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Landscape Architect Quarterly
Consuming Landscapes
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Round Table Matters of Materials
Productive Cities, by Design
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Food Forests
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Publication # 40026106
Entangled Landscapes
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Spring 2019 Issue 45
Masthead
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Editor Lorraine Johnson
2019 OALA Governing Council
Photo Editor Jasper Flores
President Jane Welsh
OALA Editorial Board Kanwal Aftab Shannon Baker Trish Clarke Jasper Flores Eric Gordon Aaron Hernandez Eric Klaver (chair) Phaedra Maicantis Nadja Pausch Melissa Poulin Le’ Ann Seely Katie Strang Sarah Turkenicz Andrew Taylor Devin Tepleski
Vice President Kendall Flower
Councillors Cynthia Graham Cameron Smith Justin Whalen
Web Editor Jennifer Foden
Associate Councillor—Senior Trish Clarke
Social Media Manager Jennifer Foden
Associate Councillor—Junior Mark Hillmer
Art Direction/Design Noël Nanton/typotherapy www.typotherapy.com
Lay Councillor Peter Hersics
Advertising Inquiries advertising@oala.ca 416.231.4181 Cover Cheltenham Badlands. See page 09. Ground: Landscape Architect Quarterly is published four times a year by the Ontario Association of Landscape Architects. Ontario Association of Landscape Architects 3 Church Street, Suite 506 Toronto, Ontario M5E 1M2 416.231.4181 www.oala.ca oala@oala.ca Copyright © 2019 by the Ontario Association of Landscape Architects. Contributors retain copyright of their work. All rights reserved. ISSN: 0847-3080 Canada Post Sales Product Agreement No. 40026106
Treasurer Steve Barnhart Secretary Stefan Fediuk Past President Doris Chee
Appointed Educator University of Toronto TBC Appointed Educator University of Guelph Brendan Stewart University of Toronto Student Representative Elspeth Holland
OALA
OALA
About
About the OALA
Ground: Landscape Architect Quarterly is published by the Ontario Association of Landscape Architects and provides an open forum for the exchange of ideas and information related to the profession of landscape architecture. Letters to the editor, article proposals, and feedback are encouraged. For submission guidelines, contact Ground at magazine@oala.ca. Ground reserves the right to edit all submissions. The views expressed in the magazine are those of the writers and not necessarily the views of the OALA and its Governing Council.
The Ontario Association of Landscape Architects works to promote and advance the profession of landscape architecture and maintain standards of professional practice consistent with the public interest. The OALA promotes public understanding of the profession and the advancement of the practice of landscape architecture. In support of the improvement and/or conservation of the natural, cultural, social and built environments, the OALA undertakes activities including promotion to governments, professionals and developers of the standards and benefits of landscape architecture.
Upcoming Issues of Ground Ground 46 (Summer) Colour Deadline for advertising space reservations: April 9, 2019
Ground 47 (Fall) Power Deadline for advertising space reservations: June 11, 2019 Deadline for editorial proposals: April 12, 2019 Ground 48 (Winter) Death & Renewal Deadline for advertising space reservations: October 7, 2019 Deadline for editorial proposals: July 12, 2019
University of Guelph Student Representative Robyn McCormick OALA Staff Executive Director Aina Budrevics Registrar Ingrid Little Coordinator Sarah Manteuffel
See www.groundmag.ca to download articles and share content on social media. See www.groundmag.ca for a digital, searchable, archival database, listing all articles, authors, subjects, key words, etc. published in Ground over the years.
TO VIEW ADDITIONAL CONTENT RELATED TO GROUND ARTICLES, VISIT WWW.GROUNDMAG.CA.
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Advisory Panel
Andrew B. Anderson, BLA, MSc. World Heritage Management Landscape & Heritage Expert, Oman Botanic Garden John Danahy, OALA, Associate Professor, University of Toronto George Dark, OALA, FCSLA, ASLA, Principal, Urban Strategies Inc., Toronto Real Eguchi, OALA, Eguchi Associates Landscape Architects, Toronto Donna Hinde, OALA, FCSLA, Partner, The Planning Partnership, Toronto Ryan James, OALA, Senior Landscape Architect, Novatech, Ottawa Alissa North, OALA, Associate Professor, University of Toronto, Principal of North Design Office, Toronto Peter North, OALA, Assistant Professor, University of Toronto, Principal of North Design Office, Toronto Nathan Perkins, MLA, PhD, ASLA, Associate Professor, University of Guelph Victoria Taylor, OALA, Principal, Victoria Taylor Landscape Architect, Toronto Jim Vafiades, OALA, FCSLA, Senior Landscape Architect, Stantec, Toronto
Contents
Up Front Information on the ground
Consume:
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Consuming Landscapes Appreciation meets destruction in the age of Instagram
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TEXT BY SHANNON BAKER, OALA
Round Table Matters of materials
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CO-MODERATED BY KANWAL AFTAB AND MELISSA POULIN, OALA
Productive Cities, by Design A conversation with June Komisar and Joe Nasr
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CONDUCTED BY ERIC GORDON, OALA
Food Forests A conversation with Catherine Bukowski CONDUCTED BY SHANNON BAKER, OALA 20/
Entangled Landscapes The effects of invasive species on mycorrhizal fungi and soil health INTERVIEW WITH RICHARD DICKINSON, CONDUCTED BY PHAEDRA MAICANTIS
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Research Corner Chernobyl after Chernobyl TEXT AND PHOTOGRAPHS BY ELISE HUNCHUCK, MLA
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Letter From…Aotearoa (New Zealand) The restoration of identity TEXT BY THEO NAZARY AND DELANEY WINDIGO 32/
Grounding Jigonsaseh and the message of peace
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TEXT BY MILLIE KNAPP
Notes A miscellany of news and events
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Artifact Digging in
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TEXT BY LORRAINE JOHNSON
Spring 2019 Issue 45
President’s Message
Editorial Board Message
President’s Message
Editorial Board Message
Welcome spring—a perfect time for OALA’s Annual General Meeting and Conference (April 25-27 in Blue Mountain) to share ideas on the theme of BIGthinking, take part in Association business, celebrate award winners, learn from engaging speakers as well as exhibitors, and reconnect with old friends and make new ones.
Our current environmental crisis is perhaps best defined in terms of the opposing sides of the same coin: consumption and waste. This issue of Ground focuses on consumption, but lurking in the background is the spectre of what happens when the bills for our consumption come due.
I wanted to share with you a few emerging initiatives of interest to members. In January, I attended an informal dinner with the president of the Ontario Association of Architects (OAA), John Stephenson, and the president of the Ontario Professional Planners Institute (OPPI), Jason Ferrigan, and their respective Executive Directors, Kristi Doyle and Mary Ann Rangam. This was an historic occasion—the first meeting of the heads of these three associations. We all agreed that our associations share many values, have concerns about similar issues, and would benefit from further opportunities to share information and leverage actions. OPPI is pursuing updated professional regulation legislation with the new government, as their previous attempt died on the order paper due to the June 2018 election. The OAA and the Association of Registered Interior Designers of Ontario (ARIDO) continue to work in partnership to implement direct regulation of the practice of interior design under the Architects Act.
Even though Canada is a small nation, our consumption of resources has led to our having one of the largest per capita carbon footprints in the world. Agriculture and energy are Canada’s largest industries, and most of our pollution is connected to them. I have often thought that our poor treatment of our collective natural heritage is based on the fallacy that we have both a bottomless supply of resources and the ability to hide our environmental sins far away from notice. Industrial agriculture is energy intensive and fossilfuel-based, and is responsible for almost all of the nutrient-loading of the Great Lakes. Nevertheless, our impacts are evident if we pay attention. One of the most beautiful and photographed features in Ontario, the Cheltenham Badlands, is the result of the poor treatment of the environment. Shannon Baker’s article in this issue underlines the irony that this incredible “natural” feature has been under threat once again from new environmental pressures.
OALA Council has approved the launch of an authenticated and legally reliable OALA digital seal. An increasing number of municipalities, governments, public services, and private businesses require digitally signed drawings and plans in order to reduce their archiving costs and increase efficiency. Look to the OALA website for more information. I am Chair of the new CSLA Committee on Climate Adaptation Municipal Roundtable. The purpose is to provide a forum for landscape architects working for Canadian municipalities to share ideas and experiences on best practices to tackle climate change adaptation. We have 19 members, from B.C., Saskatchewan, Ontario, and Nova Scotia, and areas of interest range from designing and maintaining resilient landscapes to concern with forest fires, sea level rise, flooding, erosion, urban forest canopy, extreme weather, invasive species, urban heat island impact, greenhouse gas emissions, and the need for incentives and understanding of costs. To date there have been interesting discussions, led by Cynthia Graham, OALA, and Ted Ulrich, BCSLA, on escarpment and shoreline erosion. For members interested in learning more, there is a newly developed resources section on the CSLA website: www.csla-aapc.ca/climate-change/resources. Landscape architects are well equipped to be leaders in making municipalities climate resilient! JANE WELSH, OALA, FCSLA OALA PRESIDENT PRESIDENT@OALA.CA
This issue of Ground demonstrates the leadership role that landscape architects can take to ameliorate these problems. On one level, in our immediate control, our choices of materials and methods can help reduce our carbon output and waste. On another level, something mentioned in Eric Gordon’s conversation with Joe Nasr and June Kosimar struck me as critical if we, as professional stewards of the environment, wish to facilitate change: one of the benefits of connecting people to their environment, in this case through the practice of urban agriculture, is that it contributes to building community. Our ability to create and, more importantly, maintain sustainable cities, towns, and industries lies in our ability to overcome divisiveness and instead facilitate strengthened communities. Sustainability is ultimately about reconnecting people to the environment, and the resiliency of our sustainable practices and environments is ultimately about the strength of those communal ties. ERIC KLAVER, OALA CHAIR, EDITORIAL BOARD MAGAZINE@OALA.CA
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Up Front
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TREES
planting oaks Eric Davies’ refrigerator has a number of overlapping identities: a) cold storage for edibles; b) potential irritant for his roommate (“there’s no room for her food,” Davies admits); c) repository of a future forest. Loaded on every shelf, and filling the vegetable crisper, are more than 10,000 acorns he has collected from large, healthy oaks at various locations in Toronto: Nordheimer ravine, Queen’s Park, the University of Toronto campus, the grounds of the Royal Ontario Museum. The future forest extends to the rest of his apartment. Every available surface—window ledges, tables, an old wooden ladder— supports an array of glass jars filled with water and the long taproots of germinated oak seedlings. The whole place looks alive. And, indeed, actually came alive one day when a couple of crafty squirrels made their way inside through the open back door—“It was obviously party time in here for those guys,” Davies recounts with a laugh. And then there’s the front yard of the lowrise building where Davies lives in Toronto’s Annex neighbourhood. Gone is the lawn, and in its place grows a tree nursery, constructed with permission—and assistance— from the landlord, who is clearly as accommodating as Davies’ roommate is. Made out of salvaged oak boards (which would otherwise have been chopped into wood chips, notes Davies), filled with a truckload of donated soil (“that’s when it got real!” he says), topped with hardware cloth to keep those crafty neighbourhood squirrels out, planted with 1,500 acorns, and taking up an area roughly 12 feet by 12 feet, the tree nurs-
Up Front: Information on the Ground
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ery stops passers-by in their tracks. Davies uses such opportunities to explain to all who are curious that his tree nursery is growing oaks to be given away to anyone who wants to share in this effort to restore the urban forest with locally grown, genetically diverse, provenance-verified, heritage oaks. Davies is working with schools, residents’ associations, and non-profit organizations such as Evergreen to install portable tree nurseries wherever there’s space—and willing partners to nurture the future forest. This won’t necessarily mean there will be free space in Davies’ refrigerator any time soon, as there is always next year’s crop of acorns to collect. TEXT BY LORRAINE JOHNSON, WHO REGULARLY WRITES ABOUT TREES AND URBAN FOREST ISSUES.
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Germinated oak seedlings growing in Eric Davies’ apartment
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Lorraine Johnson
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Davies’ tree nursery, in the front yard of the building where he lives in Toronto, is planted with 1,500 acorns.
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Lorraine Johnson
Up Front
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05 CRISIS
reforming refugee landscapes Living in formal and informal settlements, and poised between the territory they have fled and a stable residency, refugees encounter a range of environmental and social challenges that deeply and negatively affect their quality of life: from unsafe to unsanitary conditions, and more. Two recent projects related to this humanitarian crisis offer insights into the significant impacts that landscape architects can have on reforming refugee settlement conditions through collaborative landscape strategies.
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A rendering showing the greening potential of the Zaatari Refugee Camp, Jordan
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Robert Kruijt
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One of the greywater gardens, Zaatari Refugee Camp, Jordan
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Robert Kruijt
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Inadequate infrastructure at Zaatari led to problems such as greywater holes.
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Robert Kruijt
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A rendering of swales constructed to hold rainwater, and a buffer to stimulate plant growth
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Robert Kruijt
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located in Jordan, roughly 15 kilometres south of the Syrian border, which has hosted tens of thousands of Syrians who have escaped their war-torn country since 2012. Kruijt adapted the “Green Town Workshop” method, designed by Dr. I. Duchhart, a professor in landscape architecture at Wageningen University in the Netherlands, in order to, as Kruijt describes it in an email interview, “identify the problems, needs, and wishes of the people who are dependent on external aid.” However, Kruijt did not only identify issues and requirements. Instead, as he notes, “I aimed to empower the participants to find local, adaptable solutions that can be implemented by the refugees themselves. It is a transformative approach.” In March 2014, during Kruijt’s first visit to Zaatari, he gathered preliminary data, with the help of humanitarian organizations, in an effort to understand the current conditions, constraints, and opportunities for change in the camp. During his second visit, from April to June 2014, Kruijt gradually gained refugees’ trust by volunteering in aid operation and developmental and recreational programming while carrying out mindful discussions about his research with them. He was then in a position to facilitate participatory design workshops and interventions. The workshops allowed for a group of refugees to openly share their living experiences in the camp, issues they faced, and their connections to and interactions with the landscape— all of which led to the detailing of potential solutions to implement in the camp.
Robert Kruijt, a landscape architect from the Netherlands, focused his 2014 master’s thesis, Rightful Landscape, on conducting research and participant-driven design
A major problem in Zaatari was the lack of infrastructure to deal with sewage. Wastewater regularly overflowed into surface stormwater channels and pooled in the streets. To address this, Kruijt and residents of the camp constructed a system
workshops and interventions to improve conditions in the Zaatari Refugee Camp
of simple greywater gardens, placed in as close proximity to the refugee tents as pos-
Up Front
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07
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sible, channeling wastewater into the gardens. This intervention helped to filter the polluted water close to its source. Kruijt also presented additional schemes in his thesis, including artificial swales for rainwater catchment, and private gardens, orchards, and trees. In summarizing his work, Kruijt says, “I proposed design options for a more resilient environment. By making it visual, people started to believe in the project and supported the ideas. The ultimate victory was that the refugees started to physically change their environment on their own.�
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Field consultation was held with residents of Al Tyliani Informal Transitional Settlement about how to resolve the issue of greywater drainage from a tent kitchen and wash facilities. Septic drainage is handled by privy/ pit system.
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Larry Harder
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A playground is constructed at Al Tyliani, mostly using recycled materials.
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Larry Harder
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Design interventions at Al Tyliani
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Larry Harder
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One of the last installations at Al Tyliani was the erection of a signpost-tree, which started as a directional signpost on the path network but turned into a symbol of place.
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Djurdja Stojicic
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This modest but very practical contribution to the improvement of everyday living conditions at Al Tyliani is simply a raised, porous path, to provide dry feet and controlled drainage.
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Larry Harder
Landscape architect Maria Gabriella Trovato, an assistant professor in the Department of Landscape Design and Ecosystem Management at the American University of Beirut, headed the project E-scape Transitional Settlement, working with refugees in Al Tyliani, Bar Elias, in the Bekaa Valley of Lebanon, roughly 17 kilometres from the Syrian border. This 10
Up Front
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Al Tyliani is only one of hundreds of small and large informal settlements for people fleeing the conflict in Syria which have filled up the spaces between the towns and farms in the Bekaa Valley of Lebanon. Larry Harder
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This shelter in the Al Tyliani playground provides relief from the sun in the treeless camp environment.
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Larry Harder
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The “Central Square,” an opportunistic open space at the entrance to the camp, was reconfigured to provide a shade shelter, a small demonstration garden, and a play structure in the form of a modest “water park.”
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Larry Harder
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As a result of a small infrastructural change, this grandmother, with her grandchild, at Al Tyliani, can now sit outside with dry feet.
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Larry Harder
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informal settlement was created in 2011 by a local landowner who converted his agricultural fields into a concrete surface where the refugees’ tents were later constructed. In 2012, when the settlement “opened,” there were approximately 440 people hosted there, paying rent but not allowed to work in Lebanon. Trovato visited the informal settlement in May 2015, with 25 international academics and students, to conduct an eight-day workshop. In an email interview, Trovato states, “The first attempt of our research and practical experience on the ground was to define and formulate a definition of community that could fit to the particular situation we encountered to be able to design and implement public space projects to enrich the collective [experience]. We worked to establish connections and relationships among the individuals and the groups in the settlement.” From the outset, communication with refugees was imperative for planning and decision-making to recognize and address local matters. Site examination and refugee consultations eventually led to the design-build of three public spaces: a water garden, children’s playground, and an improved pedestrian connection on the site, which also improved drainage. As Larry Harder, a participant in the project and associate professor of landscape architecture at the University of Guelph, explains in an email interview, “Although residents were not initially involved in the design or construction, as work progressed, many residents volunteered to assist, and contributed in major ways to the final resolution.” Unfortunately, a couple of weeks after the researchers left, nearly all of the public spaces the group had built were looted and destroyed. Harder asks, “What was the impact [of the project] on the Syrian refugee
community? Just more hardship, exploitation, and despair.” Nevertheless, the project went on to receive global recognition. Harder sums up the whole effect as: “Good for landscape architecture. Not much legacy for the residents of Al Tyliani.” A shared challenge in both projects was the common frustration among refugees who first and foremost wanted to return to their home country of Syria. Trust and understanding had to be built between the researchers and refugees in order to then begin efforts to reshape their current situation. It was only after trust had been established that progress could occur. Trovato notes: “As a landscape architect interested in humanitarian design, I’m concerned with the need to enable equal access to landscape services whenever and wherever they are non-existent or scarce. Thus, I’m committed to working with vulnerable and disadvantaged communities, especially those affected by war, conflict, and natural disaster, helping them to re-create safe, sustainable, and dignified living conditions.” Though these two projects differ in some ways, they both demonstrate how collaboration through knowledge sharing, design, and on-site action can make positive changes to the community and the landscape. As Harder reflects on the project, he sums up a very personal impact the work had made: “The most special memory I have is the effusive thank you’s heaped on me by an old grandmother who, because of some pea gravel we had laid outside her tent, could now, for the first time ever since entering the camp, sit outside on a level space, on a plastic chair, and watch her children and grandchildren and neighbours—with dry feet.” TEXT BY ANDREW TAYLOR, A MASTER OF LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE STUDENT AT THE UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO AND A MEMBER OF THE GROUND EDITORIAL BOARD.
Up Front
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Bathurst Inlet, Nunavut
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Darren Keith, Kitikmeot Heritage Society
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Elders returned to the place where they grew up, and saw many changes to the landscape.
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Darren Keith, Kitikmeot Heritage Society
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The trip provided a hands-on opportunity for Elders to share their knowledge about Bathurst Inlet.
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Max Friesen
shoreline. The passage of time had brought a matured landscape but one that could not escape the impacts of climate change.
17 PLACE-BASED KNOWLEDGE
landscape and memory In the fall of 2017, Pamela Gross took four Inuit elders from the town of Cambridge Bay, in Nunavut, to Bathurst Inlet, a small Inuit community in southwestern Nunavut that had once been a Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC) outpost. HBC left the area in 1964, and, over time, several of the Inuit people also left due to the community’s inaccessibility to the rest of the North. The area is now accessible only by plane and, thus, many Elders have been unable to return to the place where they grew up. Pamela Gross, the executive director of the Kitikmeot Heritage Society in
Cambridge Bay, organized a trip by plane so that the Elders could finally have the opportunity to return to their homeland. “The Elders were crying as soon as they stepped off the plane,” Gross recalls. “They were so thankful to be there, and many were unsure if they would ever be able to return.” Looking at the physical landscape they had once known so well triggered many reactions. Gross describes the area as “a beautiful place to be. The beauty of the landscape must have been heaven for the Inuit who lived there. It gets warm during the summer, and there is shelter from the wind. It has hills and lush greenery.” The Elders acknowledged the changes in the landscape that had taken place since they had lived there. “The willows had grown taller and the shoreline came much closer to the community than they had remembered,” Gross recounts as she describes the Elders’ reactions to the changes at Bathurst Inlet. They were in awe of the transformation and, while they admired the growth of the vegetation, they lamented the encroachment of the
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The Kitikmeot Heritage Society in Cambridge Bay, founded in 1996 by community members, aims to enhance cultural resources for the Inuit communities of the North. With a library, museum, archive, and research centre, the organization takes on various projects that, as Gross explains, “aim to pass knowledge and culture from one generation to the next.” The trip to Bathurst Inlet, for example, which connected community Elders to their past, through the experience of landscape, can be used to teach a new generation of youth about Inuit culture. Plans for future trips to Bathurst Inlet include both Elders and youth from Cambridge Bay, and will involve digging into the landscape, as the youth participants will engage in archaeological study of Bathurst Inlet. “The youth will come out and work with us and gain hands-on knowledge as they dig into the past,” Gross says. ”It will be teaching participants about their culture through history”— and the rich landscape of Bathurst Inlet. MORE INFORMATION ABOUT THE KITIKMEOT HERITAGE SOCIETY CAN BE FOUND AT WWW.KITIKMEOTHERITAGE.CA/. TEXT BY LISA GREGORY, OALA, A LANDSCAPE ARCHITECT AT DILLON CONSULTING, AND A MEMBER OF THE ARTIST COLLECTIVE 1:1 COLLABORATIVE.
Consuming Landscapes
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Appreciation meets destruction in the age of Instagram
TEXT BY SHANNON BAKER, OALA
The landscape of the Cheltenham Badlands, near Caledon, seems unearthly, as if it belongs on the surface of another planet rather than our own. But it is, in fact, an exposed landscape created as a result of years of destructive agricultural practices that have left the land stripped of trees and the soil bare. The striking geologic formation has always attracted visitors. In the age of Instagram, however, the landscape’s photogenic character has meant a significant spike in popularity, exposing it to further erosion that threatened to wear away its iconic features. Deposited more than 450 million years ago, the Badlands get their deep red colouring and grey-green stripes from the iron-heavy Queenston shale that underlies much of the Niagara Escarpment. The clearing of the land in the early 1900s made way for croplands and pasture, and constant tilling gradually stripped away topsoil, leaving the site vulnerable to erosion. As the surficial soils washed away, the hills and hollows that characterize the Badlands emerged, creating the otherworldly landscape that exists today. The striking visual qualities of the Badlands make it one of southern Ontario’s most Instagrammable natural landscapes. Visitors
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The Cheltenham Badlands, near Caledon, is a provincially significant Area of Natural and Scientific Interest and one of the most recognizable and visited natural heritage landmarks in southern Ontario.
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Gary J. Wood
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The new, accessible boardwalk overlooking the Cheltenham Badlands allows visitors to experience the landscape without causing further erosion to the site.
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Ontario Heritage Trust
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The Badlands in 2006
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Ontario Heritage Trust
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The popularity of the Badlands on Instagram has increased the number of visitors.
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Aerial view of Cheltenham Badlands
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Google Earth Pro
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The Cheltenham Badlands
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Ian Muttoo
Consuming Landscapes
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flocked to the area to fill their feeds, snapping selfies against a Martian-like backdrop. On weekends, there were people climbing all over the iconic hummocks and gullies, a significant factor in the rate at which the Badlands were washing away, with 2.5cm disappearing from the hummocks each year, and some of that washing through the gullies and completely away from the site altogether. In the making of their online images, visitors were accelerating the erosive processes that were the generative force behind this anthropogenic landscape. It is a striking beauty not without irony. To slow this process, as well as address other factors such as public safety concerns associated with inadequate parking and site circulation, the Ontario Heritage Trust in partnership with Credit Valley Conservation and the Bruce Trail Conservancy temporarily closed the site in 2015 and began the work of developing a long-term vision. After years of planning and design, the site was eventually reopened in the fall of 2018. A formal parking lot was added to the site, and access is now provided along a wooden boardwalk. Visitors are no longer permitted to wander freely over the hills and hollows.
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The making and remaking of the Badlands speaks to the power that humans have in manufacturing the landscape. We are an incredible force of change. As scientists now herald the end of the Holocene epoch and the birth of the Anthropocene, they cite our role in changing landscapes as the most influential geologic force on earth today. And just as our activity has hastened environmental change on a global scale, our own lives are impacted by change at an exceedingly fast pace. Technological advances have changed our relationships with each other, and with nature. The ever-evolving social media landscape raises questions about both the natural and built environment; how we interact with and influence it. The rate at which we consume—consume landscapes, natural resources, images—has accelerated to a pace that is difficult to keep up with. Our attention spans are limited to the time it takes for a finger flick to refresh our Twitter feed, and our eyes to scan the latest posts.
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The seduction of landscapes with imageability such as the Badlands, along with farm fields of sunflowers or a park with a well-placed piece of public art, plays to our lust for likes. As we are driven to document our lives online, it can be said that we are no longer really experiencing them. We are not in the moment, connecting with the people and places around us; we are struggling to find the perfect filter for our posted images. We are immersed in our feeds, unwittingly beholden to the algorithms that curate them. This monumental shift in society asks challenging questions of designers of the built environment. Should landscape architects be changing the way we approach design in the age of social media? How do we treat sites such as the Badlands, a landscape that has its own page on Instagram? There are obvious responses—for example, to create public spaces that address the physical demands presented by the potentially overwhelming crowds that may descend upon a site. The more interesting design question may be to consider how we might more carefully choreograph the experiences of such landscapes. To draw people away from their phones, to look, and to listen, and to connect with their surroundings. To create the opportunity for people to appreciate the beauty of the natural world, and to marvel at its mysteries. That strengthened connection may inspire more people to protect the land rather than simply post photos of it. BIO/ SHANNON BAKER, OALA, IS A LANDSCAPE ARCHITECT AT WATERFRONT TORONTO AND A MEMBER OF THE GROUND EDITORIAL BOARD.
Round Table
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Our Round Table explores the use and consumption of materials as part of landscape practice, and expands the definition of landscape materials to consider the intangible
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In the village of Kuujjuaq, in Nunavik, a DIY up-cycling approach reduces landfill waste and energy consumption, and produces an engaging public structure, an outdoor sports pavilion.
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Vikram Bhatt/Minimum Cost Housing Group
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Performance stage and shelter with repurposed materials
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Vikram Bhatt/Minimum Cost Housing Group
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Repurposed materials were used to design and build an outdoor sports pavilion in the village of Kuujjuaq.
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Vikram Bhatt/Minimum Cost Housing Group
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Arctic Grayling, painted by Round Table participant Zoe Todd, whose academic work explores our relationships with fish and water and how these relate to environmental issues
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Zoe Todd
MODERATED BY KANWAL AFTAB AND MELISSA POULIN, OALA
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Round Table
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KANWAL AFTAB IS A DESIGNER AND WRITER BASED IN TORONTO. SHE HAS DEGREES IN ARCHITECTURE, LANDSCAPE, ECONOMICS, AND ART HISTORY. SHE CURRENTLY WORKS AS AN URBAN DESIGNER FOR SVN ARCHITECTS AND PLANNERS AND IS A MEMBER OF THE GROUND EDITORIAL BOARD. VIKRAM BHATT STUDIED ARCHITECTURE AT CEPT UNIVERSITY IN HIS NATIVE INDIA, AND COMPLETED GRADUATE STUDIES IN HOUSING AT THE MCGILL UNIVERSITY SCHOOL OF ARCHITECTURE IN MONTREAL. HE HAS BEEN TEACHING AT MCGILL SINCE 1975, HAS DIRECTED THE GRADUATE PROGRAM IN MINIMUMCOST HOUSING SINCE 1989, AND HAS HELD VISITING POSITIONS AT UNIVERSITIES IN FRANCE, GERMANY, INDIA, AND THE U.S. HIS TEACHING AND RESEARCH AGENDAS HAVE ADDRESSED SHELTER AND HUMAN SETTLEMENTS, HOUSING IN THE DEVELOPING WORLD, URBAN AGRICULTURE, AND HOUSING AND HABITAT PLANNING IN NORTHERN QUEBEC. IN 2014, HE RECEIVED THE MARGOLESE NATIONAL DESIGN FOR LIVING PRIZE. IN 2018, THE COLLEGE OF FELLOWS OF THE ROYAL ARCHITECTURAL INSTITUTE OF CANADA NAMED HIM FELLOW OF THE INSTITUTE. DR. ORIT HALPERN IS AN ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR IN THE DEPARTMENT OF SOCIOLOGY AND ANTHROPOLOGY AT CONCORDIA UNIVERSITY AND A STRATEGIC HIRE IN INTERACTIVE DESIGN AND THEORY. HER WORK BRIDGES THE HISTORIES OF SCIENCE, COMPUTING, AND CYBERNETICS WITH DESIGN. CURRENTLY, SHE IS WRITING THREE BOOKS. THE FIRST IS A HISTORY AND THEORY OF SMARTNESS AND MACHINE-LEARNING; THE SECOND IS A GENEALOGY OF RESILIENCE AND THE HISTORICAL TRANSFORMATIONS THAT HAVE OCCURRED IN THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN ECONOMY, ECOLOGY, AND COMPUTATION SINCE THE 1970S; AND THE THIRD IS AN ATLAS OF INTELLIGENCES. SHE IS DIRECTOR OF THE SPECULATIVE LIFE RESEARCH CLUSTER, A LABORATORY SITUATED AT THE INTERSECTION OF THE ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES, ARCHITECTURE AND DESIGN, AND COMPUTATIONAL MEDIA. DIANE MATICHUK, OALA, AAPQ, IS PRINCIPAL LANDSCAPE ARCHITECT AT CIVITAS GROUP, AN INTEGRATED ARCHITECTURE AND LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE PRACTICE BASED IN OTTAWA. DIANE IS ALSO A CAHP LANDSCAPE HERITAGE PROFESSIONAL. HER CAREER SPANS MORE THAN THIRTY YEARS AND BEGAN IN THE MUNICIPAL SECTOR, WHERE SHE DESIGNED COMMUNITY PARKS AND OPEN SPACE. MORE RECENTLY, AS A DESIGN CONSULTANT, SHE ADVOCATES FOR BOLD, COHESIVE SOLUTIONS IN EACH PROJECT, WHETHER IT IS TO RE-WORK EVOLVING LANDSCAPES OR BUILD NEW PUBLIC PLACES. IN 2017, DIANE RECEIVED THE OALA CARL BORGSTROM AWARD FOR SERVICE TO THE ENVIRONMENT. MELISSA POULIN, OALA, IS A TORONTO-BASED LANDSCAPE ARCHITECT AT WSP AND A MEMBER OF THE GROUND EDITORIAL BOARD. ZOE TODD IS A PROFESSOR OF ANTHROPOLOGY AND INDIGENOUS STUDIES AT CARLETON UNIVERSITY IN OTTAWA. ZOE RESEARCHES MÉTIS LEGAL TRADITIONS IN THE LAKE WINNIPEG WATERSHED AND ASKS QUESTIONS ABOUT THE WAYS IN WHICH WE NEED TO REORIENT OUR UNDERSTANDINGS OF OURSELVES, AND OUR RELATIONSHIPS WITH FISH AND WATER, IN ORDER TO SHIFT THE TRAJECTORY THAT CANADA IS CURRENTLY ON IN TERMS OF ITS DESTRUCTION OF THE ENVIRONMENT. ZOE IS ALSO A VISITING PROFESSOR IN THE PROGRAM IN THE HISTORY OF SCIENCE AND MEDICINE AT YALE, WHERE SHE IS A 2018-2019 YALE PRESIDENTIAL VISITING FELLOW.
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Kanwal Aftab (KA): Can landscape designers play an active role in mitigating negative impacts of the materials they “consume”? Diane Matichuk (DM): There are so many negative connotations to the word “consume.” It’s about taking, using, extracting... For centuries, we’ve been using natural materials such as water, air, stone, oil, plants, etc. to make our world habitable. As a landscape architect, my day-to-day work involves selecting materials such as concrete, wood, stone, and metal, so we’re bridging the natural world and the built world. We play a role—for better or for worse—in what’s happening to our natural environment. Orit Halpern (OH): I’m interested in trying to shift the conversation away from ideas about resources (as if the world were a resource for us to utilize) and more towards capacities, or organic function. That might seem very theoretical, but it actually changes how we think about the life cycle of materials. We need to think more aggressively about how we reuse or salvage materials, and about the entire life cycle of the material—from its production and extraction, to making it, and then using it. Consumption has a positive side to it—a metabolic side, as in “I need food.” And also, of course, a negative side, which is around exhaustion, dissipation, completion, extraction. Vikram Bhatt (VB): I would say that before we even touch materials, it’s very important to consider the land itself, the foundation on which any real environmental design takes place. Generally, we don’t address the land as a material resource, and yet it’s so valuable. Land, water, and air are important material resources; the way we engage with them affects the environment. Zoe Todd (ZT): I like the point that if we’re going to talk about materials, we need to
think about space. Metabolic processes come down to how things relate to one another in space and place and time. Capitalism and colonialism have reordered the way we understand the world; they’ve made it possible for us to take things out of the earth without necessarily considering what their afterlife will be or how that impacts our long-term relationships with non-human beings. In Western, Eurocapitalist systems, we use materials in a way that isn’t easily metabolized by the environment that the materials come from. VB: I started working on urban agriculture more than 20 years ago, and I identified pieces of land—real estate—that were leftover spaces, neglected areas, overlooked spaces. Nobody wanted them. Now we’re using those areas to grow food. Can we do that with material resources as well? Can we look at materials, including waste, and ask, “Are they real liabilities or do they offer opportunities? Can they potentially be converted into something positive?” OH: First, we have to transform our relationship to land—and in many ways, to property and value—in order to transform how we design. It is often dispossession that makes land valuable, which creates a lot of inequity in our urban space. Or think about the fact that cities are full of brownfields and toxic spaces. We’re dealing more and more with a planet that we’ve geoengineered and terraformed, and we’re forced to inhabit this toxicity. We have to think creatively and innovatively about these supposedly unused spaces. DM: One of the areas I work in is heritage conservation, and there are three levels to this. The first is preservation. Then restoration and rehabilitation. And I find that very useful to think about when I’m working on any project. When you get a team together to work on something new, I like to ground it in questions such as: What are we preserving? Is there an element that we’re restoring? Are we making something new by rehabilitating something that already exists?
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the right technologies? Are they the right materials? VB: This judicious engagement in heritage conservation is a very thoughtful idea, and I agree with you, Diane. It applies not only in conservation but even in new design. When Olmsted designed Mount Royal Park, in Montreal, the “City Fathers” reached out to him as people were clearcutting this very valuable asset. When he designed the park, he basically looked at the mountain. He did not change what was there. It was a master stroke of design because he understood the value of the existing natural asset. KA: Are there contemporary examples of how we can positively engage with the land that we are building on and deriving our materials from?
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OH: One example is a place like Rotterdam, where they’re allowing flooding. There’s a rethinking of disaster planning—not thinking of the city as something that has to be blocked off or quarantined from an external environment, but, rather, understanding these things as coexisting.
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Aggregate extraction
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Logging truck in Central Africa
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WRI’s Global Forest Watch
DM: In the construction process, there’s something called “the chain of custody,” in which each person passes their work on to the next stage and the next stage and so on. You can also think of that in terms of materials, and an ethical chain of custody. Where is the original material from? How The other principle that comes from heritage does it go through the production process? conservation is the idea of minimal intervention. How is it being used? I have an example It doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s a small from a project in which we had to source gesture; it can also be a grand gesture. But wood for an exterior application. We were the idea is that it’s no grander than it should looking for something that would be very be. A good starting point is to pull back and durable (it was on a national historic site). understand whether we’re adding enough or We studied different types of wood, and adding too much. the best material that met all of the criteria was actually Ekki, an African tropical wood. Another idea that comes from heritage is that It offered greater durability than the second when we’re building something new, our choice, Canadian Douglas fir. We had a methods should be contemporary at the same long discussion about it. Would it go through time as we’re being responsible to the past that chain of custody and meet sustainability and to context. Are we making the best use standards? In the end, the Canadian of the newest technologies? Are they government supported the Canadian
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Douglas fir. The concern was responsible sourcing of the tropical wood. So, this idea of social justice in materials has me thinking about an ethical chain of custody. KA: How do temporality and time affect the life cycle of our materials? The transportation of materials from far away has an environmental cost, but with rapid development, we need those materials faster and faster. Part of the reason that resources get depleted so fast is because of our expectation of rapid change. DM: We had a project where we had to source stone, and we needed high-quality, local stone. What we found was that there were limited numbers of quarries in our area from which to select the stone that we needed, because many had switched to crushing granular for roadways and construction. The owners of those quarries couldn’t just let their quarries sit there for the times when high-quality stone would be needed. There was speed and economy to exploit it for crusher runs.
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OH: Can we think of speed in beneficial terms? Because it would be nice to get people housing faster, if they needed it, right?
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Before and after images of a concrete plaza transformed through the planting of food, as part of the Edible Campus Garden project at McGill University Vikram Bhatt/Minimum Cost Housing Group Before and after images of vertical growing on a concrete wall, as part of the Edible Campus Garden project at McGill University Vikram Bhatt/Minimum Cost Housing Group
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VB: This is an important issue because urgency of housing for Indigenous people, in Canada, is the greatest. If we look at the Canadian North, what should we be building out of in Nunavut? The greater part of Nunavut is tundra, and 70 years ago nomadic communities moved through it; now, there are suburban subdivisions, a building form exported from the south. Every piece of building material, except some gravel, is shipped from the south. With poorquality buildings and overcrowded situations, people are getting sick. It is not only the distances and shipping and logistics of it, but also the urgency of these issues and extreme shortages that are crucial.
ZT: How do we address an urgent crisis, while also creating time so that communities can address challenges thoughtfully? Maybe we don’t have that choice, and we just have to do what we can with what we have now. DM: I’m an advocate for what I call noble materials: using woods and metals and stone and other natural products. Stay away from plastics, as much as possible. I think we’re at the cutting edge, now, of vegan-type products in which plants are used as a new chemical compound for building products, and I think it’ll be interesting to see where that goes. VB: In warmer climates, bamboo was very extensively explored, and it has been used very beautifully and ingeniously. We need to expand this idea of natural systems and using them to our benefit. It’s a positive direction. These natural materials have tremendous character and value, and they offer artistic opportunities. And yes, challenges. OH: I don’t really want to go back to nature. I’m actually very much about engaging, aggressively, with technology and the future of technology. The issue is: How do we make it more equitable and ethical, rather than nostalgic? I run a lab and I have students who are working with technical development, rather than just critiquing it. But they’re doing it in a mindful way that remembers the devastating history of things like the green revolution. I think it’s really important for us to actually engage in political, ethical, and economic battles about the future development of materials.
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A conversation with June Komisar and Joe Nasr, conducted by Eric Gordon, OALA
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ERIC GORDON, OALA, IS A GROUND EDITORIAL BOARD MEMBER AND PRINCIPAL AT OPTIMICITY, A TORONTOBASED LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE AND URBAN DESIGN PRACTICE THAT MAINTAINS A DIVERSE PROJECT PORTFOLIO REFLECTING AN EFFORT TO SOLVE URBAN AND LANDSCAPE PROBLEMS OF ALL SORTS. JUNE KOMISAR IS PROFESSOR AND AN ASSOCIATE CHAIR IN THE DEPARTMENT OF ARCHITECTURAL SCIENCE AT RYERSON UNIVERSITY, WHERE SHE TEACHES DESIGN, THEORY, AND HISTORY OF ARCHITECTURE COURSES. SHE HOLDS AN M.ARCH FROM YALE UNIVERSITY AND A DOCTORATE IN ARCHITECTURE, SPECIALIZING IN HISTORY AND THEORY, FROM THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN, FOCUSING ON 18TH-CENTURY BRAZILIAN ARCHITECTURE. FOR THE PAST DECADE, SHE HAS BEEN INTRODUCING URBAN AGRICULTURE ISSUES INTO THE ARCHITECTURAL CURRICULUM WITH COURSES SUCH AS “DESIGNING THE PRODUCTIVE CITY: ARCHITECTURE AND URBAN AGRICULTURE.” JOE NASR IS AN INDEPENDENT SCHOLAR, LECTURER, AND CONSULTANT BASED IN TORONTO, WITH A DOCTORATE IN URBAN AND REGIONAL PLANNING FROM THE UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA. HE HAS BEEN EXPLORING URBAN AGRICULTURE AND FOOD SECURITY ISSUES FOR MORE THAN 25 YEARS. JOE HAS TAUGHT AT A NUMBER OF UNIVERSITIES IN SEVERAL COUNTRIES AND RECEIVED SEVERAL POSTDOCTORAL FELLOWSHIPS; HE IS A LECTURER AND ASSOCIATE AT THE CENTRE FOR STUDIES IN FOOD SECURITY AT RYERSON UNIVERSITY. HE IS CO-AUTHOR OR CO-EDITOR OF FOUR BOOKS AND DOZENS OF ARTICLES, INCLUDING THE SEMINAL BOOK URBAN AGRICULTURE (PUBLISHED BY THE UNITED NATIONS DEVELOPMENT PROGRAMME), AND HE CO-EDITS THE SPRINGER URBAN AGRICULTURE BOOK SERIES.
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The May 2008 symposium “The Role of Food and Agriculture in the Design and Planning of Buildings and Cities,” held at Ryerson University in Toronto, is considered to be the first symposium to explore the connections between urban planning and design and urban agriculture. June Komisar/Joe Nasr The exhibition Carrot City June Komisar/Joe Nasr
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Joe Nasr and June Komisar have been driving forces behind a number of seminal urban agriculture-related events and initiatives in Ontario for more than a decade. In May of 2008, they co-organized, with Mark Gorgolewski, what is considered to be the first symposium to explore the connections between urban planning and design and urban agriculture, “The Role of Food and Agriculture in the Design and Planning of Buildings and Cities,” which was held at Ryerson University in Toronto. Building on the 2008 symposium, an exhibition, titled Carrot City, was conceived by students and faculty at Ryerson’s Department of Architectural Science, and was held in early 2009 at the Design Exchange in Toronto. Since then, Carrot City has expanded into a travelling exhibit that has been shown at a number of venues in North America, Europe, and Africa. A book by Joe Nasr, June Komisar, and Mark Gorgolewski, based on the exhibit, was published by Monacelli Press in September of 2011. The Carrot City initiative, now housed at the comprehensive website www.carrotcity.org, aims to disseminate ideas and knowledge about best practices in urban agriculture.
Eric Gordon (EG): Has there been a shift from the design of urban agriculture projects towards a more holistic food systems design at a city level? Do you envision design professionals in the built environment, such as landscape architects, engaging with urban agriculture and issues around it in the future? Joe Nasr (JN): Urban agriculture has inspired imaginative ways to produce food in the city, and this was the focus early on in the urban agriculture movement, and there’s still interest in this aspect, but it has also leveraged wider interest in the food system as a whole (including the relationship to food production near the city, not just in it)—from production to processing and distribution and marketing. The question is, how to design for all of that? A couple of years ago, June and I were asked to edit an issue of the journal Urban Design International, and, initially, we were asked to focus on urban design and urban
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agriculture. We suggested to the journal editors that the more interesting and more relevant approach would be to make it about urban design for food systems. It’s a much larger perspective on the issues. EG: Is the term “urban agriculture” generally perceived to be about food production rather than about food networks and connectivity? June Komisar (JK): That’s an interesting question because people are always saying, “Well, if you can’t feed a whole city with urban agriculture, then you’re not at the scale we need at the moment.” But there are a lot of other benefits to urban agriculture, and this is something that is increasingly being
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The main site of Ryerson Urban Farm is a quarter-acre rooftop farm located on the Andrew and Valerie Pringle Environmental Green Roof above the George Vari Engineering and Computing Centre at Ryerson University in Toronto. The farm is designed in the market garden tradition, with more than 50 crops and more than 100 cultivars, along with three rooftop bee hives. June Komisar/Joe Nasr
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understood: that urban agriculture is also for community building, and it helps teach people about where their food comes from, and, in general, skills building for children… There are a lot of benefits to urban agriculture besides simply growing food. JN: I’ve been working on urban agriculture issues for close to thirty years, and I coauthored a book on urban agriculture that the UN Development Programme published in the early 1990s (www.jacsmit.com/book. html). Back then, most people in general just didn’t understand what urban agriculture was, or they thought the term was something contradictory. Now, the term is used much more commonly, but there is still some confusion. It’s important to transition to a broader understanding of the many connectivities and many functions of urban agriculture beyond the narrow definition.
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Joe Nasr and June Komisar with the Carrot City exhibition on view in Parc de Bercy, Paris, 2012
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Carrot City exhibition
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The May 2008 symposium on design, urban planning, and urban agriculture was a groundbreaking educational event.
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EG: And now, of course, there are things like hydroponics and aquaponics, and largescale food production in warehouses and indoor spaces.
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JN: Part of the expansion that has happened includes the emergence of many different 07
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June Komisar/Joe Nasr
June Komisar/Joe Nasr
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forms of agriculture. And parallel to this is much greater demand for community gardens and school gardens, and so on. JK: One thing I’ve started to see as a trend is that supermarkets are growing their own greens, on the rooftop, putting up greenhouses…. A number of supermarkets are experimenting with this. JN: It’s an interesting trend because it’s not just about access to a reliable supply of greens for the supermarket, it’s also related to stormwater management. The rooftop urban agriculture project Brooklyn Grange, in New York City, was able to expand their productive green roof in part with funding from the State related to reduced stormwater runoff. This relates to larger systems thinking and the multi-functional dimensions of urban agriculture. These are all very much design issues, technical issues. If you don’t do it right, the project can fail and cause problems. So, there’s a need for experienced professionals to know how to deal with this.
When we first exhibited Carrot City, in Toronto, more than half of the content consisted of conceptual ideas—either projects planned and in the works or just purely conceptual ideas. More recently, the second version in Toronto consisted entirely of real-life, on-the-ground Canadian projects. But there’s an irony related to the fast growth and expansion of urban agriculture. As these projects actually start to happen, they’re hitting the reality of institutional challenges and regulatory challenges and financial challenges and so on. EG: Do you see political-level changes happening, or policy-level changes being adopted? JK: I’m seeing that some bylaws are changing, to help facilitate urban agriculture. It seems like a lot of municipalities are embracing it. JN: But, at the same time, urban agriculture has not been embedded in the practices of local planners in terms of reviewing develop-
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Food grown at Ryerson University is sold at a farmers’ market on campus.
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One of the many edible gardens on the campus of Ryerson University
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June Komisar/Joe Nasr
June Komisar/Joe Nasr Design for a food-producing garden at Ryerson University Maya Janikowski, Jonathan Pascaris, Nicholas Potovszky
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I think they are beginning to see it as a tremendous asset to the university. So, embracing this sort of thing just takes a while. JN: An example of a corporation pushing for change is with the Regent Park development in Toronto and the role of the Daniels Corporation in terms of embedding urban agriculture and urban food projects in that neighbourhood. It’s coming not just from the established local non-profits but also from the Daniels Corporation, which is helping to push through a change of attitude at the City level. EG: The work of landscape architects has many overlaps with urban agriculture. JK: I’d like to see landscape architects get more involved with rooftop garden design, helping to make them productive but also like urban oases. EG: I’ve witnessed a bit of an uptick in that field, but I don’t know how many green roof projects go the route of an architect or engineer and bypass the landscape architect altogether. 11 11/
The May 2008 symposium on food and urban design and planning included tours of projects that provided on-the-ground inspiration about the transformative power of growing food as a force for social change.
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Carrot City exhibition
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ment proposals, nor has the embracing of urban agriculture yet led to changes to specific regulations, whether in terms of zoning or building code, and so on. There are still many obstacles.
JN: In general, planning professionals have been the initial leaders of urban agriculture policy, but other design professionals have the opportunity to step forward and carve out a lot of work in these projects.
June Komisar/Joe Nasr
Some cities have explicit urban agriculture zoning, some have tax incentives for urban agriculture, and that’s good news. The not-so-good news is that these measures haven’t always been effective, or they’ve raised other issues. JK: Institutions and corporations are starting to embrace urban agriculture. For example, Ryerson University has an urban farm on one of its building’s rooftops (www.ryerson.ca/ university-business-services/urban-farm/), and it took the university quite a while to understand the importance of it. They supported it financially and were very proud of it as part of their sustainability initiative, but their recent support has increased tremendously.
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JK: One thing that’s very important is to design for flexibility. Be prepared for things to evolve—often in unexpected ways. There’s also a real lesson in cooperation in the example I mentioned earlier, the productive rooftop at Ryerson University. At first, the commitment from the university was small, but enthusiastic. Now, on a new building they have a purpose-built urban agriculture space with a greenhouse and composting area and water collection and perimeter barriers that enable people to visit the garden without any safety issues. It’s really interesting to see the increasing level of commitment that an institution can have. There was a large group of people, from many different departments and disciplines, meeting over several months to make this space optimal for teaching and learning and growing, which required a lot of cooperation. JN: Another example of the need and complexity of cooperation is a project we’re involved with at Allan Gardens in Toronto. For a number of years, we’ve been working, slowly, with a few groups to try to bring the community growing of edible and medicinal plants into the park. It started with
conversations with the parks department, and we managed to start a little garden that we called Edible Allan Gardens (www. facebook.com/edibleallangardens/). It took a long time to build trust and develop relationships. But there are now plans for transformation into something much larger and more ambitious as part of a larger re-visioning and transformation of Allan Gardens. So, what started out as a tiny initiative will become one of the key transformations in the bigger project. JK: There’s a parallel with something I’ve noticed with my architecture students. They are now, as a matter of course, always incorporating urban agriculture into their design projects—for example, if they’re doing housing or a school. The urban agriculture component isn’t necessarily the focus. It’s just considered part of the sustainability agenda for the building. It’s just accepted as part of the sustainability strategy. And that is progress.
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The Edible Allan Gardens project demonstrates how food growing can be incorporated into public parks. More than a dozen diverse local groups are involved in this project in a well-loved, historic Toronto park.
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Plan for Edible Allan Gardens
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Edible Allan Gardens design team, led by Ashley Adams
Food Forests
Catherine Bukowski in conversation with Shannon Baker, OALA
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SHANNON BAKER, OALA, IS A LANDSCAPE ARCHITECT AT WATERFRONT TORONTO AND A MEMBER OF THE GROUND EDITORIAL BOARD. CATHERINE BUKOWSKI IS A PHD CANDIDATE AT VIRGINIA TECH IN THE UNITED STATES. HER DISSERTATION RESEARCH IS ON THE SOCIAL ASPECTS OF COMMUNITY FOOD FORESTS, AND FROM 2014 TO 2016, SHE TRAVELED ACROSS THE U.S. VISITING MORE THAN 20 COMMUNITY FOOD FORESTS TO INTERVIEW THEIR LEADERS, HOLD FOCUS GROUPS, AND ANALYZE SITE DESIGN AND STRUCTURE. HER BOOK THE COMMUNITY FOOD FOREST HANDBOOK: HOW TO PLAN, ORGANIZE, AND NURTURE EDIBLE GATHERING PLACES WAS PUBLISHED IN 2018 BY CHELSEA GREEN PUBLISHING.
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Shannon Baker (SB): What is a food forest? Catherine Bukowski (CB): Generally speaking, a food forest is a space where you’re trying to maximize the growing area by planting multiple layers of vegetation, and arranging those plants so that they have a relationship with each other similar to what you would find in a forest—for example, maximizing the availability of resources and light, mixing nitrogen-fixing species with plants that might accumulate other nutrients, and facilitating growing conditions, competition, and all the normal ecological processes you’d find in a forest. It’s about mimicking a forest ecosystem structurally as well as with the relationships between plants and other components. A community food forest takes that structure and uses it in a setting where you have a social component in which people are coming together and collaboratively maintaining, designing, growing, and harvesting from that space. SB: Do the plant communities mimic what you would find in the wild, or are you using an ecological model to create a community that’s designed and not necessarily exactly reflective of what you might find in nature?
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CB: It’s definitely a designed community, using the template of what works in a forest ecosystem. It involves designing with plants that might have more direct benefits to humans than would a group of plants you might find in a forest. Using the example of a nitrogen-fixing species: even if it doesn’t necessarily produce something for humans, it might reduce the need for fertilizer, which will reduce the time, energy, and inputs that people need to put into the space.
for having the same plot the next year, in which case you’re probably going to focus on planting annual plants.
SB: In your book, you talk about systemsthinking as an approach to food forest design, and also about the role of food forests in spurring social change. How are food forests important or relevant in the context of social change?
A food forest can serve a public good similar to the way a public library does, in the sense that through providing an accessible place for exchange, people’s lives can be enhanced, but instead of books it’s through plants. People are encouraged not just to harvest the food, but to collect some seeds and even make some cuttings so they can do their own vegetative propagation in order to plant species on their own property at home.
CB: Getting people to think about how they can become involved in their urban landscape is in itself a force for change. Going through the process of designing a collaborative space together means that you’re designing a kind of commons—a public area where people can harvest food. It’s something that is not typical in our society any more. And that, right there, is a form of social change. It’s the idea for a culture of sharing that has been lost from a lot of our urban spaces. Food forests engage the question: How can the urban landscape be used to meet people’s needs? Public Works Departments or other public entities normally take care of public space, but often public space is not being utilized to its fullest potential. To look at different spaces in our community that are underutilized, and to ask how, as a society, we can better utilize them to meet our own needs, and then collaborate to make that happen, that is a social change mindset. 01-02/
The design team for the Beacon Food Forest in Seattle included professional designers working with the community.
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Lorraine Johnson
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SB: What are some of the differences between a more traditional community garden and a food forest? CB: Both types of spaces bring people together around food and get people thinking about their local food system. But the traditional model of a community garden is that people have individual allotment plots. There may not be security
With a food forest, everybody’s sharing in designing and growing within the same space. This opens things up to a wider variety of plants: perennials along with annuals. People become a little more attuned to what happens over time when you maintain the space.
SB: It sounds as if a food forest is a more permanent use of the landscape than a community garden. Some people might see a community garden as a bit more ephemeral or more easily relocated or moved to a different site. Does that present any challenges in terms of establishing a food forest? CB: Yes, for sure. With that permanent mindset, finding the right location is definitely key in securing public permission, if it’s on public land, or private permission. And that’s another area where people creating food forests are also fighting for social change, because, typically, people start to learn about the democratic processes within their community, and how to work with local agencies, and what are some of the roadblocks to securing space, or are there regulations against planting fruit trees in a public space, and why is that? And that tends to spur a lot of change within the community itself, along with activism and getting involved politically. If it’s a public space in which you’re trying to recreate a forest-type ecosystem, then you’re essentially creating a small park, rather than just gardening, and so aesthetics are involved.
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SB: What is the role of design in establishing a food forest? Is there a tension between the aesthetics of it as pure design versus an ecological restoration approach, which has different functional and aesthetic outcomes? CB: Successful food forests I’ve seen do not just focus on the ecological restoration aspect of the design. It’s a huge component, of course, but they also focus on the aesthetics of design for inviting the community in to use that space—for example, making sure that there are pathways for people to walk through that are clearly visible and have borders, as a way to invite people to explore the space, or at least to stroll through it so that it’s a restorative space. Or there might be a pavilion or a place where people can gather. Successful food forests focus on more than growing food and instead include other design elements—particularly art and cultural pieces within the gardens that are somehow connected either to local activism or have an ecological message to them. It could be something like inviting a local artist in to design a gate into the food forest with different insect species to remind people of the importance of pollinators while making the gate less of a barrier and more of an aesthetic component. SB: What do you see as opportunities for landscape architects to be involved in the establishment and design of food forests?
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CB: I think landscape architects have a lot to gain from working with food forests, because it does require an ecological design, which can be a learning opportunity, not simply an aesthetic approach. And, of course, landscape architects have a lot to offer in terms of public charrettes and getting feedback from the community, and also in terms of mapping out the entire neighbourhood in order to figure out the best location for the food forest. So yes, there are a lot of things landscape architects can contribute. But when I’ve talked to some landscape architects, and they start to understand how to design a food forest by thinking through all the different ecological elements needing functional relationships in designing a plant community, more than one has said to me that they’ve learned a lot about incorporating a systems-based approach into the planting design, which may have been lacking from a traditional landscape architecture education program. SB: What are some examples of food forests that were designed by landscape architects and that are particularly successful? CB: One of the chapters in my book is about working with professional allies, and it focuses on the role of landscape architects. I’ve included some of the drawings that a landscape architect did for a food forest in Roanoke, Virginia. Landscape architects were also integral in the design process for the Beacon Food Forest in Seattle.
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The Beacon Food Forest is a community and educational hub.
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Lorraine Johnson
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The Carolinian Food Forest is a 1-acre experimental food forest planted on public parkland in London.
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Lorraine Johnson
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Harvest bags are available that encourage everyone to harvest food at the Beacon Food Forest in Seattle.
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Lorraine Johnson
Food Forests
And there’s a project going on in Atlanta, Georgia, a fairly large food forest on public property that a landscape architect is involved with. The landscape architect had studied food forests as part of her graduate work, and then went on to work with the one being designed in Atlanta. SB: Do food forests tend to be generally welcome in a community, or do they come with some challenges in terms of their establishment?
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THE FOLLOWING LIST OF FOOD FOREST PROJECTS IN ONTARIO IS MEANT TO PROVIDE LEADS FOR FURTHER INVESTIGATION. SOME OF THE FOOD FORESTS MENTIONED BELOW ARE IN THE PLANNING/DISCUSSION STAGE, AND SOME HAVE CEASED OPERATIONS, BUT ALL WILL LEAD YOU TO FURTHER RESOURCES. Guelph: Guelph Community Food Forest Kingston:* Oak Street Garden Food Forest Kitchener: Forest Heights Food Forest (see also Grand River Food Forests) London: Carolinian Food Forest; Gibbons Park Montessori School Food Forest; London Food Bank Food Forest; West Lion’s Park Food Forest; Wood Street Park Food Forest Ottawa: Just Food Community Food Forests; Nanabush Food Forests; Riverside Food Forest Perth: Last Duel Food Forest Peterborough: GreenUp Ecology Park Food Forest Sudbury: Sudbury Shared Harvest Food Forest Toronto: Black Creek Community Farm Food Forest; Dunn Garden Food Forest *THE CITY OF KINGSTON HAS A COMMUNITY ORCHARD AND EDIBLE FOREST POLICY. COMPILED BY LORRAINE JOHNSON
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CB: People tend to be worried about liability and maintenance, because these are spaces that will require long-term maintenance. And there are occasional concerns about how homeless or transient populations may use the space, or that they’ll be attracted to it because there is free food. If the space isn’t created with public use in mind, there can be conflicts later on in terms of questions such as, was it designed with enough lighting for people to feel safe walking through it in the evening? Is there enough visual openness within it? These are the types of elements that landscape architects can help with, from the onset. SB: Are there certain design elements that contribute to the magic of a food forest? CB: Having a community gathering space is huge. It can be as simple as a picnic table, with protection from wind or really hot conditions. It’s good to have a place where people can sit down or rest. And it’s important to include space for community celebration, such as a seasonal festival or potluck that incorporates some of the harvest from the site, so people become connected to the space. Water is an important element, as well. Demonstrating different ways to save or minimize the amount of water, particularly in drought-prone areas, can be a really important educational component of a food forest project—and there can be financial support for that from local agencies. SB: Are there food forests in places other than the U.S.? CB: Yes, there are some in Canada. A lot of places in Europe are picking up on it. Australia and New Zealand are very
interested in the concept. And there’s research going on, in Italy and elsewhere, on food forests in public spaces, food forests on school property and how that might foster educational experiences outside of the normal curriculum for kids. So, it’s a topic area academically that’s really picking up, and people are trying to research the benefits. I have a website that maps out food forests I’m aware of, and there are some on there from Vancouver and Toronto. [See www. communityfoodforests.com.] SB: I have become exposed to food forests through Indigenous knowledge keepers and an approach that connects nature with food production and harvesting. I’m also thinking of Three Sisters Gardens and the growing of squash, corn, and beans together, which is like a mini-food forest because of the symbiotic relationship between those three plants and the way they are grown. CB: Yes, there are definitely these sorts of connections. I’d like to emphasize that food forests are not necessarily going to fix food insecurity problems on their own, but they have huge potential for educating people in so many different ways—whether that is about food in general, eco-literacy, design, or how to become involved with your local landscape and become an active and engaged citizen. Depending on what is built into the design, food forests have a huge capacity for public education. Signage is an example. When I first started visiting food forests, signage was lacking in most spaces, but that is changing. Without signage, people walk by and don’t really understand what they’re looking at. They don’t understand that the food is free or that they can become involved. Signage can foster some of the deeper and more important conversations about how the space serves community, and get people thinking about how they can become involved in other places within the community to bring about change. People come together around food. It’s an important way to cross boundaries.
Entangled Landscapes
The effects of invasive species on mycorrhizal fungi and soil health BIOS/
RICHARD DICKINSON IS A PH.D CANDIDATE AT THE UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO, PUBLISHED AUTHOR, AND INSTRUCTOR AT TRENT UNIVERSITY. PHAEDRA MAICANTIS, A GROUND EDITORIAL BOARD MEMBER, IS AN MLA GRADUATE FROM THE UNIVERSITY OF GUELPH WITH A BACHELOR IN ENVIRONMENTAL STUDIES THAT FOCUSED ON PLANNING AND ECOLOGY. SHE CURRENTLY WORKS AT THE GREENBELT FOUNDATION CONDUCTING RESEARCH, MANAGING PROJECTS, AND COORDINATING THE GRANTS DEPARTMENT.
Phaedra Maicantis (PM): Could you give a synopsis of your research? Richard Dickinson (RD): I’m examining the effects of invasive plants, primarily dog strangling vine (DSV), on the mycorrhizal fungi in the soil, and, in turn, what effect that has on native vegetation. Nobody has really looked at this in terms of the native plants growing in the immediate area around DSV and compared it to native plants in a similar habitat where DSV is not found. PM: In a recent presentation [at the Ravine Symposium, Toronto Botanical Garden, November 2018], you talked about how non-native species such as DSV alter soil properties, and how that can result in potential failure of restoration efforts. RD: DSV connects to the common mycorrhizal network (where other plants are connected, too) and produces allelopathic chemicals that are transported throughout the mycorrhizal community. Some of these chemicals are detrimental to native plants, so DSV is attacking plants through their own nutrient uptake system. In addition, we’ve found that not only is DSV changing the
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mycorrhizal community, it’s also changing the nutrient availability to native plants and the pH of the soil. Once established, DSV starts to take over the ecosystem. It’s managing the ecosystem so it can grow farther. PM: Is it possible to reverse that? RD: Soil reclamation is paramount. If you’re planting into soil that has previously been inhabited by invasive plants such as dog strangling vine, phragmites, buckthorn, or garlic mustard, the allelochemicals these invasives produce will still be in the soil. The micro-flora in the soil are unfamiliar with those chemicals, and so the breakdown is really slow and they remain in the soil for a long time (certainly much longer than any of the native plants that release their allelochemicals, which are broken down readily because they’ve evolved with the microflora in that soil). PM: Some people—including many landscape architects—argue that we should accept non-native species as part of the ecosystem now. What is your take on that?
Entangled Landscapes
RD: The training of landscape architects needs to include a lot more of a focus on soil and on the mycorrhizal components of soil. Five percent of soil is organic matter, and there’s a huge number of mycorrhizal species within that five percent, and the molecular technology for identifying mycorrhizae in soil has improved dramatically. There are some good, recent scientific papers about inoculating disturbed sites with soil from a pristine site. PM: What other applications do you see your research having, beyond restoration projects?
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RD: In the urbanized parts of southern Ontario, reversing the spread of non-native, invasive plants is a daunting task. But in other parts of the province, such as central Ontario where invasive species are just starting to spread, I think it’s very important to be proactive and manage those sites so the invasives don’t spread farther. In urban areas, such as Toronto, I think you would need to focus on the tree canopy and on getting rid of the larger invasive trees such as Norway maple, and then focus on the ground vegetation. There are native plants that can stand up to invasive plants, but over time, they become overwhelmed, so if you can slow that down in conjunction with soil remediation, I think it’s possible to control the spread of invasives. But at the scope of a city such as Toronto, that’s a massive project. One thing that municipalities can do, though, is public education. And if you can educate the public, funding will come when you have enough people becoming part of a movement to do something about the problem with invasive species. PM: What do you think landscape architects can do in terms of moving forward on these issues?
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RD: I’m working on a project with garlic mustard, and looking at how it seems to reach a certain point in its invasion, and then it drops back a bit, so I’m going to be looking at the mycorrhizal content of the soil and see if there’s any difference there. All invasives can’t be painted with the same brush, but the more invasive ones are definitely using fungal pathogens in their spread. I’m pretty sure that phragmites and garlic mustard are going to be quite similar in that, too. PM: Are there any plant species that can overcome DSV, in conjunction with soil restoration efforts? RD: The goldenrods are pretty tough. Ironically, they’re classified as invasive in Europe and in China; so, goldenrods are probably doing the same thing to the native plants of Europe and China as what DSV is doing here, because goldenrod definitely has allelopathic chemicals. Another tough native is black-eyed Susan (Rudbeckia hirta). If you look through the urbanized areas of southern Ontario and you see both DSV and some native plants, those are the natives that are a little more resilient. There may be other native plants that could grow in soil that’s been reinoculated with some of the native mycorrhizal components. PM: What are the barriers, then, stopping people from just planting goldenrod and black-eyed Susans together to deal with the dog strangling vine issue?
RD: Once you get rid of the DSV, the seed bank lasts for three years, so you’re going to have to deal with DSV coming back. And I wonder if people don’t plant goldenrod because it’s just everywhere. They tend to plant plants that look nice, I guess. But goldenrod is native and we all know how it spreads, so I think it would be a prime candidate for regeneration projects. If you plant goldenrod and other resistant or resilient-type native plants, in time that soil is going to be remodified back to a natural soil, and then you can plant Virginia mountain mint and Penstemon hirsutus and other showy plants. PM: In terms of the landscape architecture profession, let’s say we’re given a site: What should be our first course of action? Do we call in an ecologist to examine the soil for us? RD: Yes, go in and do a biophysical inventory and see what plants are there, native and non-native. And then maybe look at the mycorrhizal fungi community and see how damaged it is. Unfortunately, though, it’s not like CSI where you put a little sample in one end of the machine and it comes out the other with an answer. It’s quite laborious and expensive, but it does give you a good idea. For years, we’ve been so attuned to doing an inventory of a site or an ecological assessment, but we just look at everything that’s above ground. We don’t really look at the other part, which is soil. PM: Many landscape architects don’t have the ecology background to do that, and even if they did, not many of them will have the scientific expertise to do it themselves. RD: That’s where we get into partnering projects and research with colleges and universities, because they’ve got that expertise.
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Dog strangling vine affects the mycorrhizal fungi in the soil.
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Leslie J. Mehrhoff
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Goldenrod (Solidago sp.)
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Liz West
Research Corner
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01 TEXT AND PHOTOGRAPHS BY ELISE HUNCHUCK, MLA
“The orchards were blossoming, young grass sparkling joyfully in the sun. Birds were singing. Such a profoundly familiar world. My first thought was: everything here is as it should be and carrying on as usual. Here was the same earth, the same water and trees. And their shapes, colours and scents were eternal. But on the first day, I was warned: don’t pick the flowers, don’t sit on the ground, don’t drink the water from the spring.” –Svetlana Alexievech, on her first journey into the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone1
There are 25 rules listed in the Instructions Letter for Visitors of the Exclusion Zone and the Zone of Absolute (Compulsory) Resettlement. We are told that every foreign and Ukrainian national must read this document and sign it upon entry to the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone. The first rule instructs us to “maximally protect body, head, hands and feet” while “strictly comply[ing] with all instructions from the envoy officer”; rules number four and five on the “totally prohibited list” tell us not to consume liquor or food in the open air.
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On April 26, 1986, Reactor No. 4 of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant experienced a series of explosions, releasing 50 million curies of radioactivity into the atmosphere. In just over seven days, radiation would be dispersed around the globe; background radiation levels rose on April 29 in Austria, Germany, Poland, and Romania; a day later, in Italy and Switzerland; by May 2, in Belgium, Great Britain, France, Greece, and the Netherlands; and, by May 3, in Israel, Kuwait, and Turkey. Other materials ejected into the air were detected in Canada, China, India, Japan, and the U.S. by May 6.2 In the aftermath of the disaster, the Soviet government put in place a 30-kilometreradius exclusion zone around the plant as the designated area for evacuation and military control. Embedded within that were three subzones: the area immediately adjacent to Reactor No. 4; a 10-kilometreradius exclusion zone that would come to be known as the Zone of Absolute (Obligatory) Resettlement; and a further 20-kilometre zone extending beyond that, the Exclusion Zone. This changed in 1991 when the newly independent Ukraine passed a law entitled “On the Legal Status of the Territory Exposed to the Radioactive Contamination resulting from the Chernobyl accident” that, based on the continuing monitoring of radionuclides in soil, updated and expanded the borders of the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone to cover a total of 2,600 square kilometres of contaminated land.3 In the early hours of June 15, 2018, a group of researchers–nine of us in total–gathered at the edge of Maidan Nezalezhnosti (Independence Square) in Kyiv to travel north on a three-day incursion into the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone. During the trip, we went from Chernobyl to Chernobyl-2, from the Chernobyl Power Plant to Pripyat to the edge of the Red Forest. We entered abandoned villages, witnesses to the disappearance of schools and churches and post offices into growing forests. The temperatures were in the high 20ºs C and low 30ºs, and the heat, in the sun, could be unforgiving, as we were instructed to dress fully covered, from head to toe. The shade of the forest presented other concerns: swarms of mosquitos would drive us back out into the sun, and the thick
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Maria tells stories about her life before, during, and after the evacuation, while her chicken feeds nearby, June 2018.
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Elise Hunchuck
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Preparing the homemade zakuska (snacks): bread, pickles, salo (cured white pork fat), and vodka to wash it down
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Elise Hunchuck
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Research Corner
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Across the road from the village cemetery is this full and meticulously tended farming plot.
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Elise Hunchuck
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Our group sits with Maria in the open air of Kupuvate, a village inside the 30-kilometre Exclusion Zone.
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Elise Hunchuck
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Maria returns back to her daily routine.
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Elise Hunchuck
underbrush was relentless. Walking anything resembling a straight line was impossible. We met Simon, the YouTube-famous red fox, up close, and saw an exceptionally large Eurasian wolf, from afar. At night, we would leave the zone for Ecopolis, the “radioactivescientist-meets-Twin-Peaks” compound for researchers (in one of the participant’s, Lindsey Freeman’s, perfect description of the place) where we washed off the day, shared stories, and tried to remember (or forget) things we had seen or felt. If the initial concerns following the explosion were direct inhalation, external radiation, and deposition of radioactive materials onto skin or clothing, it soon became clear that, after the initial clean-up efforts, the most widespread and dangerous contamination came from the deposition of radionuclides on water bodies, plants and crops, and topsoil. In water bodies, the Caesium-137 and Strontium-90 released by the core could contaminate sand, sediment, aquatic plants, and animals, easily moving up the food chain and into drinking water. Contaminants in topsoil and subsoil could be absorbed through plant roots and fungi in the forest floor. Once consumed or absorbed by animals–including humans, as mushrooms are a plentiful food staple in Ukraine–caesium spreads throughout the muscles and can be metabolized by the body. In cases of prolonged exposure, it can cause cancer.4 “I was born during Stalin’s enforced famine. Radiation doesn’t scare me. Starvation does.” —Hanna Zavorotnya5 The Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant was built in Polissia, a natural and historic region that straddles the border between Ukraine and
Research Corner
Belarus, stretching from Poland in the west to Russia in the east. One of the largest forested wetland areas on the Eurasian continent, it is now home to the Exclusion Zone and its Belarusian counterpart, the Polesie State Radioecological Reserve. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Polissia saw its human population grow and its wetlands drained to expose the organic peat soils just below the surface for farming. However, the extensive draining and farming soon depleted the soil, making it one of the least fertile areas in Ukraine. The nutrient-poor soils of Polissia had so little natural iodine that its population suffered from endemic goiter. This would later be critical, as in the immediate aftermath of a radiological emergency, potassium iodide pills must be consumed to protect the thyroid gland from radioactive material released into the air. However, in the hours following the accident at Reactor No. 4, only the people of Pripyat were given iodine pills; it took days and weeks to get to those who lived in nearby villages. Today, some estimates say that more than 90 percent of the radionuclides that remain in the zone are no longer on the surface of the mostly wood buildings or flora in the form of dust, but that they are in the zone, hiding in the soil, part of the hydrogeology, and embedded in the food chain itself. On our last day in the zone, we met Maria Ilchenko, one of the so-called samosely, the self-settlers who returned to their homes after the spring of 1986. Greeting us at her home in the Polissia region at the edge of what is still known as the village of Kupuvate, Maria gestured for us to help her set up a seating area under two remarkable elm trees. Benches and stools were quickly occupied as we sat around the table helping to plate the zakuska (snacks) that Maria brought out for us, including homemade pickles, vodka, and salo, a Ukrainian delicacy consisting of cured, white pork fat, served with bread that we had been asked to bring from outside the zone. “This is how we talk in Ukraine,” Maria told us, gesturing to the food and the vodka, and she began to tell us about those early, confusing days just after the disaster, and the years since.
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She told us about the days after the meltdown, when 116,000 people were told to gather a few days’ worth of personal effects and their identification papers. Evacuated from the zone in a convoy of buses and settled elsewhere, people were scattered throughout the larger cities of Ukraine. The first to defy the forced evacuation were families from Cheremoshna and Nivetske villages who returned to the zone on June 21, 1986. Approximately 1,200 people would be allowed to settle back in the zone, Maria and Ivan Ilchenko among them, but today fewer than 200 remain. (On the evening of the accident, there were 324 inhabitants in Maria’s village; when I visited in 2018, there were fewer than nine.) Lina Kostensko, the dissident Ukrainian writer and poet, has suggested calling those who have returned to live in the zone povertantsi (returners) instead of samosely: “Don’t call them samosely. It is offensive, because it is their motherland. They grew up here and continue to live in their houses after the accident, though forgotten by the state and God.”6 We sat for a few hours with Maria, eating and drinking in the sun. Eventually, and reluctantly, we had to leave Maria; we were scheduled to catch the worker’s train from the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant to Slavutych, the city built in 1986 to house evacuated plant workers and their families. Our time in the zone was up. There is no consensus in the scientific community as to why it may be the case, but the life expectancy of those who have chosen to live in the zone far outpaces those who never returned. The survival of Maria, Hanna, and others like them suggests that despite an array of circumstances that should prove otherwise, there appears to be a palliative, though perhaps unprovable, power to being home. BIO/
ELISE HUNCHUCK IS A BERLIN-BASED INDEPENDENT RESEARCHER, DESIGNER, AND EDITOR WITH DEGREES IN LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE AND PHILOSOPHY. HER RESEARCH DEVELOPS CARTOGRAPHIC, PHOTOGRAPHIC, AND TEXT-BASED PRACTICES TO EXPLORE LANDSCAPES AND COMMUNICATE THE AGENCY OF DISASTER THROUGH THE CONTINUAL CONFIGURING AND RECONFIGURING OF INFRASTRUCTURES OF RISK. SHE HAS TAUGHT AT THE UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO, IS A MEMBER OF THE EDITORIAL BOARD OF SCAPEGOAT JOURNAL: ARCHITECTURE / LANDSCAPE / POLITICAL ECONOMY, AND IS ONE OF THE 2019 AZRIELI VISITING CRITICS AT CARLETON UNIVERSITY.
— See Svetlana Alexievech’s Chernobyl Prayer, translated by Anna Gunin and Arch Tait (Penguin Random House, 2016, page 28). 2 For this timeline and more, see Consequences of the Chernobyl Accident in Belarus (Minsk: International Sakharov Higher College of Radioecology, 1992, page 81). 3 See Oleg Nasvit’s “Legislation in Ukraine about the Radiological Consequences of the Chernobyl Accident” in the Japanese Journal of Health Physics, 33 (2), 1998, page 195. 4 International Atomic Energy Agency’s The International Chernobyl Project: Technical Report (Vienna: IAEA. 1991). 5 Hanna Zavorotnya in “The Babushkas of Chernobyl,” directed by Holly Morris and Anne Bogart, 2015. 6 Lina Kostensko as quoted in “Self-Settlers of–Returning Home” (https://ukrainer.net/ self-settlers-of-Chernobyl-returning-home/). Accessed November 10, 2018. 1
My deepest gratitude to Maria for sharing her stories with us and countless others; she reminded me of what it means to make, to have, and to be, home. Thank you to our guides Oleksander Rybak, Oleksander Syrota, and Denis Vishnevsky for answering our endless questions and showing us their Chernobyl. To my fellow travellers Julian Breinersdorfer, Lindsey Freeman, Margret Grebowicz, Sanem Guvenc, Lyubzja Knorozok, Eldritch Priest, and Oleksiy Radynski: thanks for keeping it wonderfully weird. And, of course, thank you to Jussi Parikka for the introduction to Svitlana Matviyenko, who assembled this group of researchers from around the world to spend three memorable days and nights together in the zone.
Letter From… Aotearoa (New Zealand)
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01 TEXT BY THEO NAZARY AND DELANEY WINDIGO
“Kia ora!” said Chelita Zainey as she greeted us in the traditional Maori welcoming at the Christchurch International Airport in Aotearoa (New Zealand). Kia ora can be translated as “be well,” and it’s common to hear people from diverse backgrounds using the acknowledgement across the country. Chelita was one of the organizers for the 2018, and second, Biennial Indigenous International Design Forum (Na Te Kore). This gathering brought together designers, planners, government officials, academics, and architects from around the world to share, present, and discuss important projects and ideas about Indigenous placemaking, design, and architecture. We travelled more than 14,000 kilometres from Toronto to attend this remarkable event.
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Christchurch waterfront
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Delaney Windigo
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Indigenous placemaking in Aotearoa
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Delaney Windigo
Letter From‌ Aotearoa (New Zealand)
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While we had heard from numerous colleagues and friends about the immense beauty of Aotearoa, nothing compared to being there and seeing it first-hand. Christchurch suffered a 6.3-magnitude earthquake in February 2011, and a significant portion of the city centre was completely destroyed. However, through the rebuilding process, the city was given an opportunity to reconnect with its Maori roots and culture. It was through this process that the City initiated a large-scale Maori urban planning and design strategy to bring back the Maori influence on the region. Maori-influenced architecture, design, and planning entwined to produce astonishing new government buildings, public spaces, parks, and commemorative pieces. Christchurch arose from the disaster as a more culturally grounded and connected city. The conference was held at the Tuahiwi Marae, which is approximately 20 minutes north of Christchurch and is home to the Ngai Tuahuriri, the descendants of Tuahuriri peoples. A Marae is a communal and sacred place in Polynesian societies. In fact, for the Maori peoples, Maraes are central to everyday life, and the Tuahiwi Marae was surrounded by homes, a school, church, and urupa (cemetery). The Marae was picturesque and held both sacred and modern beauty. It served as a community space, with its own farmland and garden, community kitchen, large multi-purpose gathering space, conference rooms, storage space, washrooms with showers, and more.
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Each morning, we woke up at sunrise for a meditation session, sunrise prayer, and communal breakfast. Then, we turned our attention to conference presentations, collaborations, and discussions around Indigenous design, architecture, and planning. In the afternoons and evenings, we toured Christchurch and visited important sites that were impacted by the earthquake and rebuilt with Maori influence and involvement in the entire process— Indigenous involvement that Canadian planners, architects, and landscape architects should also aspire towards. The conference ignited many excellent conversations, and presenters captivated audiences with their projects, ideas, and contributions. For example, we learned about the ETXEKOANDRE, the house of the ETXE, and the influence this had on
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Tuahiwi Marae
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Delaney Windigo
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The authors in front of Tuahiwi Marae
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Courtesy of Delaney Windigo
Letter From… Aotearoa (New Zealand)
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Design of the Teaching, Learning, Sharing and Healing space, planned for the southwestern corner of Nathan Phillips Square, Toronto
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Courtesy of Toronto Council Fire Native Cultural Centre
sacred spaces in the Basque region of Spain. We learned about the Mayan creation myth of the Kakaw, “the immortal chocolate Tree,” and how oral traditions are influencing design in forest farming communities in El Salvador. We learned about the de-colonized approaches used in Mexico to work with Indigenous artisanal communities and the ways in which a region called “Los Altos de Chiapas” in the south is using participatory design to revolutionize outdated design practices. We learned about the ways the Maoris are using their traditional stories of exploration and adaptation with modern design practices. Maoris are co-designing and rebuilding Aotearoa with Indigenous planning and placemaking at the centre of everything and not just as an after-thought because of “reconciliation.” While attendees and presenters came from far and wide to the Na Te Kore conference, the themes were extraordinarily similar. Indigenous peoples from across the world have a message for design and architecture communities: Indigenous
peoples will be making significant contributions to Indigenize and reclaim their spaces. As the original peoples of the lands that they inhabit, they are much better equipped to sustainably develop and imagine changes to the land. Many Indigenous peoples consider themselves stewards of the land and are emotionally and spiritually connected to the land. Turtle Island, commonly referred to as North America, is experiencing a similar reclamation movement called Indigenous placemaking. We were at the conference to share one of these examples, called the Indian Residential School Survivors (IRSS) Legacy project. The IRSS Legacy project can be divided into two components. First, there is the “Restoration of Identity” sculpture, which is the Turtle sculpture being developed by Anishinaabe artist Solomon King under the direction of Toronto Council Fire Native Cultural Centre. Secondly, there is the “Teaching, Learning, Sharing and Healing” (TLSH) space, which will be constructed on the southwestern corner of Nathan Phillips Square in
Letter From… Aotearoa (New Zealand)
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partnership with the City of Toronto. The Restoration of Identity sculpture will be the centrepiece of the TLSH space, and it will be accompanied by several other significant cultural elements such as the Story-telling Amphitheatre, Three-Sisters Mound, Indigenous Lodge, Inukshuk, Métis Voyageur, and the Kuswenta walkways to reflect the Two-Row Wampum. Each of these elements holds a deeply significant cultural meaning and teaching for Indigenous peoples of Turtle Island. The TLSH space, which will be built directly south of the Japanese Peace Garden, is a living classroom on Indigenous culture, history, and traditions. This trip to the Na Te Kore conference in Aotearoa is now in our distant memories, and the IRSS Legacy project has advanced substantially. Our project team and partners have shifted our focus towards fundraising and working with a prime consultant to refine the TLSH conceptual design and ensure consistency with the Nathan Phillips Square revitalization design. We are in the process of raising approximately $6,000,000 for the construction costs of the TLSH space and working closely with the City of Toronto to develop a co-management agreement. In terms of our fundraising efforts, we are well ahead, having raised approximately $2,000,000, with a significant contribution coming from the Ontario government. We are working closely with faith group leaders to ensure they’re able to contribute to the project. We are also turning our attention towards the private sectors and financial institutions to make significant contributions as they continue to work towards restitution. The IRSS Legacy project has had a profound impact on both of us personally and professionally, too. As we’ve learned and progressed in our own ideas, it’s become very clear that we all need to do more as a society and people. Reconciliation cannot be an addendum or checkmark for government, financial institutions, and non-profit organizations. Rather, we need to think about restitution as occupants and settlers on Indigenous land. Restitution is about making things right, and that’s what we need to do collectively across Turtle
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The Restoration of Identity sculpture, being developed by Anishinaabe artist Solomon King under the direction of Toronto Council Fire Native Cultural Centre
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Courtesy of Toronto Council Fire Native Cultural Centre
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Rapaki Marae
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Delaney Windigo
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Island. We need to restore the rightful place of Indigenous culture, history, and traditions through placemaking and similar initiatives throughout Turtle Island. To do this, we need everyone’s cooperation and partnership to achieve the kind of progress that’s being made in Aotearoa. With the IRSS Legacy project, we move one step closer towards reconciliation and restitution. To donate to the IRSS Legacy project, please visit www.irsslegacy.com/donate. BIOS/ THEO NAZARY WAS BORN IN KABUL, AFGHANISTAN, AND, AFTER MANY YEARS OF CONFLICT, HAD TO LEAVE AND SETTLE ON TURTLE ISLAND WITH HIS FAMILY. THEO CURRENTLY WORKS AS A STRATEGIC PLANNER AT TORONTO COUNCIL FIRE NATIVE CULTURAL CENTRE AND IS COMPLETING HIS PHD AT RYERSON UNIVERSITY.
DELANEY WINDIGO IS A MEMBER OF MUSKOWEKWAN FIRST NATION IN TREATY 4 TERRITORY. SHE IS A FORMER JOURNALIST AND CURRENTLY WORKS AS A COMMUNICATIONS SPECIALIST.
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ate the League took. Thomas was able to recite the Great Law in five languages. “The elders guess that it took a period of 100 to 120 years to bring the Five Nations together,” says Thomas.
This is the third in a series of articles, by Millie Knapp, that share understandings of Anishinaabe and Haudenosaunee teachings about the land.
Haudenosaunee perspective
When it comes to looking at Turtle Island (North America) from a Haudenosaunee perspective, two Seneca people, G. Peter Jemison and Barbara A. Mann, come to mind for their connection to the land and its history. Both tell about an Attiwendaronk (Neutral Wyandot) woman named Jigonsaseh who lived 1,000 years ago.
TEXT BY MILLIE KNAPP
“Jigonsaseh was the first head clan mother of the Iroquois League,” says Barbara A. Mann, a University of Toledo professor of humanities. Mann wrote about Jigonsaseh in her book Iroquoian Women: The Gantowisas; in her article “A Sign in the Sky,” co-authored with Jerry L. Fields, published in the American Indian Culture and Research Journal; and in her co-edited Encyclopedia of the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois Confederacy). Mann maintains that Jigonsaseh was “a coequal founder of the League in the year 1142.” She further notes: “A big part of the founding of the League was the Black Sun that covered the entire Northeast— and that happened in 1142.” Before the Iroquois League and the Constitution were created, it was “an era of uneasy relations among the Haudenosaunee, as hunters and maize farmers coexisted in anxious, mutual distrust,” write Mann and Fields in “A Sign in the Sky.” In the article, they quote Jake Thomas, a respected Cayuga keeper or oral historian, about how long the negotiations to cre01
“Keepers themselves made no deliberate efforts to set down The Great Law, or the Constitution of the Five (later Six) Nations, until the late nineteenth century,” write Mann and Fields. In 1916, Seneca author Arthur C. Parker created The Constitution of the Five Great Nations Or The Iroquois Book of the Great Law. In it, he writes, “The lineal descent of the people of the Five Nations shall run in the female line. Women shall be considered the progenitors of the Nation. They shall own the land and the soil. Men and women shall follow the status of the mother.” Jigonsaseh is “the one who wrote the women’s sections into the Constitution,” says Mann. “Women own the land. Jigonsaseh made sure that that was in the Constitution so that’s why women have economic power,” says Mann. When questioned about the cultural conception of ownership, Mann states, “No, it wasn’t ownership—that’s the English word. The best way to put it is that they are ‘the keepers of the land,’” says Mann. In “A Sign in the Sky,” Mann and Fields write, “‘Keeping’ is always a sacred trust. Economically, men alone kept the forest, warfare, and the hunt, while women alone kept the land, peace, and distribution decisions. Food, animal or vegetable, was always the sole purview of women, as was agriculture.” Jigonsaseh made it her career to spread the message of peace with the Peacemaker and Hiawatha. She was the first to embrace the message from the Peacemaker who came to her during a civil war among the Five Nations: Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, and Seneca.
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Jigonsaseh lived in a house built along the trails of the Five Nations warriors whom she fed. “She lived within what we now think of as Tuscarora territory,” says G. Peter Jemison, site historic manager for Ganondagan State Historic Site, about the land near Lewiston, N.Y. “She lived on a trail used by warriors as they went back and forth to fight. What we now call Route 104 was the trail most commonly used by Five Nations warriors,” he says about the road in upstate New York.
“In doing so, this is the beginning of the function of the clan mothers, in terms of raising up a chief—in selecting someone from among those candidates available—and giving them the title of authority to be a chief. This is what is accomplished by the first act of raising the antlers of authority and straightening the mind of Tadadaho,” says Jemison.
After she took up the message of peace, Jigonsaseh strategized with the Peacemaker and Hiawatha about how to bring the message of peace to the Five Nations in order to form the Confederacy.
Jigonsaseh helped negotiate the end of war and create the Constitution or the Great Law of Peace that united the Five Nations. Later, the Tuscarora would join, making the Confederacy known as the Six Nations.
Mann believes that it is important to note in the context of the Haudenosaunee Sky Woman creation story that women made dirt.
“Together, the Peacemaker, the Jigonsaseh, and Ayonwantha [Hiawatha] proved invincible, persuading the warring nations, one by one, to throw down their arms,” writes Mann. “When the Peacemaker’s predicted ‘sign in the sky,’ A Black Sun (or total eclipse), materialized, the final hold-out nation of Senecas was convinced that the spiritual path of peace was correct. Then, Adodaroh [Tadadaho] stood alone.”
As a stateswoman, Jigonsaseh strategized how to implement social, economic, and political power for women or gantowisas, keepers of the land known as Mother Earth.
“They didn’t just opportunistically find a fertile patch of ground—they made dirt. There was more to it than just a compost heap. They would deliberately mix things together to get the soil very rich and more fertilized. It would be very deep.”
The Peacemaker enlisted the help of Hiawatha, Tadadaho’s former colleague, to strategize about how to bring Tadadaho, the Onondaga shaman, to the way of peace. As part of the mission, Jigonsaseh, the Peacemaker, Hiawatha, and the newly made chiefs of the Five Nations travelled to Tadadaho’s home to subdue him. “When they got to talk with him [Tadadaho], the Peacemaker stood in the centre and on either side of him was Jigonsaseh and Hiawatha. Behind the Peacemaker stood 12 leaders that had been chosen by the people to come to that meeting. They surrounded him and began to relay the message of peace,” says Jemison about the delegation. “The Peacemaker began to convince Tadadaho that the way in which he was living was wrong. It was time to embrace the message of peace and bring about the unification of the Five Nations into a confederacy.”
Jigonsaseh placed the deer antlers of authority on the head of Tadadaho.
In the time that Jigonsaseh embraced the message of peace, “she gained for our women the rights, the responsibilities, and the privileges that they have until today. We are a matrilineal society. We trace our nation and our clan through our mother. We are the nation and clan of our mother,” says Jemison. The first Jigonsaseh became a title position to be passed down through the generations. Mann writes about the first Jigonsaseh and about the gantowisas or female official’s power in Iroquoian Women: “The gantowisas enjoyed sweeping political powers, which ranged from the administrative and legislative to the judicial. The gantowisas ran the local clan councils. They held all the lineage wampum, nomination belts, and titles. They ran the funerals. They retained exclusive rights over naming, i.e., the creation of new citizens and the installation of public officials. They nominated all male sachems as well as all Clan Mothers to office and retained the power to impeach wrongdoers. They appointed warriors, declared war, negotiated peace, and mediated disputes.”
To sum up how the role of women is related to the land known as Mother Earth, Mann says, “She’s female, we’re female. The land is a woman made by a woman for other women. A lot of people have the tradition of a Sky Woman making land. She came down and the water animals decided to save her life. Grandmother Turtle held her on her back while the other animals dove until they got some dirt to spread on her back and she [Sky Woman], just by walking, expanded the size of the earth.”
Mann notes how in the southeastern part of the U.S. where it’s now red clay, the women worked for centuries “to create a layer of fertile ground that was about a foot or so deep when the settlers came in and stole it from the people. Within a generation, they ground it down back to red clay. Why? Because they weren’t taking care of it very much. The women made the dirt.” There are many traditions across Turtle Island about women tending the earth. “If she was a really important woman and especially good with crops, you called her the Dirt Maker,” says Mann. BIO/ MILLIE KNAPP, ANISHINAABE KWE, WRITES ABOUT INDIGENOUS ART AND CULTURE. 01/
1851 Jigonsaseh
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League of the Haudenosaunee, 1851
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Notes: A Miscellany of News and Events
written by landscape designer and native plant expert Paul O’Hara, is an eloquent mix of botany, history, and memoir, grounded in the landscape of southern Ontario and the magnificent trees of the Golden Horseshoe. The award-winning book Big Lonely Doug (House of Anansi Press), by Harley Rustad, weaves the ecology of old-growth forests, politics, and culture with the story of a logger who saved one of Canada’s last great trees. And finally, Escape to Reality (Nimbus Publishing), co-written by father and son team Mark Cullen and Ben Cullen, explores how the world is changing gardening, and how gardening is changing the world. 03
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laneways The Laneway Project recently launched the new Toronto Laneway Map, a unique tool to enable laneway lovers around Toronto and beyond to get to know this layer of the urban fabric. Along with including foundational information needed to successfully analyze a laneway and plan its revitalization, the map has an interactive layer that people can populate with their own completed or in-progress revitalization projects. To view the map, visit www.thelanewayproject.ca/ torontolanewaymap/.
A number of recently published books have come to the attention of Ground and may be of interest to landscape architects. The Humane Gardener (Princeton Architectural Press), by Nancy Lawson, describes how to welcome wildlife to our landscapes and applies broad lessons of ecology to our designed outdoor spaces. Urban Gardening as Politics (Routledge), edited by Chiara Tornaghi and Chiara Certomà, investigates and reflects on the complex and sometimes contradictory nature of community gardens and urban agriculture initiatives, and questions the degree to which these projects address social inequality and injustice. Integrating Food into Urban Planning, edited by Yves Cabannes and Cecilia Marocchino, was recently published by UCL Press and the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations (FAO) as an open access book that can be downloaded for free from: http://bit.ly/2TyaqYF. Gardening with Emma (Storey Publishing) is written by 13-year-old Torontonian Emma Biggs (with her father, also a garden writer, Steven Biggs) and is a kid-friendly guide to growing healthy food and unusual plants. Trees of Power: Ten Essential Arboreal Allies (Chelsea Green Publishing), written by tree farmer Akiva Silver, is an in-depth guide to planting, propagation, culture, and ecology of some of our most important tree species. A Trail Called Home: Tree Stories from the Golden Horseshoe (to be published in May 2019 by Dundurn Press),
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public space A newly formed organization called Ontario Place for All is working to keep Ontario Place publicly accessible, based on the principles that any changes to the site must acknowledge the waterfront’s Indigenous heritage; maintain Ontario Place as part of Toronto’s waterfront park system; be integrated with the revitalization of Exhibition Place; and celebrate Ontario. Find the group on Instagram at @ontarioplace4all.
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ravines
Lakelands Community, and Mel Lastman Square. Harold worked passionately to build communities where thousands of families now live, work, learn, and play. The awardwinning public open spaces he designed across the province leave a legacy that will be enjoyed for generations to come.
A recently released report, The Toronto Ravines Study: 1977-2017, summarizes a three-year citizen-science effort to survey biodiversity in the Toronto ravines. The report notes that, in the past 40 years, the biodiversity and ecological health of Toronto’s ravines has declined to a critical level and is now likely on the edge of ecological collapse. The report is available at torontoravines.org.
Throughout his career, Harold has served as a mentor for countless staff at NAK who have gone on to rewarding careers in the industry and regard Harold as instrumental in providing them with the foundation for success.
events
His knowledge, dedication, generosity, humility, and humour will be greatly missed.
Grow Op, an annual exhibition on urbanism, landscape, and contemporary art, will be held at the Gladstone Hotel in Toronto from April 18-21, 2019. Celebrating its seventh year, the theme for this year’s exhibition is “Energy.” For more information, visit www.gladstonehotel.com.
new members The Ontario Association of Landscape Architects is proud to recognize and welcome the following new members to the Association: James Collins
Jordan Vander Klok
Stephanie Pavan
Sonja Vangjeli*
Asterisk (*) denotes Full Members without the use of professional seal. 01/
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Toronto Laneway Map Courtesy of The Laneway Project Community painting and planting day, Luttrell Loop Lane, Danforth Village in Toronto, September 2018 Katrina Afonso
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Paul O’Hara’s forthcoming book, A Trail Called Home, explores the natural history of the Greater Toronto Area and tells many stories about the trees of the region.
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Ontario Place
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Courtesy of Dundurn Press
Courtesy of City of Toronto Archives Harold Van Stiphout Courtesy of Karen Van Stiphout Park People’s 2017 Heart of the City conference was held in Calgary; the 2019 conference will be in Montreal, in June. Courtesy of Park People
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in memoriam Harold Van Stiphout It is with great sadness that we announce the passing of Harold Van Stiphout, OALA, at age 66, after a tough and courageous battle with Multiple System Atrophy, a rare form of Parkinsons. Harold was a highly regarded Senior Associate of NAK Design Strategies for 30 years until his retirement in August 2017. He joined NAK at its inception, previously working as a landscape architect with JSW + Associates in Toronto and Edmonton (HJSW). Harold’s leadership and extensive breadth of knowledge contributed greatly to the growth of NAK throughout his career there, where he was well known within the industry for his professionalism, technical expertise, and insistence on quality. Harold specialized in detailed design, contract law, contract administration, and construction best practices, and his dedication was fundamental to the success of a vast array of projects, large and small, which have won numerous awards over his extensive career. His landscape architectural and urban design work included municipal parks and squares, open space systems, environmental design, residential communities, zoos, and commercial centres. A few of his most notable projects are Mount Pleasant Village Community & Civic Square, Bramalea City Centre, Gage Park, Berczy Village,
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conference Park People’s upcoming conference, Heart of the City, will be held in Montreal from June 12-14, 2019. The theme is “Balance,” and the event will be an opportunity to learn from park volunteers, community groups, professionals, designers, and municipal staff about how our shared public spaces are often at the centre of important struggles. One of the keynote speakers is Rena Soutar, the first Reconciliation Planner at the Vancouver Board of Parks and Recreation. For more information, visit www.parkpeople.ca.
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Artifact
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The Toronto Black Farmers and Growers Collective created a farm, with the Ontario Heritage Trust, at Ashbridge Estate in Toronto in order to restore the farming heritage of the property and bring diverse, local food to the Moss Park community. Lorraine Johnson
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Swiss chard seedlings in the Toronto Black Farmers and Growers Collective’s greenhouse space at Downsview Park
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Jacqueline Dwyer
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Noel Livingston
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Lorraine Johnson
Ibrahim Khider
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How does race figure into conversations about food security? A more challenging way to put this: How is it that race, for a long time, has not figured into mainstream conversations about food security?
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Jacqueline Dwyer and Noel Livingston work to dismantle food oppression for those (such as themselves and other community members) living in neighbourhoods that don’t have access to good healthy food, or can’t afford it. Their activism is centred on a food and social justice approach that reclaims knowledge and traditions that have fed generations before them. Dwyer and Livingston—and the organization they co-founded in 2014, the Toronto Black Farmers and Growers Collective—have been centrally involved with many projects and initiatives in Toronto neighbourhoods such as Jane/Finch (a collaborative pilot project for the first farmers’ market), Downsview (creating a cultural urban farm at Downsview Park that provided summer employment to local high-school youth and provided donated food to those who needed it), Eglinton Flats (at Emmett Community Gardens), and Southeastern Riverdale (Ashbridge Estate). In
2018, they created the first Afro-Indigenous Food Security Festival, which was held at Downsview Park in September. “Food always brings people together,” says Dwyer. “Food must now create local employment and entrepreneurial opportunities, to ensure that people are not hungry.” Adds Livingston: “Food breaks down barriers and builds bridges.” Their goal for the future: “To continue dismantling racial food injustice against Black people by ensuring this food system is culturally relevant, accessible, and funded to address community food justice and food security issues through partnerships for Afro-Indigenous people…” Their work in the present: “At the grassroots.” And the pathway forward: “Community decisionmaking at the table, serving and empowering food-insecure and food-poor people, and remedying systemic injustices they live with. Good food is a right and should be treated as such.” TEXT BY LORRAINE JOHNSON, AUTHOR OF CITY FARMER: ADVENTURES IN URBAN FOOD GROWING AND THE EDITOR OF GROUND.
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