospect of urbanization. Can it confront the problem of an existing city?� (p. 175). The present project seeks to contribute a response to this question through an exercise in cross-disciplinary ideas and techniques.

Integrating Ecologies in Suburban Space The processes of centralization, fuel-subsidization, and control that characterized industrial society have created infrastructures that are rigid, costly to maintain, and ecologically damaging. Modern development has reduced the functional capacity of local natural systems, and in doing so has restricted their ability to act as sources of provision, regulation, well-being, and habitat. This development pattern has, in effect, hindered society’s ability to thrive. By re-drawing the city along the lines of ecological processes, city-builders can decentralize systems, reduce fuel-subsidization, and distribute control while achieving greater resilience, lower costs, and increased ecological health.

Following the metaphor established at the start of this chapter, the weave of urban space must now result in a high-performance textile. City-builders need to better harness the performative characteristics of a broad range of flows, increase the presence of certain flows, and weave all of these systems together with specificity and intent.

Hard and Soft Flows With the goal of building a productive and manageable framework for organizing the flows that comprise urban space, this project will introduce a distinction between two major types of urban flows: hard and soft. This distinction echoes other conceptual pairings -- including Deleuze and Guattari’s smooth vs. striated space, biological vs. technical nutrients (McDonough et al., 2003), or green vs. grey infrastructure -- but its intent is neither to parallel precisely nor to usurp these predecessors. Instead, it aims simply to put forward its own distinction and test its applicability as a tool in suburban renovation.

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A Common Currency One thing that all flows share in common is their expenditure of energy on the landscape: it is the currency shared by high-voltage power-lines, highways, creeks, squirrels, and seeds in the wind. Energy is continuously expended on every square meter of the earth’s surface. The intensity of this expenditure across the spectrum of landscapes, outlined by Eugene Odum in his 1997 book Ecology: A Bridge Between Science and Society, reveals a telling leap. There is a two-orders of magnitude jump in energy use between more “natural” landscape areas and urban areas. The transition of a typical square meter of grassland — which expends approximately 10,000 kilocalories per year in solar-powered photosynthetic processes — to agricultural land can quadruple the expended energy to approximately 40,000 kCal/year. Develop that land again into the lightest urban use and the expenditure leaps above 100,000 kCal/year. Cover it with a highway or industrial use, and the contents of that square meter can expend as much as 3,000,000 kilocalories each year (Odum, 1997).

The unique energy signature here is created by the expenditure of “imported” auxiliary fuel in urban systems: potable water is mechanically pumped through pipes, combustion engines pull cars along highways, a YouTube video pulses through fibre-optic cable. These processes are enabled by energy that would not have otherwise been expended in that location. These processes comprise much of what is traditionally considered “infrastructure” in cities. On the opposite side of the graph sits a related suite of processes: but these are enacted without auxiliary fuel. These processes carry flows of things like surface and ground water, nutrients, vegetation, and wildlife; they do not rely on imported fuel to exist and function.

The immensity of the leap between these two “sets” of processes suggests that a productive distinction may be made between them, as types of flows participating in the city. Indeed, both families of processes are present in cities, and both bring their own specific demands and benefits to urban space. Within this document, the term “hard” will be used to describe flows with a high-intensity energy signature (those enabled by auxiliary fuel, on the right of the graph), and the term “soft” will refer to flows with a low intensity energy signature (those with no/little energy subsidization, on the left side of the graph). The following section will

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energy expenditure per year

0

500000

1000000

1500000

2000000

2500000

3000000

ocean surface

low-intensity agricultural

increasing urbanization

grassland

Energy expended per square metre, measured in kilowatts-years. Illustrated based on figures drawn from Odum, 1997.

kW/m2

typical urban uses

high-intensity urban uses

Hard flow character (narrow, straight, slippery)

Soft flow character (broad, convoluted, rough)

Hard systems are frequently developed along the contour lines of soft systems.

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explore the performances of these two groups of flows: what they do, where they overlap, where they conflict, where they provide unique service, and where they have productive exchange.

Hard Flows Hard flows bring a series of critical performances to the city. They offer mobility, efficiency, control, and vitality to urban space: mobility in their ability to reduce the friction of movement, efficiency in their capacity to carry large quantities at great speeds, control in their predictable delivery of goods and services, and vitality in the dense life and energy they bring to the city. They can manifest the romance of a Manhattan city-space and provide public commons in the form of streets and plazas. They are closely tied, in service and in space, to the institutional fabric of society.

The character of hard flows is typically narrow, straight, and slippery, forming well-connected networks. Their materiality and aesthetic tends to be mineralized, streamlined, taut, and cold. Imagine railroad tracks stretching unbroken across the continent; straight networks of data cables; the sculpted front of a sports car cutting through the air. Hard flows tend to demand high degrees of connectivity and continuity, explicit hierarchies, and centralized control systems.

Soft Flows Soft flows also bring vital performances to the city, though modernist industrial urbanism has typically given them less attention and even treated them as combatant forces. They offer provision, regulation, habitat, and wellness to urban space: provision in their supply of basic goods (food, water, materials, medicine), regulation in their ability to maintain and adapt complex ecologies in the face of disturbance, habitat in their support of living spaces and biodiversity, and wellness in their capacity to be a source of inspiration, joy, and space for physical activity. They can conjure the pastoral romance of wilderness and provide public commons in the form of parks and natural open spaces.

The character of soft flows is typically broad, convoluted, and rough, forming diffuse field-like networks. The materiality and aesthetic of soft flows is vegetated, loose, sticky, and layered. Imagine in sequence the difference between walking on

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a steel catwalk, a gravel road, across a playing field, through a marshy bog. Each path becomes slightly less directed than the one before it, more textured, more resistant.

Soft flows tend to have less dependency on strict continuity than their hard cousins, partly due to their diffuse nature and inherent redundancy. Think of the difference between a train’s dependency on a track versus a cloud of poplar seeds’ dependence on the wind. This being said, connectivity in soft flow systems supports water movement, biodiversity, and nutrient cycles, and continuity within these flows is critical to their long-term health. Soft flows tend to have looser hierarchies and decentralized control systems.

It is important to note that the terms “hard” and “soft” are deployed here to describe types of flows that differ in their territorialization and energy signature -- not necessarily in their tactile qualities or speed intensity. In this project, the erosion of a rocky cliff would be considered a soft flow, even though that may be low on your list of adjectives if you were caught in a landslide!

There will of course also be scenarios that don’t site at the extremes -- where flows have taken on characteristics of both hard and soft. Indeed, closer readings of almost any urban flow will reveal some degree of mixture between the two. A channelized creek system, for example, could be described as a soft flow that has been “hardened” through straightening, territorialization, mineralization, and centralized control in service of the human system (i.e. transport or irrigation).

The resulting flow does little to support biodiversity (especially for stream-bed ecosystems), regulate aquifers (by preventing infiltration), filter sediment (from surface runoff), or offer the joy of living near a creek. Although the water flow is still enabled by local expenditure of solar power (that brought it to a higher elevation in the first place), a concrete water channel would be considered “hard” in the context of this project. In this example, water molecules are the same whether they are in a concrete canal or a stream. This reveals the importance of process- and performance-based distinctions.

Shared Functions While both soft and hard flows exhibit unique performances, there are many functions that both systems have the capacity to provide. These include things like defence (for an example of “soft” defense, see Johnson, 1917; Shlaim offers

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Increasing hardness of a natural stream. These examples demonstrate, from A to F, examples of the incremental hardening of a soft flow.

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a more modern example of a “hard” defense mechanism in his writings on the wall between Israel and Palestine, 2007), tourism (Ayala, 1996; Hoffman, 2003; Valentine, 1990), carbon storage (Keith, 2009; Nowak & Crane, 2002; Schimel et al., 1994), temperature control (Jones, 1985: Parker, 1983), filtration (Barrett et al., 1998; Guo, 1997), and disaster prevention (Bourgin, 1953; Hey & Philippi, 1995).

Recent trends in environmental design have explored the capacity for hard flow systems to transition toward soft flow systems in many of these functions. The popularity of the LEED framework (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) (Solomon, 2005), the increasing adoption of storm water management systems (Marsalek & Chocat, 2002), and growing “eco-tourism” initiatives (Nelson, 1994) all point to the momentum of this transition. The motivations are typically a blend of imperative (we must), ethics (we should), and economy (the soft systems do it for free).

In some special cases, these motivations do not all push in the same direction.

Carbon capture, for example, currently presents a global crisis: soft methods of carbon capture (photosynthesis) cannot offset current growth rates of carbon emission, even if all of the world’s arable land was dedicated to such processes (Solomon et al., 2009). Human systems under industrialization have created a load that surpasses the natural system’s ability to self-regulate. Hard carbon capture systems, like Carbon Engineering’s Air Contactor, are under development to address such imbalances (Keith, 2009). In this case, as the demand for carbon capture increases, response will necessarily occur via both hard and soft strategies.

Such cases demonstrate the complexity of the relationships between hard and soft flows, and that simply making all processes softer or more natural will not address all of society’s ecological imbalances. A city space that allows functional duplication and transition between hard and soft flows will more easily adapt to changing demands on both of those systems.

Exchange Between Flows Hard and soft flows are in a constant and dynamic exchange within the landscape. A critical point of relationship between soft and hard strands is their complementary role in achieving the circulation of biological and technical nutrients in safe and healthy metabolisms. The concept of “biological and technical nutrients” has its roots in life-cycle systems design, which aims to create closed loops and eliminate

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waste from the production cycle (McDonough et al., 2003). Products are made from combinations of organic and inorganic materials, and when a product is past its useful life, it can be broken down into its constituent nutrients. Technical nutrients like metals are recycled and brought into reuse; biological nutrients like wood become food for bacteria and microorganisms, returning to soil and eventually creating the conditions for a new tree to grow. When technical and biological loops are drawn in space, the moments at which they are kept separate or brought together become critical -- cotton-polyester shirts are great, but no one wants lead in their oatmeal.

Bringing this idea of nutrient cycles into the hard/soft framework, processes often move between hard and soft flows in a complementary manner. For example, soft flow provisioning services (such as food production) tend to lead to hard processing and distribution flows, which eventually return waste to soft regulating systems (such as compost). These in turn provide the base conditions for further provisioning. Both hard and soft systems are necessary in many of the city’s processes and cycles, and the structure and pattern of the city should sponsor critical exchanges between them.

Conflict Between Flows While the interaction of hard and soft flows can be critical to many urban processes, sometimes interactions between these flows can be destructive. Road kill, eroded railways, genetic fragmentation, and icy sidewalks are all the result of destructive intersections of hard and soft flows. In some cases, these problematic intersections are obvious and solutions have been built into the structure of the city: roads are bridged over rivers, for example. Unfortunately, not all destructive crossings, or their negative consequences, are so readily apparent. The choking of subsurface flows toward a river caused by the highly compressed soil under paved roadways, for example, can have negative long-term effects including reduced nutrient transport, potholes, and riverbank erosion. Given the costs of these destructive outcomes, city-builders should structure urban environments to minimize destructive interactions between hard and soft flows.

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Composing Hard and Soft Flows: A Summary Given the profile of the two flows posited in this chapter, how can designers sponsor a basic landscape patterning that savours and integrates local ecologies?

A high performance suburban textile must provide well connected networks of both hard and soft flows.

A high performance suburban textile must account for the presence of process duplication between hard and soft flows, while sponsoring effective transition toward soft and hybridized hard/soft systems.

A high performance suburban textile must facilitate the flow of both technical and biological nutrients and create opportunities for intentional exchanges between hard and soft flows.

A high performance suburban textile must weave together hard and soft flows in a manner that minimizes destructive interactions and find opportunity in moments of hard-soft alignment.

Precedent Urban Schemes: Organizing Hard and Soft Throughout history, city-builders and designers have posited compelling schemes for the composition of the city. The following six precedent studies explore wellknown schemes in terms of the “hard-soft” framework outlined above. They were selected because they exhibit a strong vision for the city that: i) focuses on the patterning of undeveloped or green space, or ii) in some way explores space toward the edge of the city. Read through the lens of hard and soft flows, these plans offer both inspiration and caution.

Frederick Law Olmsted’s Emerald Necklace (1887) In the late 1880s, the City of Boston hired Frederick Law Olmsted (who had just recently and famously completed New York’s Central Park) to draw a plan linking the city’s major parks. He achieved this through a series of picturesque pathways along constructed drainage canals, modelled after the British traditions of landscape design (Zaitzevsky 1982). This was one of the first and most famous

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A Landslide across a highway. Destructive flow interaction (principal cost to hard flow).

Vehicle-wildlife collisions. Destructive flow interaction (cost to both soft and hard flows, including property and health insurance claims and lost hunting revenue.

Flooding in Calgary’s Bow River in 2005.

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Chapter 2: High Performance Suburbs

park plans that sought a connected soft system, fully interwoven into the fabric of the city. The use of these soft flows as functional drainage systems and recreational amenities foreshadowed work in urban ecology that would not catch on fully for another century. Olmsted’s pioneering work here remains influential to this day in the design of urban and regional open space systems. In Richard Forman’s book Urban Regions, one can see that “Emerald Patch” and “Emerald Necklace” have become common language for key ecological spaces and connections in any city (2008, p. 249).

Ebenezer Howard’s Garden City (1898) Howard’s vision for a new “garden city” in England in the late nineteenth century was at its core a utopian and collectivist restructuring of land-ownership. Celebration of the scheme in years since has focused on the formal properties of the city plan and its integration of agricultural and park space within the traditional limits of the city (Victor, 1992). In this dimension it provides a forward-looking example of ecological integration. The justification of the scheme’s patterning is based primarily on human access to green space, rather than any notion of ecological health, though this reveals Howard’s industrial context more than any specific shortsightedness in the plan. In a contemporary context, remnants of the garden city’s aesthetic agenda are far more apparent than its political underpinnings. The connectivity of both hard a soft flows as constituent elements of urban space, and the creation of a more livable human habitat through their proximity are indeed lessons to take forward.

Le Corbusier’s Radiant City (1930) Le Corbusier’s infamous Radiant City plan sought an open urbanness, characterized by order and efficiency (Menin & Samuel, 2003). It wove complex and grade-separated hard transportation systems through a broad felt of soft park space, and punctuated this system with very tightly wound residential hubs.

Soft systems here became part of the city, but were framed as matrix in which the city occurred rather than a separate network of implicated processes. There are spectacular examples of failed (mis)appropriations of Le Corbusier’s plans throughout the world, and the socioeconomic echoes of these attempts have cast a broad negative shadow over this scheme. What one may productively take away is

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Frederick Law Olmsted’s Emerald Necklace (1887)

Ebenezer Howard’s Garden City (1898) | 59 |

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Le Corbusier’s Radiant City (1930)

Frank Lloyd Wright’s Broadacre City (1935) | 60 |

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Chapter 2: High Performance Suburbs

the rigour with which the scheme’s flows were handled through the manipulation of the ground plane, and the experimental articulations of density as a method by which soft space was made accessible to the plan’s inhabitants.

Frank Lloyd Wright’s Broadacre City (1935) In its coarse weave of highways and low-density buildings, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Broadacre City imagined an ultra low-density civilization that was diffuse and mobile (Wright, 1935). Wright understood well the trend toward continuous urbanism, and saw productive pairing of this idea with emerging trends toward private space and individual mobility. Broadacre City, like Howard’s Garden City, had a strong political agenda, but sought to overcome class struggle not through collectivism but self-determinism (De Long et al., 1996). Although this scheme was never explicitly developed, implicit manifestations of Wright’s ideas had a prophetic impact on the American landscape. As an example of the arrangement of hard and soft systems, Broadacre presents a fascinating extreme in which the hard weave of the city was diffused to a nearly unrecognizable point, a point at which the flows that produce everyday urban space were relegated to the family home. It solved the inherent conflicts of adjacent and contested space not with a complex pattern, but simply through the “addition” of space.

Christopher Alexander City-Country Fingers (1977) In the book A Pattern Language (Alexander et al., 1977), Christopher Alexander outlines a series of nested patterns that build within each other to achieve a range of environmental qualities. Critiques of Alexander’s strategy (outlined in Salingaros, 2006) have focused on its tendency toward vernacular qualities and the inevitable pathologies that arise out of pattern-book design. Notwithstanding these critiques, the text’s value remains in the way that it frames the relationship between pattern (arrangement), and performance. The pattern of “city-country fingers”, which appears early in the book, is one of the clearer examples of this relationship (for real-world examples of this pattern deployed in a regional context see Copenhagen, Denmark, or Canberra, Australia). Alexander posits an urban system in which broad corridors of city and country, hard and soft, interweave like nested fingers. This offers minimum access distances from any built area to any unbuilt area, affording the production of food and development of other ecological services within the city. This argument forms a small part of

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“City-Country Fingers” from C. Alexander’s A Pattern Language (1977)

Fibreplan for Toyko (2006) | 62 |

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Chapter 2: High Performance Suburbs

the book, but it captures a significant range of agendas for urban space that are perhaps even more relevant now than they were when the book was published thirty-five years ago.

Toyko FibreCity (2006) The FibreCity plan for Toyko was published by Japanese urbanist Hidetoshi Ohno and his research group in 2006. The plan incorporates a large selection of studies about the composition and structure of the city, ultimately proposing a city of broad green fingers, tight street renovations, and re-purposed elevated highways (Ohno, 2006). In addition to greater ecological performance, these linear systems afford an effective infrastructure of urban egress in the case of an earthquake or other natural disaster. This is a key performance in a dense and disaster-prone city. The urban composition here focuses on linear elements -- in Ohno’s words, “fibres� -- that act as conduit for all kinds of flow within the city (p. 18). The plan is remarkable not only for its decades-long comprehension and completeness, but for the insight it makes on the necessary capacity for urban material to both grow and shrink (in both short and long time-scales). As a precedent for the arrangement of hard and soft flows, it also begins to elicit patterns that respond with great specificity to local conditions. Specific opportunities in the existing city become the inspiration for intervention, leading to a more pragmatic and rooted vision.

The City as a High Performance Textile: A Summary This chapter began with the assertion that cities are produced by a collection of interacting flows. It built this idea into the metaphor of a textile, which gathers emergent performances both from its constituent parts and the manner in which these parts are patterned. It chose ecology as the driver for reweaving the flows of the suburbs to meet future demands, outlining a brief lineage of the deployment of ecological imperatives within urban space. The chapter then set out two categories of flows in cities, examining their contributions and interactions. Finally, it briefly examined six precedent urban plans according to this new categorization.

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Conquer, Save, Savour

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Chapter 2: High Performance Suburbs

Throughout this sometimes thick path of inquiry, it can be easy to lose sight of the broader purposes to which the project aspires. This final piece of chapter two intends to clarify this broader message.

Conquer Save Savour There have been three broad approaches to the relationship between the human and natural systems in urban space, and these can be characterized as conquer, save, and savour.

Conquer Industrial urban design typically conquers the natural landscape. Characterized by development that occurs simply at the lowest immediate cost to the human system, it imposes an arbitrary, universal, and indiscriminate logic onto the landscape. In the Canadian prairies, this is characterized by the grid township and range roads; in its cities by the urban grid of streets. It produces abrupt edges that have narrowly defined performances focused on the ends of the human system. It embodies the myth of frontier, of an endless outward push.

Save At the other end of the spectrum is a protectionist development strategy that is largely a reaction to the broad negative consequences of the conquer model.

Characterized by development that occurs at the least immediate cost to the natural system, it ultimately avoids natural process. In the North American context, it is characterized by the systematic conservation model, no-development zones, natural land trusts, and natural parkland reserves and parks. Performance goals are framed around the notion of “coexistence” and produce abrupt edges that build adjacency rather than interaction. While the “save” model constitutes a far less ecologically-damaging approach than the conquer model, it is ultimately steeped in the myth of wild-land conservation and fails to frame the human system as something that could gain from — or contribute to — natural process.

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Savour A third relationship approaches the human/natural interface from a position of appreciation. It seeks out moments where congruencies, adjacencies, and interactions between human and natural systems prove beneficial to both. The savour model produces more sophisticated edges with a broader performance scope, and is interested in building an integrated ecology in which the inputs and outputs of all urban systems seek out economical continuity. The notion of the “savoured” city goes beyond two-dimensional land use and spatial planning, extending into the realm of daily practice. It asks designers and scholars to fundamentally re-evaluate the spatial (and didactic) relationship between human and natural systems.

This project seeks to build a “savouring” suburbanism through the considered manipulation of hard and soft flows.

Beyond the general benefits of a healthier and more productive ecology, what are the specific services offered by the savouring city? The following illustrations indicate a generalized cross section showing a range of potential performances.

These are organized according to: programming, provision, regulation, wellness, and habitat.

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Chapter 2: High Performance Suburbs

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3

Chapter Three: Calgary’s Suburbs

Introduction In order to explore the idea of manipulating hard and soft flows to create a highperformance urban space, this project tested the concept on a large suburban area in Calgary, Alberta. The following chapter will provide a brief overview of Calgary in terms of its history, urban composition, and ecology; it will outline the criteria according to which a study area was selected; and it will read the selected study area through the framework established in chapter two. Throughout this overview and analysis, the chapter will examine the ways the existing study area satisfies the high-performance urban space, in what ways it differs, and most importantly, it will ask the appreciative question: what are the particular characteristics of the study area that support its evolution toward a “savouring”, ecologically integrated future?

Calgary Overview The city of Calgary is the largest city in the Canadian province of Alberta. It is located just east of the Rocky Mountains at the confluence of two rivers — the Bow and the Elbow. The settlement was formed in the early 1880s as a Royal Canadian Mounted Police fort aimed at driving out American whisky traders.

In 1886 the Canadian Pacific Railway established a station that connected the settlement to the trans-national railroad, which was run near the southern border of Canada as part of a larger project establishing sovereignty from the United States. The presence of the station soon rendered the fort obsolete, and Calgary

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400km 200km 100km 0 Alberta’s Road Network. Calgary is the lowest of the major road clusters

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Chapter 3: Calgary's Suburbs

grew to become a regional urban centre (Foran, 1978). Over the past hundred years, development in the city has grown extensively in a pattern that reflects periods of regional economic prosperity. This prosperity is closely tied to the price of oil and gas, which was discovered in the province in the early twentieth century and has led to Calgary’s role as an international centre for the oil and gas industry.

Demography The current population of Calgary’s metropolitan area is just over 1.3 million, and this is projected to rise with steady 1% − 2% growth to a total population of over 1.5 million by 2020 (City of Calgary, 2011). This trend follows consistent and rapid growth through the last twenty years. Calgarians tend to be younger, better-educated, and higher-earning than the average Canadian. Much of the city’s current population has come from international immigration and migration within Canada (Statistics Canada, 2007). While Calgary is the fourth most popular landing point for new immigrants, it ranks first among second destinations for new Canadians after they have lived in another Canadian city (Statistics Canada).

Compared to the inner neighbourhoods developed before 1970, Calgary’s newer suburban neighbourhoods tend to be more homogenous in their demographic makeup. These neighbourhoods tend to have higher home-ownership, higher median household income, and more families with children (Statistics Canada, 2007).

Shape of the City Calgary’s urban distribution is highly mono-centric, with an intensely developed central business district surrounded by over seven hundred square kilometres of low density development. Aside from two slices of industrial use reaching from the core to the north- and south-east, much of the land surrounding the city’s downtown core is dedicated to residential land and its supporting uses. This development has generally spread in a pattern of concentric rings. These rings of development broadly relate to (i) the early growth of the core and inner city (to 1913); (ii) the post-war oil boom (1946 on); (iii) the OPEC embargo and ensuing oil boom (1970s); and (iv) the recent energy boom (late 1990s to mid 2000s).

The development of land within these rings can be loosely correlated with urban development styles typical of each era: gridded streets in the earliest days, adapted

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Zone

Definition

Street Pattern

Core

The area of high intensity development, Large, strict grid. primarily containing the central business district. Gridded street pattern typically filled with towers.Downtown.

Inner City

Area of medium intensity development surrounding the core area. Typically contains a mix of low-high intensity residential and commercial uses.

Typically gridded due to development era.

Middle Ring / Neighbourhood Unit

First wave of suburban development, now encircled by further growth. In Calgary, development typically follows neighbourhood unitpattern that appeared in the 1960s and 1970s.

Streets usually indicate central neighbourhood zone, mixing curvilinear and gridded streets. Some cul-de-sacs.

Suburbs & Edge Industrial

Low-intensity, primarily residential development characterized by singlefamily homes, centralized big box commercial, and large collector roads.

Street pattern predominantly curvilinear with many cul-de-sacs.

Country Residential

Very low-intensity, residential development characterized by singlefamily homes on large, sometimes multiacre lots.

Street density higher than rural surroundings, but not as dense as suburban.

Communter Satellites

Centralized pockets of urbanization within functional range of the primary metro area. They are considered distinct from the metropolitan area because they have at least 5 km of non-built area separating them from the metropolitan boundary.

Clear urban cluster distinct from the primary citys road network. Linked via major highway route.

Agricultural & Natural Lands

The matrix in which Calgary s system of built intensity is located. A mix of farming, ranching, and natural space.

Large grid of township and range roads, sometimes altered by topography or intensified with access roads.

Metropolitan Boundary

Calgary’s concentric zones of development

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Chapter 3: Calgary's Suburbs

grids shortly thereafter, neighbourhood unit hybrid grids starting in the post-war years, and curvilinear cul-de-sac patterns for neighbourhoods developed since the mid 1970s (Sandalack, 2006).

The city’s growth has occurred freely in all directions with the exception of several key constraints. In the southwest quadrant sits the Tsuu T’ina Reserve, which is under independent First Nations jurisdiction based on treaty agreements with the Federal Government signed in 1883. The city has grown along the north and east borders of this reserve, which remains mostly untouched by urban or agricultural development. To the northeast, the presence of toxic sour gas wells and pipelines has limited growth at the current edge of the built city. Major growth to Calgary’s north, northwest, and south has occurred in large part due to the traditional draw of real estate in the city’s west end. Proximity and views to the nearby mountains, more prevalent industrial uses in the east, and western prevailing winds have tended to push residential investment to the city’s west.

Most of the Calgary’s growth has occurred in the last two bursts noted above, creating a significant suburban legacy for the city. Over two-thirds of Calgarians now live in low-density neighbourhoods, compared to the Canadian municipal average of 48% (Turcotte, 2008).

The Region Calgary has not grown into a multi-centre metropolis like Vancouver or Toronto, instead maintaining a single centralized identity within the surrounding urban system. There are, however, a collection of settlements in the Calgary area that have key functional ties to the city. These include the towns of Cochrane, Canmore, and Banff to the west, the City of Airdrie and the towns of Crossfield and Iricana to the north, the towns of Chestermere and Strathmore to the east, and the towns of Okotoks, Black Diamond, Turner Valley, High River, and Nanton to the south (Calgary Regional Partnership, 2010). There is no commuter rail in the Calgary region, but these settlements are well-connected by large highways, and many run commuter buses to Calgary’s downtown on business days. Although Calgary has the second-lowest commute time among major Canadian municipalities (Statistics Canada, 2012), many workers commute over long distances from these regional towns.

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Percent of CMA households by density. Calgary has by far the highest proportion of lowdensity households of the three cities profiled (data source: Turcotte, 2008).

Percent population by distance to urban core. Among the cities profiled, Calgary has the highest percentage of its population living within 15km of the city core (data source: Turcotte, 2008). | 79 |

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Chapter 3: Calgary's Suburbs

The lands surrounding Calgary are under the jurisdiction of the Municipal Districts of Rockyview and Foothills (to the north and south respectively) with Wheatland County a small distance to the east. Due to major cuts in regional planning that occurred at the provincial level in the mid 1990s, Calgary has had to establish cooperative partnerships with these neighbours. Over time, as Calgary has grown into this adjacent land, jurisdiction has been transferred to the City. The Calgary Municipal Plan was coauthored and published in 2010 by Calgary and its surrounding municipalities (including the settlements listed above) to create a regional vision and guiding document for the alignment of local municipal plans (Calgary Regional Partnership, 2010).

Highways Calgary’s transportation system is primarily focused on moving people between the city’s vast residential areas and its employment centres, of which the downtown core is by far the largest. The city’s transportation network is characterized by major highways (ironically named “trails”) that draw a coarse grid. As roads move outward from the city core, they tend to be broader, faster, and have larger rightof-ways, resulting in distinct spatial segregation of individual neighbourhoods in recently developed areas. A transit and utility corridor (TUC), commonly referred to as the “ring-road”, was drawn around the city by the Province of Alberta in the 1970s and is currently under construction. The corridor will eventually contain a freeway with 42 high-speed interchanges, utility alignments, and a variety of green-space uses (Alberta Transportation, 2012). This ring is intended to act in conjunction with the primary north-south Deerfoot Trail freeway to create key interface with the provincial and national highway systems and lighten the burden on smaller-scale east-west roads bisecting the city. Aside from these regional aspirations, the ring road has had notable impacts on the shape of infrastructure and growth within the city. Extensive development of residential neighbourhoods and commercial centres has occurred beyond the extents of the completed ringroad in the north and northwest, and similar growth is planned along the eastern arc of the corridor.

The interior road networks of Calgary’s suburban neighbourhoods reflect the automobile-focused system in which they are sited. The earliest neighbourhoods developed in Calgary’s suburban era still demonstrate some properties of the

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Calgary Highway

Calgary Railway

Calgary Pathway

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Chapter 3: Calgary's Suburbs

neighbourhood unit, with limited grid-like connectivity adapted to green space systems and topography. Street layouts from the 1980s onward all but supplanted this connectivity with a distinct hierarchy of streets with branch-style connectivity — leading vehicles from highways to boulevards to roads to streets to closes to cul-de-sacs, private driveways, and garages (Sandalack, 2006).

Railway Calgary has a small but growing light rail network that is the spine of an otherwise bus-oriented public transit system. The light rail transit (LRT) was first brought to the city in the mid 1980s leading to the Winter Olympics hosted by the city in 1988, and has since seen sporadic investment. Recent focus on the LRT system has seen extensions to existing lines joined by the rapid construction of a new line from the core to the city’s west/southwest. Additional lines have been proposed from the core to the city’s north and southeast (City of Calgary, 2010).

Bikeway Calgary has frequently boasted its extensive recreational pathway system that includes over 700 kilometres of pathways running through the city’s neighbourhoods and green spaces (City of Calgary, 2010). More recent debate, however, has sought to refocus the conversation on cycling as a legitimate form of mobility (rather than a recreational pursuit). This has turned focus away from expansion of cycling networks in the city’s suburbs to on-street cycling routes throughout the city (with a focus on the inner city) and tighter connections between existing pathway systems and these bicycling routes (see City of Calgary, 2011).

Ecology & Open Space Calgary is situated at the pinwheel of three major ecosystems. Aspen parkland runs upward from the city’s north, eventually bending to the east between the prairie and the boreal forest. To the west and southwest, foothill landscapes stretch toward the nearby Rocky Mountains. And to the east, prairie landscapes flow into the neighbouring provinces of Saskatchewan and Manitoba and south to the

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Chapter 3: Calgary's Suburbs

American Midwest (City of Calgary, 2006). Within the composition of the city, Calgary has preserved a large proportion of open space compared to similarlysized cities (ibid).

Waterways The city’s open space network is structured in large part by the Bow and Elbow Rivers, which run from their sources in the Rocky Mountains to the city’s core, where they join and pass southward out of the city. The Nose Creek valley, which enters the city to the north, hosts the previously-mentioned Deerfoot Trail highway, and has been less-respected by development than the Bow and Elbow, leading to the stream’s ranking as one of the most polluted in the province (Trout Unlimited Canada, 2012). A large percentage of the banks of these waterways is protected as public space, and much of this space is home to a highly connected river-pathway system. Many of the city’s manicured and natural environment parks are connected in some way to the river systems. The geologic legacy of these waterways is a system of large escarpments that hint to the retreat of glaciers through this area as recently as fifteen thousand years ago. These escarpments and their coulees direct water flow toward the rivers and are home to most of the city’s native vegetation (City of Calgary 2006). The escarpments themselves have been largely preserved from development, leaving them a highly visible landscape feature within the city.

Emerald Park Spaces Calgary hosts several large green spaces that are integral anchors within the city’s park system and form key patches within the regional ecological structure (City of Calgary 2006). Fish Creek Provincial Park in the city’s south runs along the Fish Creek Valley and part of the Bow River system, and hosts a diverse selection of foothills flora and fauna.

In the city’s north, Nose Hill Park sits atop the end of the Porcupine Formation at the north end of the Bow River escarpment (Jackson & Wilson, 1987). It is a giant Natural Environment park and preserves a rare patch of prairie and parkland landscape. It is large enough to sustain populations of mid-size carnivores and genetically diverse populations of small ungulates.

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A bend in the Elbow river at it enters Calgary’s Glenmore Reservoir. Calgary is home to rich patches of natural space.

Bridges over the Bow River near downtown Calgary. The city’s waterways are major corridors and key sources of recreation, identification, and civic pride.

Nose Hill Park. Calgary boasts several of the continent’s largest in-city protected natural areas. This emerald park space has now been closed off at the north end and is surrounded by suburban development.

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A slope intensity map of the Calgary region (darker is steeper).

0

5km

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Chapter 3: Calgary's Suburbs

A new park in the city’s southeast — Ralph Klein Natural Environment Park — is in large part a recognition of the important regional role played by prairie ecosystems, especially in highly permeable wetland zones. While it is not the same size as Fish Creek and Nose Hill Parks, it forms an important ecological contribution to the city’s diverse preserved natural areas.

Study Area Selection Parameters The location and extents of the study area were selected based on the following criteria: i. Suburban patterns of organizing urban space should dominate the study area, including residential and supporting uses. ii. The study area should capture enough area to explore systems between multiple neighbourhoods, but be small enough to capture the building-grain of individual neighbourhoods. This would allow the analysis to see beyond neighbourhood boundaries while not losing the varied patterns of blocks, streets, and parks within the neighbourhood. iii. The study area should afford links to existing human and natural systems that reach beyond the study area’s extents to the regional scale. iv. There should be consistent and comprehensive data available for the study area. v. The study area should be accessible for ground-truthing, verification, and more detailed study.

The Study Area The study area covers a large portion of the northwest quadrant of Calgary. It runs from the Bow River north to Nose Creek West, and from Nose Hill Park in the east to West of the present city limits.

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8km 4km 2km 0

Study Area Surface Hydrology Roads Calgary, Alberta

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Least Solar Exposure

Most Solar Exposure

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Aerial photo of the study area

Yearly solar exposure | 88 |

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Lowest Elevation

Highest Elevation

1km 0

Shallowest Slope

Steepest Slope

2km

4km

Elevation gradient. Note the central ridge that washes downward toward the Bow River (southwest) and Nose Creek (northeast)

Slope intensity laid over aerial photograph | 89 |

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) Stoney Trail (TUC

12-Mile Coulee Road

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Neighbourhood division. Note the clear relationship to major roadways | 90 |

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1km 0

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Current Green Space and Major Roadways | 91 |

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Chapter 3: Calgary's Suburbs

i. The study area is predominantly covered in residential suburban space.

The oldest neighbourhoods are located at the south and southeastern corners of the study area — closest to the city core. They were established in the mid 1960s and developed through the early 1980s. The newest neighbourhoods are still under development. The selected study area therefore covers a broad lineage of what would be considered suburban space in Calgary. Almost all of the commercial space in the area follows suburban, automobile dependent patterns, with a hierarchy of centres that range from isolated neighbourhood gas stations to giant regional “power centres” such as Crowfoot Crossing. Open space types range from major emerald parks and stream corridors to neighbourhood playing fields, trails, and pocket parks. ii. The study area covers an area of approximately 79 square kilometres, and includes within its boundaries fully thirteen neighbourhoods.

Ten further neighbourhoods have partial coverage. Within this extent it remains possible to draw a full street network diagram and building figure-ground that together capture the variations in neighbourhood pattern and key moments in the study area’s morphology. Specific neighbourhood street and green space patterns are not “washed out” into a field of suburbanness but remain differentiated and specific. iii. The extents of the study area are arranged such that they capture key surrounding patches that link the study area to broader regional patterns.

Ecologically, links to the major patch Nose Hill Park, the Bow River (which forms a major green corridor through the city), Nose Creek (which runs through the valley of what was likely an ancient glacial river (Tyler, 2011) at the study area’s northeast), a patch of less-disturbed knob-and-kettle parkland landscape to the study area’s northwest, and links to new preserved park space along the Bow River as it runs west of the city (Haskayne Park and Glenbow Ranch Provincial Park).

In terms of hard flows, the study area is intersected by several key infrastructure systems. Of these, the three most important are Crowchild Trail, Stoney Trail, and the CPR railroad, along with their associated right-of-ways and utility alignments.

Crowchild Trail, which runs from the city centre to become the 1A Highway, links Calgary to Cochrane and Canmore to the West. It also hosts the northwest leg

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of the city’s light rail transit system. The northwest leg of the Transit and Utility Corridor, which contains the Stoney Trail ring road, cuts an arc from its Bow River crossing point at the study area’s southwest to the study area’s north eastern corner, and links the study area to other major highways and the city’s adjacent quadrants. A series of secondary roads stemming from these two major trails connects the study area both inward toward the city centre and outward to the provincial highway system. The CPR line, which is by far the oldest of the three systems, runs along the south edge of the study area, north of the Bow River. It historically linked Calgary to the rest of Canada, and is still under continual use for freight trains that run from and through the city toward the country’s west coast. iv. Much of the spatial data for the study area was available from both public and private data catalogues at the City of Calgary.

Within the municipal boundary of Calgary, the City of Calgary provided source files for spatial elements of the city, including road and utility right-of-ways, building footprints, and topography. For areas outside of the municipal boundary, provincial catalogues and University research databases provided supplemental coverage. High resolution aerial imagery was available for the entire study area and its surrounding region from the University of Calgary library. Provincial digital elevation scans provided adequate elevation detail for the study area’s scale and the nature of the inquiry. For the small percentage (<0.3%) of the study area that did not have equal coverage, basic classification of ground cover could be achieved through manual tracing over the air photo. The study area was highly accessible for photography, ground-truthing, and reflection. The chosen site in this particular project is more illustrative and process-testing than prescriptive and processes-deploying, so the ability to gather high-quality information was as important as the extents of the study area.

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Flows in the Study Area In order to understand what the existing study area offers toward building our posited high-performance textile, it is important to understand its present structure. This structure will be assessed according to the notion of hard and soft flows as they were set out in Chapter Two.

Soft Flows The landscape function of the study area in its pre-development configuration would have been similar to the less-developed area immediately to the west (Tyler, 2011). In this topographically diverse parkland landscape there are several key flows that knit the landscape together, and they are spatially related to the surficial geology and its impact on water flow (Jackson & Wilson, 1987). The region’s surficial geology is largely a product of the last period of glaciation, which occurred between 20,000 and 15,000 years ago. The flows of retreating glaciers (which were in this area several kilometres thick), scraped the surface of the landscape, leaving deposits of gravel and massive rivers flowing behind them.

These retreating waterways shaped the land’s basic topography, and in conjunction with flows of atmospheric ash from a volcanic eruption that occurred 7700 years ago in Oregon, gave specific character to the soils that remain on the site (Jackson & Wilson, 1987).

North-South Flows The study area is bisected by a topographical spine running northwest-southeast.

One of the northern most of a series of ancient landforms comprising the Porcupine Hills, it separates the Bow River valley from the next basin to the north. Surface and sub-surface water runs both north and south off of this spine’s broad slopes through a series of deep coulees, which simultaneously direct water and protect it from evapotranspiration in the region’s frequent sunshine and strong winds. At points, this water emerges from the hillsides after it hits the soil’s waterproof clay layer, forming intermittent springs. Water moving through this system enables nutrient flow, and the coulees of these hills are home to groves of trees and shrubs that are afforded little purchase elsewhere in this landscape. The coulees — wet,

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protected from the wind, and covered in dense forests of vegetation — also form key habitat and natural corridors for wildlife. The coulees house the study area’s primary north-south flows.

East-West Flows Flows on the south side of the spine run toward the Bow River, which draws a critical NW-SE line through the southwest quadrant of the study area and participates in much broader landscape systems. The corridor formed by the river, including its stream-bed, shorelines, riparian vegetation, and subsurface flows, anchors the study area’s east-west flows. Looking slightly further north, one encounters the base of the river escarpment (running parallel to the river). The first repository for water running down the coulees, it would form a river backchannel in periods of flood, and the moisture and nutrients it carries support vegetation and wildlife systems. A further strand runs along the top edge of the escarpment, where dynamic soils and their binding vegetation are in constant negotiation with gravity and water flows. This pattern of bottom- and top-edge flows mirrors itself on the north face of the spine, facing Nose Creek.

Along the top surface of the spine, a highly varied knob and kettle topography creates a system of small hills and shallow ponds of standing water. This system does not have the obvious flow-like properties of the other strands, but predevelopment aerial photography reveals that it ran continuously along the spine’s plateau into present day Nose Hill Park. This landscape plays important roles in providing habitat and influences the land’s capacity to hold, filter, and de-sediment water.

Together, these north-south and east-west flows weave together the study area’s soft system.

Hard Flows Hard flows in the study area typically have been oriented to minimize encounters of severe elevation change on the landscape. This has led to a general mirroring of the order found in the natural features listed above: east west flows run parallel to major topographical features (along a contour line), or perpendicular to these features along the shallowest path (greatest average space between contour lines).

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Throughout the study area, this generally translates into alignments that follow the river and escarpment, or alignments that navigate coulee systems as they climb from the river to the top of the landscape spine.

The first significant hard flow through the study area was the CPR railroad, laid across this landscape in 1883. This alignment, which operates on-site to this day along the Bow River valley, formed a dominant east-west axis to which most subsequent hard flows were oriented.

In the study area’s present landscape, hard flows are loosely organized into a cellular grid of highways (running both parallel and perpendicular to natural features) that frame residential neighbourhoods and commercial centres. These alignments have grown outward with the spread of neighbourhoods from the city’s core, and carry within their right-of ways many of the city’s primary subsurface utilities. Primary east-west flows include the railroad and the 1A highway, which carry enormous quantities of people, goods, energy, and information through the study area between downtown and the city region. Secondary flowlines include the roads that run parallel to the north of the 1A: John Laurie Boulevard and Country Hills Boulevard. The primary north-south flow in the study area is the ring road, with secondary flowlines to the east including Nose Hill Drive, Sarcee Trail, 53rd Street, and Shagannappi Trail.

Present Challenges Examination of the present composition of flows via maps and ground observation reveals quite clearly that the development and intensification of hard flows throughout the study area has come at the cost of connectivity and function of soft flows. Pieces of soft systems have been preserved throughout the matrix, but show little coherence. The mirroring phenomenon mentioned in the previous section, in which hard flows reflect the routes of the soft systems in which they are located, has led to three primary moments of interface: point intersections, fragmentation, and dual alignments.

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Point Intersections Point conflicts tend to occur where a hard flowline crosses perpendicular to a soft flow, creating an intersection. For example, a point intersection occurs where water and nutrients flowing through a coulee system reach the bottom of the escarpment and encounter a compacted railroad berm. Here, the soft flow is interrupted, building a pond of standing water that threatens the stability of the rail berm and ultimately the connectivity of the rail system. On the opposite side of the tracks — between the railway and the river — the soil that is starved of this flow becomes dry, loses its vegetation, and eventually erodes into the river.

Another good example of a point intersection is the crossing of a wildlife corridor and a highway; this conflict again does damage to both the hard flow of vehicles and soft flows of wildlife.

Built responses to point intersections tend to manifest in some form of bridging structure. The essential performance of a bridge (or indeed of any spanning structure) is to in some way separate intersecting flows while maintaining their individual connectivity. In the examples above, a drainage culvert and a wildlife crossing structure respectively could function to mitigate the negative effects of flow crossover. Such structures occur within both human-made and natural systems, with the former tending to be more discrete (like a concrete tunnel under a runway) and the latter tending to be more diffuse (like water flowing through a gravel bed).

The study area’s current composition does contain structures that mitigate point intersections in which the problems of intersection are the most obvious — vehicular bridges over the Bow River are probably the best example. There are other point conflicts, however, in which the intersection is not treated with such attention, or is altogether ignored. This tends to occur where the flows involved in the point conflict are more subtle, the threat to the hard system is less acute, or a quick solution cannot be cheaply engineered. This occurs frequently along major roads in the study area, as they cut across linear parks and escarpments. There is an opportunity to structure and celebrate these key moments in an ecologically integrated urban system. They could play a significant role in the health and longevity of both hard and soft systems, and sponsor a new ecological legibility.

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System Fragmentation Fragmentation occurs when a system’s connectivity and coherence is interrupted by being broken into multiple, disconnected pieces. It generally implies that some value of connectivity pre-exists within the initial ordering, and that this value is in some way lost for all constituent pieces. Take for example a shopping street, which becomes fragmented when there are gaps between sections of shops. Part of the value of that initial street was its emergent environmental coherence: the destination value shared by all shops. Remove 20% of the shops from the middle of the street, and the retail health of every other shop suffers as the entire street becomes a less attractive destination for shoppers. This principle is well documented in retail strategy literature (Lamb, 1985). Similarly, in natural habitat, the entire system brings value to the wildlife, who, like shoppers, seek out environments that offer a range of desirable elements. For mule deer, as an example, these elements typically include access to food, water, protection from predators, and genetic diversity (other nice deer that aren’t their siblings). When this environment is fragmented, access to these elements can become limited (Forman, 2008). Here, the deer are like shoppers — they will seek out other opportunities and the area will lose the benefit of their presence. In the best-case scenarios, fragmentation leads to adaptation or relocation, in worst-case scenarios, businesses and habitats simply die out.

Looking at a simple green space map diagram of the study area reveals much about the current state of soft flows. They are dispersed and fragmented throughout the study area, appearing more like resultant flecks and loose threads on a sweater than truly integrated constituents of a textile. In the study area, small parks are often distributed throughout neighbourhoods. This increases accessibility for the residents but fails to treat these patches of natural space as continuous systems.

The erosion of this connectivity and loss of landscape function has historically not been a major issue in urban development, as old “conquer-esque” development notions simply saw the spread of cities as the transformation of natural into manmade space. As discussed in previous chapters, however, performance demands on cities now expect a more integrated relationship between hard and soft systems, and implicit in this demand is the notion that soft systems are healthy and functioning.

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Point intersection. A road splits a golf-course and park in the study area.

Fragmentation. Small neighbourhood parks sit like islands within this neighbourhood in the study area.

Dual Alignment. A major highway runs parallel to a large coulee on the study site.

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The impact of fragmentation can be less acute than in the point intersections outlined above, but over time the consequences can be severe. Constriction and interruption of natural landscape flow can choke nutrient transport, lower the amount of viable habitat for wildlife, and reduce pollinator populations, triggering cascading effects throughout the local ecology (Forman, 2008).

Dual Alignments The third type of conflict arises when hard and soft flows run along the same line.

This “flow on flow” relationship is common in cities for two primary reasons: (i) the phenomenon of flow mirroring and (ii) the recent tendency to create large open-space right-of-ways along major roads. The first reason, mirroring, is based on the idea that flows through the landscape, especially of surface water and wildlife, have formed guides for human systems since pre-urban First Nations inhabited this area more than ten thousand of years ago. The 1A highway, for example, began as a wildlife corridor, became a First Nations trail, an early trading route, a wagon road to Banff and the Rocky Mountains, the first highway connecting Calgary to Vancouver, and now a major twinned regional highway (Foran, 1978). The evidence of a flow-mirroring development pattern is even more pronounced in the site’s north-south coulees, most of which have been partially filled in and serve as highway right-of-ways. Shagannappi Trail and Sarcee Trail, two dominant hard flowlines carrying north-south traffic, both follow this pattern and create a condition of dual alignment. The second reason, highway right-ofways, has meant that open spaces, and sometimes even functioning landscapes, have been preserved as a buffer between fast-moving vehicle traffic and residential areas. So regardless of whether the highway’s alignment followed the line of a soft flow, it created at least the capacity for a soft system through its right of way. The best example of this in the study area is the ring road (Stoney Trail), which has a massive provincially-designated right of way that is never narrower than three hundred metres. Development of suburban residential neighbourhoods has now occurred on much of the land flanking both sides of this right-of-way, resulting in a series of long, linear open spaces within the city that do not necessarily conform to pre-existing soft flows in the study area.

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Dual flow alignments can have destructive impacts on both hard and soft flows, but it is the soft, non-subsidized system that typically bears the brunt of these impacts. Such alignments ultimately act to overwrite soft flows directly along their highest-functioning lines â&#x20AC;&#x201D; principal elements that stitch together the pre-urban ecology. At the same time, dual alignments offer some of the best opportunities for functional overlap, system exchange, and productive adjacency.

However, without a considered structuring of these alignment, such potentials often fall prey to destructive conflict (i.e. road erosion) and undesirable exchange (i.e. hydrocarbon runoff into soils).

Conclusion: Answering the Question The beginning of this chapter posed the question: What are the particular characteristics of the study area that would help it evolve toward the highperformance environment imagined in chapter two?

Chapters Four and Five will further examine the study area profiled in Chapter Three. Chapter Four employs GIS (geographic information systems) methods to identify specific spatial potentials in the study area. Chapter Five will take a closer reading of these potentials and identify more detailed barriers and opportunities.

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4

Chapter Four: City Defrag

Introduction Defragmenting landscape systems has become a common pursuit in the ecological management of rural and developing lands (Forman 1995), but urban space presents this task with a unique set of challenges (McDonnell & Picket, 1990).

Cities are spaces of intense development, highly privatized parcel fabric, and tightly knit systems of hard infrastructure. Whereas weaving soft systems through agricultural land is like pulling rope through a net, weaving in the inner city is like feeding thread through a thick, dense sweater: the city weaver must use tight, strong thread, and a sharper, more precise needle.

The experience of Paris in its recent biodiversity strategy (Giboudeaux, 2011) has revealed the challenges of such an exercise. Paris’ urban space has undergone a centuries-long process by which the region’s soft networks have been overwritten by fuelled, channelized, centralized systems. Now the city has taken up the significant challenge of reweaving ecological connectivity into their urban space.

Every unbuilt parcel, open space, and water course becomes precious and key to the success of this project (2011). In the absence of a radical reconstruction reminiscent of Baron von Hausmann’s 19th century urban refitting, the project’s challenges are tremendous. To the city’s great credit, it is sharpening its needles and pushing forward.

In the context of Paris’ great challenges, the appreciative mind should again see the great potential for the defragmentation and reweaving of soft flows in the suburban space of North American cities. With loose collections of parks, broad backyards, and massive highway right-of-ways, the suburban city-weaver has

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a base cloth loose enough to productively restructure (and yet tight enough to matter). Compared to the denim example above, the suburbs are a loose knit, requiring some precision but ultimately yielding when pressed. The reading of Calgary in the previous chapter reveals that its suburbs have indeed preserved patches of natural space, created large parks, and set aside significant amounts of open space in the service of its sprawling infrastructure. Seen through the lens of ecological re-connection, the villainous sprawling city is reinvented as a potential hero.

Forming the Question The first three chapters have now culminated in the following question: how can a coherent and well-connected network of soft flows, bringing much-needed performance to the city, be woven into the hard flows of suburban space?

The question is then applied to the study area, forming a specific, measurable, and testable challenge: how can a coherent, well-connected network of soft flows be retrofitted into in the suburbs of Calgary’s NW? Finally, the question is re-framed in the spirit of appreciation: what in the spatial patterning of Calgary’s NW suburbs specifically affords the creation of a coherent, well-connected network of soft flows, and along what lines is this network drawn?

Method Overview In order to identify a precise defragmentation of the soft flows within the study area, the project employed an analytical feature contained within ArcGIS’s ArcMap package called “cost-corridor”. This feature uses friction maps to determine the least resistance corridors between two specified locations. A friction map is a grid of squares placed over a map, in which each square contains a value corresponding to the difficulty of movement across that particular piece of terrain within the grid.

Higher values typically mean increased difficulty -- the “cost” of moving through

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$2

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$$$

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Cost-corridor overview part 2.

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Chapter 4: City Defrag

that particular square is high. Lower values typically mean reduced difficulty. The result of the analysis is a gradient of connectivity that shows, from least to most resistance, the best-fit routes between any two locations.

Suitability of the Chosen Analysis Method Cost-corridor analysis is well-suited to this particular inquiry for three primary reasons: First, it resonates with the notion of the continuous city outlined in chapter one.

The city and all of its terrain is treated as a continuous field demonstrating varying degrees of resistance. It avoids the object-oriented trap outlined in the Minnesota Lakes anecdote, treating the city as a dynamic and continuous terrain.

Second, the method enacts itself in an appreciative fashion. In somewhat anthropomorphic terms, it will “see” a linear park as an opportunity to connect two patches, it will “reach” through a golf course to connect a community playing field to a highway green space, and it will “slip” along the ring road corridor to reach the Bow River. The algorithm does not identify barriers, but opportunities to traverse barriers.

Third, the cost-corridor method has an implicit economy in its analytical algorithms. It moves through terrain like a soft flow, seeking efficiency and fitness.

This is in clear contrast to more abstracted and generalized strategies that might, for example, draw straight lines of connection between key locations. The more nuanced paths drawn by cost-corridor analysis are well suited to model soft flows.

For these three reasons, the cost-corridor analysis finds highly suitable fit into the present project.

Cost-Corridor Analysis in Similar Research The cost-corridor tool is frequently used in landscape ecology research and transportation planning outside of cities (see Forman, 2008), but it has not been broadly deployed within an urban region’s built-up area. One notable exception to this comes from Cape Town, South Africa. Over the last ten years, the city has forwarded an innovative and comprehensive biodiversity plan (City of Cape Town, 2008) that seeks out the high value landscape patches and connections required to support a base-level of biodiversity in the city. In a rare precedent,

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friction weighted maps mixer produces maps with varying proportions of influence nc

on

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“The Loom”. Diagram showing Chapter Four’s cost-corridor method and network creation.

existing fabric

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Chapter 4: City Defrag

they employed the use of ArcMap corridor functions within their built-up urban environment (City of Cape Town, 2007, p. 25). In this process, the city identified key patches based on their current and potential function as ecological attractors, and then utilized a friction map to find the most effective links between these areas.

The Loom - Creating the Network Maps This next section will move through the “Loom” diagram shown opposite, discussing the constraints and decisions behind each section of the method. The loom diagram will recur throughout this section to help orient the reader.

1. Classifying the Study Area The cost-corridor analysis begins with a grid of squares laid over the study area like a game board. Within this map, each square must be assigned a value based on the cost of movement through that square (Chang, 2006). The cost of movement can be driven by any variables that would affect the route of the desired corridor.

If the desired corridor were a railway, a construction constraint such as landscape slope might drive cost. If the desired corridor were a deer pathway, then tree cover and other habitat variables might drive cost. In the present project, the study area was classified according to its potential to be transformed into part of a soft flow network. The classificaiton responded to the question: what terrain in the study area could be most easily softened?

The Challenges of Classification Classification of landscapes for use in friction-based functions is not an exact science. It is necessarily reductive, generalized, and often relies on feedback and “noticeable” difference. In this way it makes explicit the challenge faced by every model, so eloquently stated by George E. P. Box: “Remember that all models are wrong; the practical question is how wrong do they have to be to not be useful”(Box & Draper, 1987, p. 75). The assignment of a specific cost to any given value tends to be explorative and based on relative rather than absolute values (Chang, 2008).

In some rare instances, specific dollar amounts may be used, for example, to

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Chapter 4: City Defrag

determine the path of a mountain highway based on well-documented costs of building in specific terrain types. This tends not be the case however, especially in ecological research, as birds, badgers, and prairie grasses do not typically drop coins as they make their way through a landscape. Because of these limitations, variables in any given project tend to be operationalized with a degree of creativity and relativity. This is encouraged in the technical literature (Steinberg & Steinberg, 2006), and acknowledged in notable research (see Chetkiewicz et al., 2006; Epps et al., 2007). Despite the challenges inherent in cost-path methods, they remain popular due in large part to their practical application.

In any cost model, regardless of the detail or the degree of empirical support behind the classification, the outputs must be understood as limited by the data that fed the analysis. Keeping this in mind, the present project utilized a classification method based on the following criteria: i/ availability of data, project time line and scope ii/ coherence (do the breaks between cost values make intuitive sense?) iii/ noticeable difference in outputs through iterative process Six Classes The study area was divided into square metre cells and classified according to six surface conditions, providing a field-like coverage over the entire study area.

Data sources for the classification were predominantly from City of Calgary or Province of Alberta spatial databases, with the exception of â&#x20AC;&#x153;Coyote Projectâ&#x20AC;? files, which were generated by a separate research project. All of the data was accessed through the Spatial and Numeric Data Services Desk at the Taylor Family Digital Library at the University of Calgary in 2011. (Province of Alberta, 2001 [road network]; City of Calgary, 2011 [land cover shapefiles]; Lukasik & Alexander, 2011 [land cover shapefiles]; City of Calgary, 2011 [digital aerial survey CAD files]; City of Calgary, 2011 [satellite photo imagery]).

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Chapter 4: City Defrag

Class 1 - High Functioning Natural Spaces These spaces already demonstrate high ecological function. Therefore there is no cost to “convert” them to become participants within a soft network. They can form natural routes through the existing city, and it is key that the cost function sees routes through these spaces as highly desirable in network terms.

Class 2 - Disturbed Native Green Space Ecologies Disturbed spaces remain broadly in their natural configuration but have been disturbed in a minor way by human activity. This set includes natural spaces that have been partially manicured for park amenity, bisected by formal and informal pathways, or have a history of development but are currently being reclaimed.

These are clear candidates for inclusion in a soft network, and only slightly more “expensive” to convert than class one space.

Class 3 - Homogenous, Manicured Public Green Spaces This class of spaces is found throughout the study area in various forms. It accounts for those pieces of the city that are public and unbuilt, but have been reduced to a homogenous green condition. This class includes spaces such as playing fields, highway right-of-ways, pathway corridors, and boulevard medians. Of the open spaces in a city, these tend to be among the lowest in terms of biodiversity.

However, because they remain in public control and thus lend themselves to a centralized planning exercise, the project categorizes them as more desirable (on average) than open space that sits within private yards.

Class 4 - Privately held non-developed green spaces Privately held open spaces (almost entirely accounted for by residential yards in the present study area) present a range of potentials, and were the most difficult to trace. For this reason, they were calculated as the underlying matrix: the remainder when all of the other classes were subtracted. They are the most generalized of all the classes, but provide a useful mid-range backdrop. In some cases, one will find very ecologically rich yards, in others they will be a bit of cut grass and a few concrete pads. Because of this uncertainty, they were ranked as less-desirable than the generally low-function but publicly-held spaces in class three.

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Example of Class 1 Terrain

Example of Class 2 Terrain

Example of Class 3 Terrain

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Example of Class 4 Terrain

Example of Class 5 Terrain

Example of Class 6 Terrain

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Chapter 4: City Defrag

Class 5 - Roadway Surfaces & Existing Building Footprints This class was generated based on road and building footprint layers gathered and processed from a variety of sources. In some cases, air photo tracings were used to supplement the information when recent major construction and development projects put the existing spatial data clearly out of date. The class is made up of building footprints, including both commercial and residential structures, as well as road surfaces. High volume and speed road surfaces (classes 1 and 2 according to provincial classification) were subtracted from this data set because they present a different level of infrastructure and the consequences of converting to (or crossing with) soft networks were much more significant.

This class has a subtle but important role within the friction function, tending to direct corridors away from densely built up areas — sections of the city in which a higher proportion of surface has been mineralized. The practical cost of eroding or otherwise converting these spaces to soft corridor is also higher than classes one through four.

Class 6 - Highway Surfaces Class six was created from combining railway routes with the high volume road routes subtracted from the roadway data in class five. The consequence of converting or crossing over these spaces is among the highest in the study area because it entails either substantive crossing structures or the closure of a major thoroughfare. In the analysis, this class has the effect of preventing corridors from crossing major roadways unless absolutely necessary for connection. When corridors do cross, they will do so at the point that makes the most sense in the context of the entire network.

Assigning Costs to the Classes The six classifications were assigned relative cost values, with Class One having a cost of “0” and Class Six having a cost of “5”. In order to evaluate the relative classification values, an early calibration test was run in which these values were squared (scaling up their relative difference) and a test analysis was run. The squared classification produced no noticeable difference in the analysis outputs, so the initial cost assignment was maintained through the duration of the analysis.

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“As-Is” classification of the study area

0

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Chapter 4: City Defrag

“As-Is” and “As-Was” Classification in Urban Analysis The above-listed classification provided a map of the existing terrain and its relative ability to afford conversion to soft corridors. Implicit in this method is the idea that the renovation of the city should be driven by the city’s present composition -an “as-is” classification. There is a risk in relying solely on this method, especially in the pursuit of ecological restoration and connection. The chance exists that some previous city-shaping decisions were based on non-ecological imperatives, and that the re-creation of an ecological infrastructure through as-is analysis may miss significant opportunities present in the underlying, overwritten landscape.

This idea is illustrated in the following scenario: a developer in 1990 scrapes and develops a ecologically rich coulee to add housing with good views, and places a public park in the area set back from the escarpment edge because the real estate is worth less in that location. An as-is classification would ignore the high-potential coulee feature and route a corridor instead through the existing park.

An alternative to the as-is classification would be to develop a detailed map of pre-development ecological function -- an “as-was” classification. This could be used to identify corridors based on a map of underlying, pre-existing systems (with no regard for the urban development that has since overwritten the study area). However, in addition to a range of operational difficulties (pre-development information about the composition of natural systems is often sparse), this approach would fail to recognize any of the challenges or opportunities presented by an urban context. It would be a failure in appreciation.

A Hybrid Classification In order to avoid the pitfalls of both “as-is” and “as-was” classification, the present project sought some form of hybrid solution. To address this desire, a second classification of the site was incorporated into the analysis. The intent of this new classification was to approximate spaces of higher ecological importance in the study area’s pre-urban composition -- an “as-was” classification. With both an “asis” and an “as-was” map in hand, the project could develop a range of hybrid classifications that combined these influences in varying proportion.

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The Challenges of As-Was Classification Creating a map that captures the specific ecological order of a developed site can be, as previously alluded, a significant challenge. In the case of the present study area, there was only low-resolution aerial documentation to hint at specific land cover, and large sections of the study area were already converted to agricultural use when these historic photos were taken. In order to overcome these challenges the project used a series of strategies, including (i) precedent examples of landscape generalization drawn from ecological literature, (ii) documents that outlined the relationships between various components of the study area’s ecology (such that inferences could be made between, for example, water and wildlife flows), and (iii) an excursion into similar, adjoining, less developed landscapes with local ecologists.

These three strategies all brought together the suggestion that topography and specifically slope - was a key indicator pointing to ecological function. As stated in Foundations of Restoration Ecology, the origins of topographic variation include geologic processes, water flow, wind, waves, and biotic activity, and “the cumulative effect of these processes is a complex three-dimensional landscape that exerts tremendous influence on the composition and function of ecological systems” (Falk et. al., 2006, p. 143). Recognition of topography as a key ecological variable reaches deep into the roots of ecology, with the English botanist H. C. Watson noting the significance of its influence as far back as 1835 (Watson, 1835).

This theory was reflected in the regional excursion made with Cormack Gates and Mary-Ellen Tyler in the Fall of 2011. The long coulees and hill-top knob-andkettle systems, formed by glacial activity over fifteen thousand years ago, drew along them other key ecological presences, including evidence of surface and subsurface water, patches and lines of vegetation, and key wildlife habitat. These landscape phenomena were clearly indicated by changes in the site’s topography.

In other words, the soft flows that knit together this landscape type were largely drawn along the lines of slope, and patches of landscape containing slope tended to suggest the presence of areas of high ecological function.

This is admittedly not a perfect scenario for capturing pre-development landscape characteristics, but based on the project’s constraints, including scope and availability of data, it offered a productive contribution to the analytical process.

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Classifying the Study Area (As-Was) The observation that slope tended to be connected to ecological function had positive implications for the creation of an “as-was” friction map that could influence the composition of corridors along underlying landscape lines. Detailed topographic data was available for the study area, and while much of the finer detail had been flattened by the development process (physically and conceptually), clear lines showing coulee paths and sections showing tell-tale areas of varied topography shone through the houses and shopping malls.

Topographic data for the study area was processed according to slope intensity.

In order to aid in the formation of the “as-was”/“as-is” hybrids, slope intensity was divided into six classes. Break values between the classes were determined algorithmically such that the difference within each class was reduced while the difference between classes was maximized. No more exacting classification was employed because the analysis required only relative values.

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2. Blending the Classification Maps - Five Friction Maps After the classification processes for both the “as-is” and “as-was” scenarios, the project had two maps of the study area. One classified the study area according to its capacity for current land cover to support soft networks -- the other classified the study area according to the distribution of pre-development soft flows.

The overlay of these two maps, in various proportions, allowed the analysis to draw connections based on a mix of both existing composition and underlying suitability.

The project generated five friction maps to explore a range of influences: A. 100% existing composition — 0% underlying suitability (full “as-is” classification) B. 75% existing composition — 25% underlying suitability C. 50% existing composition — 50% underlying suitability D. 25% existing composition — 75% underlying suitability E. 0% existing composition — 100% underlying suitability (full “as-was” classification) By creating a series of “as-is” and “as-was” hybrids, the project could output a range of corridor networks that actively explored a question commonly encountered in urban design discourse: should the city be shaped based on how it was/is, or how it should be?

The following five illustrations show the resulting five friction maps (A - E).

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3. Identifying Key Patches Two key elements were required in order to carry out a corridor analysis in the project’s study area. First, key patches were identified that link the study area’s soft systems to the regional ecological structures within which they are implicated.

Patches for this analysis were selected based on the following criteria: i/ They participate in regional-scale green systems.

Research in spatial ecology has shown that a pattern of patches and corridors can form a productive ecological landscape, allowing both patch-interior ecologies and links that encourage genetic diversity and flows of wildlife, vegetation, and nutrients (Forman, 2008). By explicitly linking the present study area to these broader networks, the resulting composition of urban space could participate in — and add function to — the regional systems within which it sat. ii/ They are currently high functioning natural landscapes that have relatively little disruption.

Calgary is fortunate in that some of its highest functioning natural landscapes have been preserved as development has spread into the surrounding landscape. By using existing high-quality natural spaces as inputs for the analysis, the resulting network of connections had a strong base of anchoring patches.

Patch Profiles Nose Hill Park (North and South) Nose Hill Park is a large patch of partially disturbed native parkland habitat to the study area’s east that is large enough to support ungulate populations and small predators. It plays key roles in the regional ecology and the city’s park system (City of Calgary, 2006). In the last decade, suburban development has completely surrounded the park, fragmenting it from northern natural and agricultural land to which it was previously connected. Because of its size within the study area, a patch at the northern corner and southern corner of the park were identified separately. This reduces the redundancy of each connection and avoids the duplication of every route running through the length of the park.

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Nose Creek Nose Creek peeks in at the north end of the study area, and is the destination for much of the surface and subsurface water flow runoff from the north side of the study area’s east-west topographic spine (porcupine hills formation). While the creek has a history of mistreatment as it runs through Calgary (Trout Unlimited, 2012), its riparian corridor is an important soft flow both downstream to the east and upstream to the study area’s north (City of Calgary, 2006).

Northern Habitat Patch Much of the land to the northwest of the study area has been developed under a country residential pattern of large residences on acreages. However, much of this terrain is quite boggy, and therefore not suited to agriculture or other landscape development. Where country residential development has occurred, in many places it has maintained native ground cover, forested areas, and bodies of standing water — a feat no other form of development can boast. For this reason, and its links to less developed land to the north, an area of country residential land to the north of the study area was selected as a patch.

Haskayne Park The land along the northern edge of the Bow River was recently given to the City of Calgary to establish a park that runs continuously from Calgary to the Town of Cochrane. This land, which transitions from Haskayne Park to Glenbow Ranch Provincial Park and then outward to the Rocky Mountains, is an obvious natural corridor that connects the study area’s soft systems to the regional ecologies to the west.

Bow River The Bow River corridor runs from west to south through the City of Calgary, and is one of the city’s primary sources of ecological service provision, recreation, cultural identity, and park space. Much of the riparian zone that runs the length of the river has been preserved in a semi-natural state (or has been reclaimed from industrial gravel extraction), especially in the suburban regions near the city’s extents. The Bow River is in many ways the city’s ecological spine, and creates natural connection both up- and down-stream (City of Calgary, 2006).

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4. Creating Cost-Maps for Each Patch At this point, the project had classified five friction maps and identified six key patches in the study area. In order to identify the least-cost corridors between the patches in the study area, the software needed to calculate the cost to move anywhere on the friction map from each of the patches. The output of this operation is called a “cost-map”. When two cost-maps are added together, the result is a cost-corridor that identifies the best route between the patches used to generate the cost-map addends.

Why is this such a complicated operation? In a vector network -- like those used in Google Maps -- a complex topology (where the network understands its own connections) allows routes between points to be navigated quickly in a single direction. But in a raster analysis (like the present cost-corridor method), such topology is not present. The software must build its own information-set about the study by testing every possible pathway. This process can be compared to the calibration stage of a robotic vacuum, in which the device “maps” its room by bumping into every obstacle and slightly adjusting its course. Once this map is created, the robot can sort out an efficient cleaning course.

In this project, the “movement” of potential corridors away from each key patch was drawn against the five friction maps, resulting in a set of thirty cost-maps (one map per patch for each of the five friction maps). One set of these cost-maps (generated with friction map A) is illustrated on the following pages.

5. Combining Cost Maps to Identify Least-Cost Corridors Once all of the cost-maps had been generated, they could be combined in pairs to identify a set of least-cost corridors for each of the five friction maps. As indicated in the diagram opposite, each friction map produced fifteen cost-corridors (the total combinations of any six variable set). One set of these cost-corridors (generated with friction map A) is illustrated on the pages following the costmaps.

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6. Amalgamating Least-Cost Corridors -- Five Network Diagrams Following the cost-map and cost-corridor functions, the project had five sets containing fifteen corridors each (one set for each of the friction maps). At this point, the corridors within each set were merged to create five network maps of least-cost corridors.

These five network maps show recommendations for a least-cost network connecting key patches on the study area, and they are each driven by a different friction map. Read together, the network maps represent a gradient of influence -- each one plucks threads in different layers of city textile and watches where the reverberations travel. The five network maps are illustrated in the following pages.

As indicated in the diagram opposite, a closer reading of these network maps will occur in Chapter Five.

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5

Chapter Five: The Challenges and Opportunities of Connection

Reading the Network Maps Five Network Maps The five network maps that were generated as part of the analysis in chapter four offer a range of lessons and deeper readings into the potentials for ecological connectivity throughout the study area. They are not five separate strategies, or distinct solutions, as one might be tempted to read them. Rather, they work together as a set of diagrams that reveal both similarity and difference. In this way, they are like a series of excavations that cut through the study area at varying depths; as a collection, they offer a complex picture of the range of influence exerted by the input variables (and strengths and weaknesses of the method). This chapter will begin by briefly looking at each diagram individually, gathering from them a generalized understanding of how each organizes connectivity throughout the study area. It will then zoom in on six detailed scenarios that occur in one or more of the diagrams. From this closer reading, the chapter will distill a selection of key challenges and opportunities facing ecological connectivity in Calgary’s suburbs.

Network Map A (Influence: 100% built — 0% landscape process) The first network map, which responded completely to the as-built classification, presented the sharpest delineation of corridor routes. This type of specificity is not surprising given the sharp delineations of the underlying cost surface — this network of corridors has been drawn most closely along the tight, distinct thresholds of the human system. The generalized pattern in this network map is

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essentially a loop anchored at various patch points. This loop utilizes coulees, the river corridors, and highway right-of-ways (especially the TUC land) to construct a ring of connection, leaving the study area core as a single, uninterrupted island.

The interesting thing to note here is that despite a series of “arms” that reach into the central cluster of development, each route found the longer path around the outside edge more cost-effective. The frequent use of highway right-of-ways in this network makes sense because the adjoining lands are continuous for large stretches; once the analysis had “bought” its way onto one of these corridors, it tended to be a good pathway until it encountered some intersecting higher quality connection. Other points of interest in network map A include the well-connected corridor running along Twelve-mile Coulee through Tuscany, the use of Sarcee Trail to connect Nose Hill to the Bow River, and a node at the intersection of Crowchild Trail and Stoney Trail.

Network Map B (Influence: 75% built — 25% landscape process) Compared to the first output, network map B began to show slightly more diffuse corridors, a likely result of the minor introduction of the more gradient-based landscape drivers. It repeated the basic ring pattern seen in the first network map.

One point of key interest was the very slight corridor that wound north from Nose Hill toward the TUC and Nose Creek. This was an important connection because of what it connected: an cut-off emerald natural environment park to a stream corridor. Other points of interest in the second network map included the repeated emphasis on the Stoney-Crowchild intersection and the length of Sarcee Trail as key pieces of the network’s structure.

Network Map C (Influence: 50% built — 50% landscape process) The third network map exhibited the most noticeable contrast to its fellow, and brought several new elements to attention. First, the emergence of a clear new corridor winding parallel to the TUC from Twelve-mile Coulee over the landscape spine and down toward Nose Creek. That this route was selected over one following the right-of-way of the TUC drew attention because on its face it seemed less efficient. On second glance, however, a smaller coulee wound through the neighbourhoods here, and much of its route had been preserved in open spaces: a mix of school yards, hills, and linear parks. The basic ring pattern here was still present, but this new route had the effect of bisecting the space to create a

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distorted figure eight. Sarcee Trail was again highlighted as a key route, though in this diagram a more diffuse assortment of parallel paths had joined it, including 53rd Street and a green parkland corridor that winds north-south through the core of Dalhousie. The Stoney-Crowchild intersection was highlighted again here, and this time the network map brought additional attention to a similar key node to the south at Nose Hill Drive at the base of the Twelve-mile Coulee.

Network Map D (Influence: 25% built — 75% landscape process) The fourth network map in the series began to show the increasing diffusion of the corridors through the landscape as topography asserted a greater influence.

Several new corridors emerged in this diagram, most notably a link running northwest from Nose Hill Park through the core of the study area. This additional corridor, along with the route identified in diagram three, now split the central study area into three pieces, with two major built-up areas in the core. This new corridor was by far the most interesting element of the analysis. It did not move along any major road, but rather picked its way through many small existing green spaces. This route reinforces the spine one would infer from the overall ecological structure of the study area, flowing parallel to the ridge of the secondtier escarpment, a path of now in-filled wetlands. The diagram again reinforced the two aforementioned patches, the connection north from Nose Hill, and the use of Sarcee Trail and its parallel routes to flow southward from Nose Hill toward the Bow River.

Network Map E (Influence: 0% built — 100% landscape process) The fifth network map proved to vary little from its predecessor, much like the small distinction observed between diagrams one and two. Diagram five showed the most diffuse network, and added a few routes along important landscape lines, such as a corridor along a shallower coulee route that had been overwritten in the neighbourhood of Scenic Acres. It supported all of the key moments revealed in the previous four diagrams. That Sarcee Trail was picked out so prominently in all maps (even in network map E, when it did not exist as a “road” at all) supports the inference that naturally occurring corridors have been broadly overwritten with roads in this landscape, and that finding a way to re-structure or to convert these corridors would support the long-term ecological function of areas throughout the city.

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Six Scenarios Following a reading of the network maps, six key moments in the study area were identified for more precise evaluation. These scenarios were selected because they were either: (i) highlighted as connections within all five network maps, or (ii) drawn as a connection in only one network map. The aim of this more detailed examination was to begin to understand what connection challenges and opportunities would arise as the exercise became more precise. Simplified network corridors from Chapter Four were laid over aerial photographs for each scenario, and diagrams were drawn to highlight the challenges that would arise as the corridor wound its way through the site.

These six scenarios are highlighted in the map opposite, and will be discussed in the following pages.

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Chapter 5: Challenges & Opportunities

1. Stoney and Crow This scenario was selected for further study because it played a pivotal role in all five corridor diagrams. The key moment in this scenario is the crossing over Crowchild Trail just northwest of the Stoney Trail intersection. If a soft flow corridor was allowed to flow across the roadway at this point, it would link a kilometres-long stretch of continuous green ROW to the roadâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s northeast to an equally long stretch that runs southward toward the Bow River, connecting continuously to the Twelve-mile Coulee and the Bow River escarpment. This is really a typical case that could be repeated in similar scenarios along the TUC. Part of the great opportunity of the TUC lands is that they have been designed to carry high-speed freeways free of controlled intersections. The cost of highway overpass structures has led to a low incidence of intersecting roadways. For this reason, the broad right-of-ways that run alongside the TUC freeway remain uninterrupted for long stretches. By creating moments of connection at these intersecting roadways and structuring the landscape such that it can function both as a hard and a soft flow, the entire TUC (all forty-four square kilometres) could be activated as a high performance green belt in the city.

This scenario links to two others: at its east extent to Crow to Creek (scen. 2), and less directly to a similar node (scen. 4) at Stoney and Bow.

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Oblique view of scenario 1

Looking north at the node from eastbound Crowchild Trail west of Stoney Trail

Looking southwest at the node from southbound Stoney Trail north of Crowchild Trail

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Generalized corridor shape: a key intersection | 162 |

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Generalized corridor laid over air photo. link to north habitat patch

link along TUC right of way

link along 1A hwy future development corridor

Crowchild Trail

Stoney Trail Arbour Lake Road

link to Citadel (see scen. 2)

Pinched/narrow section Building interruption Major crossing Backyards Minor crossing Dual alignment Generalized Corridor Detailed Corridor

link south along TUC toward scen. 3

Diagram of connection challenges for scenario 1 | 163 |

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Chapter 5: Challenges & Opportunities

2. Crow to Creek This corridor first emerged in the 50-50 weighting diagram. It connects up and over the landscape spine that anchors the study area and divides the Bow River and Nose Creek drainage systems. The porcupine formation (that terminates at Nose Hill at the siteâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s east end) is comprised of two steps. One is the current river escarpment (and former river edge). The other is the former coastline of Glacial Lake Calgary, and it has its own system of coulees that descend both south toward the Bow River and north toward Nose Creek. One of these smaller coulees forms the guide that helps draw this corridor through the built area, over the spine and down through a connecting coulee on the other side. This would have formed a critical flow in the pre-development landscape function, and it lends to this corridor the additional capacity to function as a drainage system within a restored soft network.

It is a particularly interesting corridor because it provides an alternate, neighbourhood-integrated route that mirrors the nearby TUC. With only four necessary minor crossing points and one major crossing within its five kilometre length, it is a testament to the connectivity potentials inherent in suburban road networks. In the grid-patterned neighbourhoods surrounding Calgaryâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s core, any kilometre-long line will intersect an average of 9 roadways. A five kilometreslong route through this gridded neighbourhood would typically cross over more than forty road/rail lines. Based solely on street pattern, these two examples differ by 1000%. Grid-like street patterns are celebrated for the connectivity they offer their own systems, but they tend to have a highly fragmenting impact on the connectivity of the matrices in which they are located. That the corridor scenario described above encounters one tenth of the interruption of a typical gridded neighbourhood reinforces the idea that the suburbs offer a particularly strong opportunity for ecological connectivity.

This corridor links to two other scenarios: the node at Stoney and Crow (scen. 1) and to Nose to Royal (scen. 6).

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Oblique view of a section of scenario 2

A few trees populate a broad green space in Arbour Lake

A road cuts across a corridor in Citadel Park

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Corridor shape: a narrow linear route | 166 |

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Corridors laid over air photo link toward Nose Creek

Stoney Trail

Citadel Way

Country Hills Blvd

Stoney Trail link toward Nose Hill Park see scen. 6 see scen. 1

Pinched/narrow section Building interruption Major crossing Backyards Minor crossing Dual alignment Generalized Corridor Detailed Corridor

Diagram of connection challenges for scenario 2 | 167 |

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Chapter 5: Challenges & Opportunities

3. Nose to Creek This scenario is a response to two key conditions. The first is the desire to connect Nose Hill Park northward, as development has severed it completely from related habitat patches to the cityâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s north. The other is the challenge of pushing such a corridor through two rather dense choke points at Country Hills Boulevard and Hamptons Boulevard. The corridor appeared on the very first diagram (100% as-is influence) and remained present but became increasingly diffuse through the subsequent studies. It is clear from reading the air photo that the corridor is responding to two broad green sections that reach toward each other but do not touch. From Nose Hill, a winding escarpment that snakes through Edgemont; from the north, the TUC and a golf course. These two systems meet in a very dense patch of residential housing that does not easily afford connection. The two choke points are both characterized by a roadway crossing immediately adjacent to dense residential uses. At both points, the erosion of some specifically targeted buildings would ease flow and enable this critical connection.

While this sounds like an aggressive strategy, the removal of small sections of suburbs does not have to be a Haussmanesque exercise, and could ultimately enact itself throughout the decades-long turnover of the building stock. Such a procedure is common-place in the creation and widening of other types of urban infrastructure. That said, there is a range of challenges embedded in the pursuit of eroding built city that transverse the social, political, economic, and legal spheres.

It is not within this projectâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s scope to find detailed resolution to such challenges, but rather to identify with a degree of precision what smallest interventions affect the greatest change.

This scenario meets two others at a hinge point at its southern end: to the north tip of Nose to Bow (scen. 5) and the east extent of Nose to Royal (scen. 6).

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An oblique view of the corridor at Country Hills Boulevard

A view into a preserved escarpment in Edgemont

A broad green space as it cuts through the Hamptons

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Corridor shape: two finger reach toward a pinch point | 170 |

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Corridors laid over air photo link to patches north of the city

Pinched/narrow section Building interruption Major crossing Backyards Minor crossing Dual alignment Generalized Corridor Detailed Corridor

Stoney Trail

Country Hills Blvd link to Nose Hill Park

Diagram of connection challenges for scenario 3 | 171 |

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Chapter 5: Challenges & Opportunities

4. Stoney at Bow This scenario was selected because it forms a pinwheel intersection between three major corridors: the TUC corridor, Twelve-mile Coulee, and the Bow River Escarpment. Similar to the node in the first scenario, a few carefully placed connections will activate a large quantity of network. This moment of connectivity is also an interesting convergence point between corridors with three very different characters. The first is Twelve-mile Coulee, which runs parallel to the TUC for a while before branching off through Tuscany to the northwest. It is comprised of mostly-undisturbed native habitat and still forms a key drainage route. The second is the Bow Escarpment. While the hill-side itself has only minor disturbances (mostly from formal and informal recreational use), channelized storm-water systems and development near the top and bottom edges of the escarpment have had impacts on the corridorâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s natural flow. Finally, the TUC corridor. This is a heavily adapted and re-shaped landscape designed to suit the needs of a freeway corridor. The convergence of these three corridors, each of which exists in a different state of disturbance, would form an interesting and instructive case study for the evolution and programming of these corridors over time.

Another compelling opportunity arises in this scenario. Because this confluence of corridors forms a major intersection in the soft network, it could take on a name and identity as a node, similar to the address of a street intersection. Such a move could play a key role in the practical and didactic legibility of a savouring city. Indeed, there is strong potential throughout the corridor system for a soft way-finding system that guides, educates, and brings legitimacy to this new infrastructure. Corridor names, symbols, signage, and other signifiers could all be used in concert to establish such a system.

This scenario is connected via the TUC north to the node at Stoney and Crow (scen. 1).

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Oblique view of the node in scenario 4

A view northward into twelve-mile coulee

Looking west along the Bow River escarpment south of Scenic Acres

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Corridor shape: four-way stop | 174 |

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Corridors laid over air photo link up 12 mile coulee see scen. 1

Stoney Trail

link west along Bow River Escarpment

Pinched/narrow section Building interruption Major crossing Backyards Minor crossing Dual alignment Generalized Corridor Detailed Corridor

Nose Hill Drive

CPR Tracks

link east along Bow River Escarpment

link toward Bow River

Diagram of connection challenges for scenario 4 | 175 |

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Chapter 5: Challenges & Opportunities

5. Nose to Bow This scenario was drawn out of the diagrams because it was clearly delineated throughout each weighting. Whether the system was guided entirely by the asbuilt scenario or by the underlying landscape, the same pair of corridors was drawn through the city to connect Nose Hill south to the Bow River corridor.

There are two roads that run parallel to the corridor direction: one major (Sarcee Trail) and one minor (53rd Street). These two roadways form tight spines for corridors that flow down from the escarpment system that winds west of Nose Hill. Each starts with a major crossing at John Laurie Boulevard, flows down its tight roadway corridor, hits a second major crossing at Crowchild Trail, and then carries on through less inhibited city through the Bow River escarpment to the river itself.

What drew particular attention in this scenario was the degree to which the suggested corridors mirrored the arrangement of the major roadways. This could be framed as a limiting issue, but there is an opportunity here in the built infrastructure that is quite compelling. Looking at the crossing points for Crowchild Trail, for example, each of the major crossings identified in the scenario aligns with an existing overpass structure. By either increasing the breadth of the bridges or reducing the intensity of their traffic to free up spanning (or spanned) space, soft connections could be established that avoid the high costs of constructing new crossing structures (either under or over the road).

This opportunity is not isolated to this scenario, and could find purchase in other related moments (especially along the TUC).

This scenario is connected at its north extent to Nose to Creek (scen. 3) and Nose to Royal (scen. 6).

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Oblique view of the north end of the Sarcee Trail pinch point.

Looking south along Sarcee Trail

Recently planted trees in the corridor leading into Silver Springs

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Corridor shape: two narrow options connected at the top and bottom | 178 |

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Corridors laid over air photo link toward Nose Hill Park

Pinched/narrow section Building interruption Major crossing Backyards Minor crossing Dual alignment Generalized Corridor Detailed Corridor

John Laurie Blvd

Sarcee Trail

53rd Street

Silver Springs Gate Crowchild Trail links toward Bow River

link toward Bow River

Diagram of connection challenges for scenario 5 | 179 |

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Chapter 5: Challenges & Opportunities

6. Nose to Royal This corridor was identified for further review because it was the only route to cut clearly through the core of suburban coverage in the study area. It emerged only when the influence of the existing built composition was only 25%, having previously opted to reroute itself along less expensive perimeter lines. This fact likely drove the high degree of connection challenge in this corridor, which was more frequent and varied than in any of the other scenarios. The corridor runs northwest from Nose Hill, snaking through a range of conditions and neighbourhoods and ultimately connecting past the corridor outlined in scenario two and out of the city through Royal Oak. It follows a contour line of one of several smaller ridges that form the Porcupine Hills Formation. It encounters a number of crossings, pinch points, and dual-alignments along its path.

Although this scenario had the largest extent, it became particularly interesting at a detailed scale. At certain points along the route, it became clear that slight “short-cuts” or other efficiencies could be achieved through the use of clusters of suburban yards. In several of the neighbourhoods through which the corridor runs, the street pattern has created a series of small blocks with a housing perimeter and a green interior. On the ground, these interiors are highly fragmented yard spaces divided by regular fences. However, if the owners of these green patches were to coordinate the landscaping of their interior patches such that they created continuous clumps of habitat, a stepping-stone pattern of connectivity could emerge through some of the tightest and most challenging spaces along this corridor. Such a strategy could be supported by incentives from the City or the Province — incentives that ultimately recognize the performance that such patches contribute to the composition of the city. Designed properly, such interior patches could potentially create local storm-water management services, habitats for local birds, pest control, more productive private gardens, and a host of other services. “Permablitzes” — gatherings in which volunteers rebuild someone’s backyard into a food-producing landscape in a day — are increasing in popularity, and reveal something of the capacity for this type of change to occur in suburban environments over very short time periods. Such activities could be scaled up to a block or a cluster of neighbours.

This corridor is linked at its east extent to Nose to Creek (scen. 3) and Nose to Bow (scen. 5), and at its west extent to Crow to Creek (scen. 2).

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Oblique view of corridor as it passes through Hawkwood

Two hilly corridors approach each other across a road in Arbour Lake

A patch of natural vegetation anchors a short corridor section in Hawkwood

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Corridor shape: long narrow connection | 182 |

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Corridors laid over air photo link toward patches north of city

Country Hills Blvd

Stoney Trail link toward crowchild (see scen.1)

Arbour Lake Rd

Pinched/narrow section Building interruption Major crossing Backyards Minor crossing Dual alignment Generalized Corridor Detailed Corridor

Arbour Lake Way

Hawkwood Drive

Sarcee Trail

Nose Hill Drive Hawkwood Blvd

Edgemont Blvd

link to Bow River (see scen.5)

link to Nose Hill Park

Diagram of connection challenges for scenario 6 | 183 |

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Chapter 5: Challenges & Opportunities

Observations from the Scenarios 1. Long Corridors (scenarios 2 and 6) The long corridors were compelling in the way that they built a connection from a selection of very small spaces in a built-up zone with few linear elements. The exploration of these corridors brought attention to the challenges of connecting through tight residential space, but also highlighted the surprising gains that could be achieved from relatively few gestures.

2. Nodes (scenarios 1 and 4) In opposition to the corridor scenarios, the nodes -- which tended to arise prominently at the intersection of major corridors -- brought attention to the opportunities for connection within the broadest sections of city. Both nodes in this exploration, which were located along the TUC, established â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;landingsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; for some of these corridors and tended to coincide with major highway intersections.

3. Critical Corridor Sections (scenarios 3 and 5) The critical corridor sections, which both linked the Emerald park space of Nose Hill to important other systems in the study area, explored the challenges of linkages in the shadow of extremely tight residential and infrastructure contexts.

4. Connection Challenges Throughout the analysis of the scenarios, six key connection challenges emerged that were present in nearly every case. These were: i. Laneways and other pinched, narrow corridor sections These were sections in which a soft corridor of some kind existed, but its width was heavily constrained by the surrounding city. This was a challenge faced at some point in every scenario. Laneways formed a particularly interesting challenge to create brief moments of highly compacted connectivity. ii. Building interruptions Building interruptions were identified as sections in which the flow of the corridor broad sided or was otherwise drawn around an existing building or cluster of buildings. This occurred predominantly in the long corridor scenarios.

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Chapter 5: Challenges & Opportunities

iii. Major crossing points Major crossing points were identified as moments where a corridor crossed either a major roadway (70km/h or faster) or a transit or industrial rail line. This tended to occur at the extents of corridors, but they were the key challenges in the node scenarios. iv. Minor crossing points Minor crossing points were identified as moments where a corridor crossed a minor roadway (less than 70km/h). Due to the spaghetti pattern of much of the neighbourhood roadways, this occurred less than one might guess (entailing only 5 crossings in stretches of dozens of kilometres in the two corridor scenarios). v. Backyards The backyards condition occurred where the corridor ran through major sections of suburban residences. This was observed as both a challenge and an opportunity, as change in use of these parcels was expensive and problematic, while change in character, for example through removal of fences and community-coordinated planting and landscaping work, could be one of the most effective connection strategies available. vi. Dual alignments Dual alignments were defined as linear sections in which a proposed corridor shared its alignment with a major roadway (70km/h or faster). These proved to be quite prevalent throughout the scenarios, and were understood to be one of the greatest structural challenges in the suburban ecological connection playbook. A strategy for building successful dual-alignment corridors could be usefully deployed in several areas throughout the study area.

Summary A closer look at the network connections proposed in chapter four has unearthed a range of more detailed challenges and opportunities faced by the urban designer.

In the final section of this project, a series of sketches will begin to ponder the range of design responses that might confront these issues.

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6

Chapter Six: Sketches and Conclusion

The Next Steps The questions posed and ideas presented throughout this project aspire to set out a new vision for the broad organization of suburban space. The scope and scale of such an undertaking will tend to produce more questions than answers, but the hope remains that it will form a productive entry point into more detailed discussions about suburban futures.

This project has spent much of its time floating high above the city, exploring representations of landscapes, flows, and connections without much of an anchor in the lived space of the city. While this is in many ways necessary given the scale of the challenge, it risks becoming alienated from the day-to-day lives -- and day-to-day spaces -- through which any desired changes ultimately will be enacted.

For this reason, the project concludes with a collection of brief design sketches that arose from insights that emerged throughout the research process. These sketches include studies on: i/ the opportunity embedded in blocks of suburban backyards, ii/ the connective potential of suburban alleys, iii/ the reorganization of medium-sized suburban sites through redevelopment of old building stock, iv/ the potential for landscape bridges to link ecologies across roadways v/ the re-ordering of highway interchanges to reduce wasted space, build ecological capacity, and connect soft flows and citizens across major urban barriers.

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Sketches & Conclusion

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Sketch 1 - Backing Yards Use clusters of coordinated private suburban yards to reconnect portions of difficult corridors with threads or stepping stones. Take the opportunity to rebuild natural water management and habitat for native species.

An example of backing yard from the study area (see white circle below)

All incidences of backing yards noted in the study area | 188 |

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A cross-section exploring a range of coordinated programming for backyard space.

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Organizing space and ecological function in six zones.

residential zone contents: mixed native grasses & fescue, play space, permeable hard cover (patios or decks) functions: play space, supervision, human wellness

recreation/provision zone contents: mixed native grasses & fescue, food/ornamental garden, play space functions: food provision, play space, habitat, human wellness

source/sink zone contents: mixed native vegetation, compost, fruit-bearing trees/bushes, vegetable garden functions: food provision, habitat, soil recharge, human wellness

barrier zone / property line contents: optional fencing structure functions: contolled access for pets & children

riparian zone contents: dense vegetation cover functions: particulate filtration, habitat, erosion control, pest control, visual barrier

core zone contents: permeable swale system, native vegetation functions: ground-water recharge, surface water flow control,habitat

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Potential site future.

bio-swale

water flows toward swale and then out to curb

Current site -- issues & opportunities.

single family homes

vegetated corridor

connect to other strands to establish network

compost & gardens

site slopes to north and east

water pours across sidewalk surface

small bridges can connect neighbours over the swale

existing tree & shrub cover

concrete sw ale system

storm system tie-in

additional runoff flows under grated sidewalk

sidewalk crossing point

storm system tie-in

Sketch 2 - Alley Armature Use the narrow public space of alleys to create ecological corridors by constructing armatures for vegetation, wildlife, and human use. Build off of the particular ecological functions of the alley fence as a home (and sink) for garbage, vegetation, compost, recycling, discarded goods, and wildlife.

The alley fence plays an important and messy role in both hard and soft infrastructure.

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All incidences of laneways in the study area.

A key laneway site in the study area could link two major green spaces (see white circle).

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identify garage access zones

create foundation offset from garage access

side rails lift canopy from garage entrances

structure runs continuously through length of lane

edge creates accumulation over time

Building a multi-functional armature to help connect and bridge soft flows through an alley. Plan (right). | 194 |

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Over time, a range of human and natural functions would accumulate on and around the armature.

Sketch 3 - Reorganization When aging building stock undergoes renovation/replacement, especially in larger commercial or multi-family cases, take the opportunity to orient new development in such a way that it benefits from (and contributes to) soft flows.

Silver Sp rings Blv d

Single-Family Homes

Townh omes

School yard

Soft Corridor with Community Plantings Commer cial Bu ilding

School

Recreational Uses

Recreational Uses

Soft Strand

Natural Continuity Interruption Site

Drain to Bow River

Reorganizing built fabric so that it responds to major soft flow systems.

Natural park space

Townh om

es

Silver Springs Gate

d oo urh hild bo wc igh Cro Ne in e via Ma anc tr En

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Strip-Mall Commercial Form

Corner Visibility & Linear Filtration

2 x 25-metre deep retail/commercial bays Subsurface parking

Split floor plate adds retail perimeter and allows flow of water & people

20% increase in retail frontage Offset creates outdoor patio space

Continuous parkade hosts water filtration system tied to vegetated corridors above

A new orientation to the major soft flow could drive a range of options to improve architectural types and their environmental performance. | 197 |

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Pattern of Interlocking Fingers (co-connectivity)

Increased... Convolution Perimeter Green Space Access

Grade for Drainage & Water Management

13-metre deep residential footprints

Sheared Array Affords West Views and Eases Dominant Turning Direction

Division Splits Footprints & Frames View to School

A new orientation to the major soft flow could drive a range of options to improve architectural types and their environmental performance.

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Even if the existing program remains the same, a new organization could make a tremendous difference in the connectivity of soft flows.

Sketch 4 - Landscape Bridge Build new over- and under-passes at critical points in the network. Construct these to feel natural and continuous with the landscapes they are connecting.

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Parametric definitions could adapt a single construction technique to a range of site conditions.

Such bridges could range from massive landscape connectors across freeways to small, landscaped pedestrian connectors within neighbourhoods.

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Construction techniques such as the cable and membrane system shown here could be efficient, repeatable, and cost-effective.

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Multiple bridges and bridges containin multiple crossing routes could help separate human and wildlife uses. arch

concave

compress

fill

channelize

span protect clear

lighten mid-point

fill

pockets

program opportunities

gather landscape

reduce slope maintain clearance

reduce fill separate flow types

These bridges would need to capture a range of performances, and could be used to generate other urban programming.

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Sketch 5 - Inter-change Transform the ring road into a continuous green belt by creating connection points at major intersections. Use existing bridge structures as much as possible to separate hard and soft flows.

Existing bridges could be re-organized to carry both hard and soft flows at principal crossing points.

84 km/h

60 km/h

the COST of SPEED

for a ramp speed increase of 24 km/h:

3.4X 12.2X

travel distance right-of-way area

Interchange speed and land area required. | 204 |

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The intersection of Stoney Trail and Crowchild Trail as it presently exists in the study area.

Most of the space within and surrounding the interchange is used simply as a buffer. | 205 |

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consolidate roadways

shift roadways toward ROW edges x

x

x

4x

utilize existing span structures

create new opportunities for cross-flow

build upon existing interchange geometries

establish ring of connectivity

A series of small, logical steps could make a big difference in the use of highway land.

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By re-ordering a few cloverleaves and tightening the roadway system, the landscape can be restructured to support major hard and soft flows in close proximity. | 207 |

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Sketches & Conclusion

Conclusion Return for a moment to the provocation posed at the beginning of this project: What if the suburbs were our greatest hope for helping cities respond to the challenges of the next century?

This Masters Degree Project has tackled a typically villainous suburban context through the lens of appreciation. Its method has exposed many elements of suburban form and performance that can be productively harnessed by citybuilders as they work toward change in cities. Some of these elements were obvious -- others emerged more surprisingly from the project’s conceptual and applied explorations. In this light, the broadest conclusion is simply that hope exists for cities, and much of it is embedded in the suburbs.

Not all of this opportunity will be easy to exploit. Some of the most significant pieces of the puzzle require a deeper restructuring of the basic relationships between human and natural systems. In the face of this challenge, this Masters Degree Project has contributed several key tools: The first tool is a conceptual framework that sets out a distinction between “hard” and “soft” flows in designed space. This is a pragmatic and scalable system that can provide insight into projects ranging from regional open space plans to block designs, building layouts, or even small garden plots. This framework does not try to make claims of infallibility, or present a model that captures all existing situations. Rather, it presents a manner of talking about complex systems -- a way of drawing, analyzing, and ultimately intervening in these systems -- that avoids the limitations implicit in object-based readings of urban space.

The second tool contributed by this Master Degree Project is a technical method for identifying opportunities to connect soft networks through existing suburban space. This is a powerful research tool that has implications for the re-design of park systems, urban infrastructure, area structure plans, and transportation networks. It builds on the appreciative tone of the entire project, and responds to its study area via the hard-soft framework. There is sparse precedent for the use of such tools within the bounds of an existing city; this project further innovates by

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Sketches & Conclusion

blending maps of pre- and post-development to drive the analysis. This blending is an important step in both ecology and urban design, as it embeds both natural and human imperatives directly within an urban analysis.

Returning to the eloquent words of former Toyota executive Taiichi Ohno, city-builders must demonstrate “the talent and courage to rethink what we call common sense”(Ohno, 1988, p. 30). When transposed to the current situation of change within cities, “talent” is about understanding how to innovatively use available tools to answer difficult questions. The use of the cost-corridor tool in this Masters Degree Project is an apt example of this kind of innovation.

In a similar vein, “courage” is about crafting the right discussions about how the city is shaped. City-builders and citizens need to challenge themselves to find new ways of understanding and communicating the rich opportunities embedded in the urban landscape.

Master of Architecture This project culminates in a series of questions and studies about how the physical shape of the city can support more intentional relationships between hard and soft flows. These questions are picked up by a subsequent Masters Degree Project in Architecture, which looks in much greater depth at a section of the study area.

It pursues a closely related problem: a range of hard and soft flows are presently at play in suburban neighbourhoods. What role can architecture play in restructuring and re-alining these flows toward a savouring, ecologically-oriented map of the city?

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Sketches & Conclusion

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