Ground 24 – Winter 2013 – New Media

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Round Table The Future Present of New Media Features The Cinematic Flâneur Big Data vs.

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Publication # 40026106

Winter 2013 Issue 24

Contents

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Up Front Information on the Ground New Media:

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Round Table The future present of new media MODERATED BY DENISE PINTO AND VICTORIA TAYLOR, OALA

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The Cinematic Flâneur Film and site exploration TEXT BY MARTIN HOGUE

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Big Data vs. Small Data Denise Pinto in conversation with Lori and Rodney Hoinkes New Media Resources for Landscape Architecture COMPILED BY ADRIENNE HALL

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Sites of Value A capital treasure TEXT BY NICOLE VALOIS

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Education Corner Geodesign TEXT BY ERIC GORDON, OALA

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Notes A miscellany of news and events Artifact Frequencies made visible TEXT BY LORRAINE JOHNSON

President’s Message

Editorial Board Message

President’s Message

Editorial Board Message

New media is a catch-all term used to describe forms of media that are not traditional. Generally speaking, the Internet, podcasts, YouTube, and the like all get lumped into this category. However, new media was originally used to describe the idea that, with home video recorders, people would be in control of their own media. This was long before YouTube. In other words, new media is really just anything that changes how we communicate and consume our media. That is a very broad umbrella.

What do you get when the ideas of a molecular biologist, a digital urbanist, an arborist, a tech entrepreneur, and two professors collide? You get a riveting discussion of the intersection between the digital world and the physical world. And what if a handful of these people are also landscape architects? Well, you might just have a Round Table on the future of the profession.

The high speed of new media permits a very rapid infusion of design and product into the real world, and accelerates the transmission of notion to reality, good or bad, with public opinion being the acid test to determine whether or not a design is a worthwhile communication.

Even more interesting is the fact that as technology continues to develop, the refinement of designs and the ease of exploration of options allow for better collaboration between professionals.

At the OALA we are striving to ensure the prudent use of new media and make certain we can continue to move forward with the solid protection of members.

We hope you will be pleased to see an expanded use of the OALA’s website in the immediate future.

In particular, the efforts of committee members will be posted for other Association volunteers to review in order to maintain a current picture of the progress of the many initiatives in full play at the moment. These initiatives will be presented as updates to members in a “world café” format at the upcoming AGM in Hamilton next March, with brainstorming in small groups on topics such as the reporting structure for our mandatory Continuing Education Program and the pillars of our Practice Legislation. We are quite excited about the growth of the Association and the refinement of the many policy areas that members have identified in the past few years. As always, we welcome comments from members at large to assist. We will employ, of course, new media vehicles to keep all with an interest “on the same page.”

I look forward to seeing you all in Hamilton in March!

JOANNE MORAN, CSLA, OALA OALA PRESIDENT 2012-2014

Winter 2013 Issue 24

In this issue, we venture into the imaginative and boundary-pushing realm of data-mediated design. We offer the following pages up to interactive tools: the ones that have shifted design process, amplified our ways of seeing, and created new methods of public participation.

In his article “The Cinematic Flâneur,” Martin Hogue looks at approaching landscape inventory through film, photo stills, and montage. He plays with spatial reorganization to draw out many versions of a walk around Toronto’s Dundas Square.

For a quantitative twist, Eric Gordon gives us a short history of GIS from its beginnings with the Canada Geographic Information System. Gordon considers the now ubiquitous system that combines social, municipal, and architectural data to amp up the scale and scope of landscape planning.

For a community-centred perspective, Lori Hoinkes and Rodney Hoinkes lend a new vision to public participation with their design of a mobile-app-enhanced walking tour, and explain how new tools are creating neighbourliness.

Landscape architecture has seen a boost of invention due to new media tools. Join us as we take a look at the industry’s cutting edge. And, if this leaves you wanting more, be sure to check out our comprehensive list of apps, podcasts, and online reference tools, on page 24.

In the spirit of digital friendship, we hope you’ll also get in touch with us on Twitter @GroundMag. DENISE PINTO CHAIR, EDITORIAL BOARD

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Editor Lorraine Johnson

2013 OALA Governing Council

Photo Editor Todd Smith

President Joanne Moran

OALA Editorial Board Nancy Chater (on leave) Doris Chee Eric Gordon Adrienne Hall Jocelyn Hirtes Karen May Leslie Morton (on leave) Kate Nelischer Denise Pinto (chair) Maili Sedore Todd Smith Brendan Stewart Netami Stuart Victoria Taylor Dalia Todary-Michael

Vice President Morteza Behrooz

Art Direction/Design www.typotherapy.com

Associate Councillor—Senior Inna Olchovski

Advertising Inquiries advertising@oala.ca 416.231.4181

Associate Councillor—Junior Katherine Pratt

Cover See page 8.

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 407 Toronto, Ontario M5E 1M2 416.231.4181 www.oala.ca oala@oala.ca Copyright © 2013 by the Ontario Association of Landscape Architects All rights reserved ISSN: 0847-3080 Canada Post Sales Product Agreement No. 40026106

Treasurer Sarah Culp Secretary Doris Chee Past President Glenn O’Connor Councillors Alana Evers Jonathan Loschmann Moreen Miller

Lay Councillor Linda Thorne Appointed Educator University of Toronto Elise Shelley Appointed Educator University of Guelph Sean Kelly University of Toronto Student Representative Sara Ahadi University of Guelph Student Representative Sarah Taslimi OALA Staff Registrar Linda MacLeod Administrator Aina Budrevics Coordinator Joanna Wilczynska

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 Issue of Ground Ground 25 (Spring) Micro Deadline for advertising space reservations: January 20, 2014 Ground 26 (Summer) Habitat Deadline for editorial proposals: March 10, 2014 Deadline for advertising space reservations: April 21, 2014 Ground 27 (Fall) Engagement Deadline for editorial proposals: May 5, 2014 Deadline for advertising space reservations: July 28, 2014 Ground 28 (Winter) Underground Deadline for editorial proposals: August 29, 2014 Deadline for advertising space reservations: October 20, 2014

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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, Partner, The Planning Partnership, Toronto Ryan James, OALA, Basterfield & Associates, Peterborough Alissa North, OALA, Assistant 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 Jim Vafiades, OALA, Senior Landscape Architect, Stantec, London

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Up Front

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01 DESIGN

landscapes of the sky John Hicks, OALA, shares a hobby common to many people: astronomy. But, unique for a landscape architect, he has channeled his design skills into the very specialized realm of observatory design, focusing not only on the built form of these structures but also on how amateur astronomers can integrate backyard observatories into home landscapes. In 2008, he published a book on the subject—Building a Roll-Off Roof Observatory: A Complete Guide for Design and Construction (Springer Books).

The publication’s fifty diagrams, created by Hicks, guide readers through the processes of creating backyard observatories that are reminiscent of garden sheds and accommodate adjoining patio spaces, appropriate for residential landscapes.

It is his experience as a landscape architect that has equipped him to succeed as an amateur astronomer, notes Hicks. “The study of the night sky is really another landscape, which you don’t realize until you look through a telescope,” he says.

Hicks’ interest in astronomy began when he moved to the country and was presented with the opportunity to study with leading

Up Front: Information on the Ground

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amateur astronomer Jack Newton. The two observed together for twenty years, during which time Hicks became a member of two astronomical societies and began to receive steady accolades and awards for his photographs and studies. Hicks’ astronomical work focuses on the sun, which is one of the most difficult subjects to study due to its constant movement. “As a landscape architect you have a biological side, and I thought that the one thing that always has influence on us is the sun,” notes Hicks. “The sun is the most sensible thing to study in the cosmos. It’s powerful and it controls us.”

In 1988, Hicks began construction on his first observatory. Determined to ensure it would last a lifetime, Hicks drew upon his landscape architectural training to draft plans for the structure at his breakfast table and make his way through the challenging spherical calculations, producing an impressive structure of stainless steel and

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Protoype dome observatory designed and built by landscape architect John Hinks

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John Hinks

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Cross-section of dome observatory designed by John Hinks

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John Hinks

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Hinks’ photos have been used by NASA.

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John Hinks

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aluminum that he still uses today. The domed observatory on the property of his Lake Simcoe home, which offers optimal protection from the wind, became the inspiration for his how-to book on designing and building a backyard observatory.

Hicks sees his landscape architectural work and his astronomy passion as combining science and art. Originally trained as a chemist, Hicks was working as a salesman when he stumbled upon a posted notice for

Up Front

a landscape architect in park planning during a hike in British Columbia.

Recognizing an opportunity to apply both his artistic abilities and his scientific knowledge, Hicks enrolled in the landscape architecture program at the University of Toronto and went on to found his own practice after a short period at the Ministry of Natural Resources. Most of his career has focused on provincial park planning, including 18 years working in Algonquin Park.

Hicks is quick to point out that while his professional training helps in his astronomical studies, his landscape architectural practice has also been greatly influenced by the experiences gained in photographing the sun and the night sky. “More than anything, it’s made me aware that we’re destroying this place faster than we realize,” he notes.

“I appreciate the dilemma of the planet more now because I’m looking at other planets out there that are destitute. I’ve become more of an environmentalist because of it.”

Hicks currently sits on a number of local and provincial environmental committees, including the Thane Smelter Public Liaison Committee with the Ministry of the Environment, and has worked for years to enhance municipal night sky legislation. He gives regular lectures across Canada and in the United States every year on astronomy and environmentalism. “Al Gore is jealous,” he teases. “He talks about the sun, but he doesn’t know anything about it. I do.”

Having taken more than 10,000 images of the sun, Hicks now plans to write a book on his work in the field. He credits his training and experience as a landscape architect with helping him to take not only technically sound images, but also beautiful and engaging photographs. His highly artistic photographs are prized in the astronomical industry, and many have been used by NASA and research organizations around the world. Noting the rarity of his unconventional pastime, Hicks reassures, “I have normal hobbies too—I fly fish.”

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in the midst of planning the second edition of his observatory publication, this time detailing the design and construction of the more challenging dome structure. He is pleased that more and more people are able to experience the landscape of the night sky, and hopes that the practice will have as great an impact on others as it has had on him. “Astronomy helps you to appreciate this planet,” Hicks says. “It makes you more concerned about the biology of the planet and the endurance of it.”

TEXT BY KATE NELISCHER, WHO WORKS IN DESIGN COMMUNICATIONS FOR THE PLANNING PARTNERSHIP AND IS A MEMBER OF THE GROUND EDITORIAL BOARD.

In a story rife with irony, it was Mutton’s public-space activism that initially led her—a sole practitioner who focuses on garden design and consulting in Northumberland County—into politics in the first place.

Concerned about the sale of a small parcel of public land in Cobourg to a developer, Mutton was instrumental in the fight to preserve the treed parcel as a public pathway. Following this success, Mutton ran for a seat on Cobourg Town Council and was elected, first in 2006 and again in 2010.

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Now, Councilor/landscape architect Mutton is engaged in another battle over public space—this one over the boulevard garden in front of her Regency-style, 1850s cottage in Cobourg’s downtown heritage district.

05 POLITICS

boulevard garden cut Hicks is a popular speaker in the astronomy circuit, and the demand for his lectures continues to grow as the worldwide interest in amateur astronomy expands. New technology is making the practice more accessible to a greater demographic and allowing beginners to obtain impressive results— even in urban landscapes. Hicks is currently

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Cobourg-based Miriam Mutton, OALA, is not the only landscape architect to have won a seat in recent elections. But she is no doubt the only landscape architect in Ontario to have had her boulevard garden cut down by the same municipality she represents as an elected official.

Mutton describes her boulevard garden, which she planted in 2001, as a managed meadow, and the process of creating it as “editing.” “It was an intentional garden, but it was also an experiment,” she explains. She planted native and naturalized wildflowers that would do well in the hostile growing conditions beside the street, along with herbs, daylilies, irises, and lady’s mantle.

“Any plant that grew well in the sandy and dry conditions in my backyard garden, I planted in the boulevard.” Because many of her landscape clients have large rural properties in which they want low-maintenance meadows, Mutton’s boulevard garden served as a testing ground for her largerscale meadow plantings. But most importantly, it was also a demonstration of how naturalized gardens work in an urban

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“This feels like a very personal attack,” says Mutton, who notes that there are more than 80 examples of other boulevard gardens in Cobourg with plants higher than 8 inches, most of which have been left alone. As well, there are no driveways on Mutton’s side of the residential block, and her meadow, the tallest plants of which are roughly 3 feet, does not obstruct any driving sightlines, she says. “As a landscape architect, I view boulevard gardens as a traffic calming measure. I think that most citizens are ahead of Council on this issue and see the benefits of these types of gardens; eventually, I think Council will catch up.”

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setting: “It was about my fundamental environmental beliefs and contribution to education, the sharing of ideas with urban folks that nature belongs in healthy urban areas.”

On May 29, 2013, Mutton received a notice of violation from the municipality, citing her boulevard garden for containing vegetation higher than 8 inches, and giving her 96 hours to comply with a bylaw passed by Council in April, 2013, that limits plants to 8 inches in boulevards. Mutton wrote a letter to Town officials, offering to address any safety issues, and heard nothing back. In June, while Mutton, in her capacity as Council Coordinator of the public works portfolio, was in a meeting with public works staff, the Town cut down her boulevard garden. When the plants started growing back, the Town cut down the garden again, in July, and sent Mutton a bill for the work.

In the meantime, Mutton—along with many Cobourg gardeners and environmentalists—continues to advocate for changes to the 8-inch restriction on boulevard gardens, with some success. In September, councilors voted to send the boulevard bylaw for review. However,

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two days later, the Town hired a contractor, who was accompanied by a police escort, to cut Mutton’s boulevard garden down to 8 inches, again. A photo of the event made the front page of the local paper, and the fight continues.

TEXT BY LORRAINE JOHNSON, AUTHOR OF THE NEW ONTARIO NATURALIZED GARDEN, AND EDITOR OF GROUND.

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During a drought, Mutton’s boulevard garden flourishes.

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Miriam Mutton

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Mutton’s boulevard in early spring

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Miriam Mutton

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Naturalized mullen, one of the plants in Mutton’s boulevard garden

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Miriam Mutton

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The garden after being mowed by the Town of Cobourg in 2013

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The boulevard in summer

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The boulevard in autumn

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Miriam Mutton

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The barriers to community engagement are many: from a lack of political will to simple indifference. Yet the patio of Market 707, an outdoor marketplace in Toronto’s west end, is an example of a built project that may signal a new era for community engagement around public space.

PUBLIC SPACE

new frontiers in funding

Marisa Bernstein and Nicolas Koff, two recent graduates of the landscape architecture program at the University of Pennsylvania, sat down with me on the patio of this innovative market, surrounded

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by shipping containers repurposed as food vendors’ stalls. After graduation, their experiences with community-based projects were uninspiring but perhaps typical.

Koff and Bernstein found that so many community groups could not connect with a design professional or, if they did, it was never at the right time. Projects got moving with a flurry of excitement, only to be bogged down in bureaucracy and a lack of vision. According to Koff, there were a few reasons for the poor success of these endeavours: “a lack of visibility, a lack of resources, and a lack of design.”

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After a few rounds of trial and error, Bernstein, Nicolas Koff, and Jonathan Koff developed Projexity, a crowd-sourcing website dedicated to the mobilization and funding of community-based public space projects. Projexity provides a venue for members of the public to discuss and mobilize around local projects; but it also goes further, providing a funding mechanism that lets locals re-invest in their own neighbourhoods through donations. Access to even a modest budget allows Projexity to leverage social capital to create a platform for design competitions and broad visibility among professionals; according to Koff, this provides the opportunity for “community groups to come together with professionals at the right time over a project, not just an idea.”

Projexity represents the beginnings of a new institutional framework for communitybased projects. Graham Taylor, OALA, a 10-13/

Construction of the Market 707 patio

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Courtesy of Projexity

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Two of Projexity’s three founders: Marisa Bernstein and Jonathan Koff

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Courtesy of Projexity

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The Market 707 patio is well used by the community.

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Courtesy of Projexity

landscape architect with Baker Turner Inc. and a close watcher of web-based tools, highlights the “micro-local” application of the technology. While web-based tools are generally applied en masse over a global scale, Taylor argues that “it is the perfect time to combine crowd-sourcing with social media to fund projects right around the corner.” Taylor explains that anyone can “find a local cause, post it on Projexity, get the word out on Twitter and Facebook, fund the transaction through a PayPal account, and create a new community space.”

ubiquitous shipping pallet. Yet the lowly skid has been modified into a platform with a series of planters that elevate patrons and create a safe, comfortable environment. It was the winning entry of 15, which included several from students. What was common among all entrants is that they are emerging professionals, trying to make a name for themselves in a conservative field.

Danielle Charlton, a landscape architectural intern with Terraplan and one of those emerging professionals who participated in the design competition, notes that Projexity projects “aren’t the typical developer-driven model that is only concerned with the bottom line; instead they offer landscape architects a chance at making a tangible, positive contribution to the urban fabric.”

Early results for Projexity are promising.

The Market 707 patio campaign successfully raised $6,500 to commission a design competition for the market’s patio and deliver a finished product to the marketplace vendors in just five months. In such a short time frame, most community projects would probably still be floundering in their attempts to pull together political will or financial resources, yet the Market 707 patio harnessed community resources independent of the political actors or granting organizations that usually dictate the pace of a project. Koff explains that “Projexity created the momentum. The money generated excitement around the project.” And once the designs came in, “it helped people develop their imagination for the site. Without Projexity, it would have taken a lot longer.

There would have been less community involvement and more layers of committees.” Because of this freedom, Bernstein adds, it was “not the cheapest, but rather the most suitable design” that was built.

TEXT BY JON WOODSIDE, AN ARBORIST AND LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURAL INTERN WITH BAKER TURNER INC. AND BOARD MEMBER OF SPROUT, A COMMUNITY OF LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTS WORKING PRO-BONO FOR COMMUNITY ENGAGEMENT AROUND ONTARIO’S PUBLIC SPACES, LAUNCHING PROJECTS THIS WINTER.

The winning entry, by the firm G, is an embodiment of the Projexity ethos: it takes what is disregarded or overlooked and, with it, finds a novel solution to complex problems. Here, the patio is based on the 15

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Join us as we take a look at the industry’s cutting edge, through the lens of digital tools

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New Media

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Round Table

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Our panel of experts looks at what’s already possible and what might be in store for landscape architects in a digital world CO-MODERATED BY DENISE PINTO AND VICTORIA TAYLOR, OALA

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Round Table

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YASSER ANSARI IS THE CO-FOUNDER OF NETWORKED ORGANISMS, A NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC-BACKED SOFTWARE COMPANY FOCUSED ON CONNECTING PEOPLE TO THE NATURAL WORLD. HE STUDIED MOLECULAR BIOLOGY AND BIOINFORMATICS AT U.C. SAN DIEGO AND EARNED HIS MASTER’S DEGREE FROM NYU’S INTERACTIVE TELECOMMUNICATIONS PROGRAM, WHERE HE IS CURRENTLY AN ADJUNCT FACULTY MEMBER. MARISA BERNSTEIN IS A LANDSCAPE AND URBAN DESIGNER AND CO-FOUNDER OF PROJEXITY, AN ONLINE PLATFORM THAT ENABLES PEOPLE TO DESIGN, FUND, AND BUILD PROJECTS IN THEIR NEIGHBOURHOODS. WITH A MASTERS OF LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE FROM THE UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA, MARISA’S INTERESTS RESIDE IN FINDING INNOVATIVE WAYS TO RESTORE AND RE-IMAGINE THE DYNAMIC RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN COMMUNITIES AND THEIR ENVIRONMENT. RUTHANNE HENRY, OALA, IS AN ARBORIST AND LANDSCAPE ARCHITECT WORKING FOR TORONTO PARKS, FORESTRY AND RECREATION, SPECIALIZING IN POLICY AND STRATEGIC PLANNING RELATED TO THE URBAN FOREST AND COORDINATING CAPITAL PROJECTS WITHIN PARKS. RUTHANNE IS ALSO A GRADUATE OF RYERSON UNIVERSITY’S MASTERS IN SPATIAL ANALYSIS PROGRAM, WHICH FOCUSES ON SPATIAL DATA INTERPRETATION AND VISUALIZATION, AND IS A MEMBER OF THE RYERSON URBAN FOREST AND ECOLOGICAL DISTURBANCE RESEARCH GROUP. SVETLANA LAVRENTIEVA, OALA, IS A SENIOR ASSOCIATE, LANDSCAPE ARCHITECT, AND LEED-ACCREDITED PROFESSIONAL AT SCOTT TORRANCE LANDSCAPE ARCHITECT INC. WHO COMBINES HER PASSION FOR THE PUBLIC REALM WITH AN ECOLOGICAL AND SUSTAINABLE DESIGN APPROACH. AS A TRAINED FINE ARTIST, SHE FINDS HER INSPIRATION IN VARIOUS CREATIVE DISCIPLINES AND USES HER KNOWLEDGE OF COLOURS, TEXTURES, AND COMPOSITION TO BRING PLAYFULNESS TO ALL HER DESIGNS. MARK LINDQUIST IS A GRADUATE OF THE INAUGURAL YEAR OF THE MLA PROGRAM AT THE UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO AND HAS PRACTISED AND TAUGHT LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE AND URBAN DESIGN IN CANADA, NEW ZEALAND, THE USA, AND THE UNITED KINGDOM. HE IS CURRENTLY ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OF ENVIRONMENTAL DESIGN AT THE UNIVERSITY OF CALGARY, WHERE HE RESEARCHES PEOPLE-ENVIRONMENT RELATIONSHIPS MEDIATED BY DIGITAL MEDIA. IAN MALCZEWSKI IS A WRITER, URBAN PLANNER, AND TEACHER INTERESTED IN THE INTERSECTION OF CITIES, TECHNOLOGY, STORYTELLING, AND CIVIC ENGAGEMENT. HE'S AN ASSOCIATE WITH SWERHUN FACILITATION, A PUBLIC ENGAGEMENT FIRM, AND A MEMBER OF URBAN+DIGITAL, A GROUP FOCUSED ON EXPLORING THE INTERSECTION OF CITIES AND DIGITAL TECHNOLOGIES. LIAT MARGOLIS IS AN ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OF LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE AT THE UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO, JOHN H. DANIELS FACULTY OF ARCHITECTURE, LANDSCAPE, AND DESIGN. SHE IS ALSO THE PRINCIPAL INVESTIGATOR OF GRIT LAB (GREEN ROOF INNOVATION TESTING LABORATORY), WHERE SHE EXAMINES THE ENVIRONMENTAL PERFORMANCE OF GREEN ROOFS, GREEN FACADES, AND SOLAR TECHNOLOGIES. DENISE PINTO IS THE DIRECTOR OF JANE'S WALK, AN ANNUAL FESTIVAL OF URBAN EXPLORATION CELEBRATING THE LEGACY OF ACTIVIST AND WRITER JANE JACOBS. SHE HAS A PASSION FOR URBAN ISSUES, CITY PARKS, PLACE MAKING, AND PUBLIC DIALOGUE, AND AN UNWAVERING BELIEF IN THE POWER OF WEB-BASED TOOLS TO PROMOTE CIVIC PARTICIPATION. DENISE TEACHES AT THE INSTITUTE WITHOUT BOUNDARIES AND IS THE CHAIR OF THE GROUND EDITORIAL BOARD. VICTORIA TAYLOR, OALA, IS IN PRIVATE PRACTICE TO DESIGN SPACES INFORMED AND INSPIRED BY CONTEXT ECOLOGY, COMMUNITY ENGAGEMENT, AND SOCIAL AND HORTICULTURAL POSSIBILITIES. VICTORIA IS AN EDITORIAL BOARD MEMBER OF GROUND AND A LANDSCAPE CRITIC AT THE UNIVERSITY OF WATERLOO SCHOOL OF ARCHITECTURE.

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Denise Pinto (DP): In this issue, we’re exploring the ways that new media intersect with landscape architecture.

Digital technologies are shaping not only community outreach, participation, and engagement, but also transforming the tools we use to create landscape forms.

Think back twenty years ago. The technological jump we’ve taken since then is pretty incredible. And now think forward twenty years; how can we imagine a more equitable future in which there is not only more information but also equal access to it? Could each of you provide a description of what you work on that’s pertinent to this discussion?

Yasser Ansari (YA): I’m based in New York, and I started a company in 2010 called Network Organisms. I was finishing my Master’s degree in the Interactive Telecommunications Program at the Tisch School of Arts at NYU. The program involves technologists, artists, and designers working together to dream up future scenarios. I combined some of my greatest passions— the outdoors, nature, science geekery, biology—with the power of mobile devices.

Network Organisms launched a project called Project Noah, which is basically a digital butterfly net. I was reading a lot about how technology was disconnecting and dehumanizing us, and how we were all heads-down text-messaging instead of talking to people. The experiment was: well, can we turn that around? Can we turn technology into the most powerful window that’s ever been created to unlock and learn about the natural world? So, Project Noah has created a community that’s over 225,000 members strong now. The way it works is that you share photographs of your encounters with wildlife with this digital community. If you know what it is you’re looking at, it becomes a catalogue of species you’ve encountered. But if you have no idea what you’re looking at, you can farm it out to the community to help you identify the species, using a collaborative, crowdsourcing process.

We also have specific data-collecting tasks you can participate in. Many of them are for fun, such as “let’s document animal architecture” or “animal mimicry.” But others are for scientific data collecting: tracking invasive species, learning more about the distribution of particular species. With all of these observations, there is a photograph and a location attached to everything. We are basically creating a crowd-sourced, location-based field guide. When you launch the app in Toronto or Texas, you will see all the wildlife that the community has documented in and around where you happen to be. We were able to get National Geographic on board very early, so they are a part-owner of the company I created and they are the financial backer that’s allowed us to really build out and scale the platform.

We’ve built services and tools on top of the Project Noah platform for organizations like the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to help people document their encounters with wildlife in fish and wildlife refuges. We’re launching an Android-based tablet that’s going out to 25,000 students in North Carolina, and Project Noah is included in that as a way of getting kids engaged. The project is geared towards being welcoming to people who don’t know much about the natural world and who don’t really have other places where they can go to ask questions. Many communities that exist today are very specialized or expect you to have some sort of baseline knowledge of the natural world; I’m trying to change that and become more of a gateway drug for the next generation.

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Ontario, and there are still a lot of technical questions around what the ideal construction standard should be.

Our approach is to investigate such technologies contextually in terms of the regional climate and ecological conditions and also in terms of the infrastructural priorities of urban management; what are the city’s priorities in managing environmental systems? Is stormwater the most critical point and so we should gear all of our specifications and efforts towards retention of water during rain events, or is biodiversity as critical?

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Ian Malczewski (IM): I work with two different organizations: Swerhun Facilitation and Urban+Digital. I’m interested in the intersection of urbanization and technological innovation, the increasing ubiquity of technology in all aspects of our life, and how that’s influencing the way cities are governed, managed, and designed. I’m also interested in the way people connect stories to place.

At Swerhun Facilitation, we design and deliver public consultation processes to help connect public agencies with their constituents. We’ve worked with Metrolinx, the City of Toronto, and the Province of Ontario to deliver projects ranging from public transportation to urban design guidelines to public realm master plans. Right now I’m part of a team developing a parks, open space, and streetscape master plan at Yonge and Eglinton in Toronto. We’re using Ushahidi’s Crowdmap platform to solicit place-based stories about Yonge and Eglinton’s public spaces. The data will be part of the background analysis to understand how people are using the public realm in that community and, through that data, generate some ideas about the area’s potential future public realm.

At Urban+Digital, we’ve hosted two events.

The first was Open Data Day, which brought together people interested in technology and people interested in cities to talk about the possibilities open data could have for the city. Our second event was focused on transportation, specifically how technology is enabling new forms of urban mobility.

These are the kinds of issues we want to consider with regard to green roof technology specific to Southern Ontario and Toronto’s climate, and to figure out what is the most effective construction standard.

My specific interest is in informatics: tapping into environmental data to create unique interfaces. There are really interesting opportunities for landscape architects, planners, designers, and artists to leverage data and present it back in creative ways. A good example is the work of Natalie Jeremijenko, whose project “Amphibious Architecture” installed arrays of lights in the East River and Bronx River in New York City. The light arrays measured and displayed data about water quality by changing colour depending on the quality of the water. The lights would also blink if there were fish underneath. That accomplished two things: it told people about the quality of the water and raised awareness about the fact that there are actually fish in this very polluted body of water. So often technology separates us from our environment, but if used right, it can actually bring us closer to it.

Liat Margolis (LM): In 2010, I started a research lab, with a number of colleagues at the University of Toronto’s Daniels Faculty, called Green Roof Innovation Testing Laboratory (GRIT Lab). The idea was to develop a hands-on, practical approach to understanding environmental technologies.

We typically study environmental technologies and products from textbooks or industry brochures; we don’t really know whether they’re effective or optimal. Our approach at the GRIT Lab is to integrate sensor technology and real-time data acquisition to investigate that. More specifically, what prompted this current phase of GRIT Lab is Toronto’s green roof by-law, which came into effect in 2009 and mandates the construction of green roofs on all new construction above 2,000 square metres. The industry has grown tremendously in Southern

Another thing that’s really important for us is that the GRIT Lab is conceived as a teaching tool, a new form of pedagogy in architecture schools. It’s a hands-on, practical, and evidence-based approach to understanding environmental technologies, and it is centred around multi-disciplinary collaboration.

Within our lab we have a biologist and a number of people from the civil engineering department whose expertise ranges from hydrology to energy modeling. We collaborate with industry members who bring in very specific expertise and also their concerns about the way the industry is shaping

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up. We also have government funding and, as we establish our findings, we can have a direct conversation with the City about policies and guidelines. For us, this kind of platform, which engages in a multi-disciplinary and multi-institutional conversation, is a way to actually change the siloed educational model that we’re used to within our universities.

We’re also thinking about tools for visualizing the digital data. We have 270 sensors to date that record data every five minutes.

Over the next three to five years, we will have huge amounts of data and will be looking at ways to convey that information to the general public, to professionals, and to academics.

Ruthanne Henry (RH): I have worn a few different hats with Toronto Parks, Forestry and Recreation. Right now I am working as a capital project coordinator on several projects in our parks that are revitalizing different areas of the city. Before this position, I was working on urban forestry policy and, within this role, two years ago I initiated a project inspired by the New York City mobile app Trees Near You, which is for increasing awareness of tree benefits. This project was adapted for Toronto as part of the event Random Hacks of Kindness, which is a worldwide group of software engineers and IT specialists who volunteer on social/environmental projects for the public good. The event was very exciting; there were code writers working on the data,

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IT specialists remotely connecting from Europe, and others creating websites to temporarily host the data. Unfortunately, we did not get that far with the app, and the beta website developed by volunteers has since expired. All the data for approximately half a million Toronto street trees is still available, hosted on Toronto’s Open Data portal, and all that is needed is application designers to come on board again. If developed, this application would provide detailed tree information such as size, species, and condition for all street trees and could be linked with other existing websites that provide a summary of the economic value of the environmental benefits offered by trees. It could be a powerful public education tool.

I’ve also just finished a Masters in spatial analysis as part of the Urban Forest and Ecological Disturbance Research Group at Ryerson, which looks at environmental research or spatial analysis techniques to help us understand information about the urban forest in an applied way. My research used spatial analysis (ArcGIS and Vectorbased landscape analysis tools) to simulate future scenario implications of trail impacts within environmentally significant areas in Toronto.

Another project completed as part of my Masters (with two other students—Chris Scarpone and Noel Damba) used the Google API technology for mapping and

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the city’s tree canopy data to look at the correlation between housing prices and the amount of tree canopy across different areas. Our statistical conclusion was that there is a significant correlation between canopy cover and house values.

In general, I think there is a lot of opportunity to use technology, particularly mapping technology, to increase data sharing with the public and stakeholder communities that could be increasingly relevant to landscape architecture.

Svetlana Lavrentieva (SL): As a Senior Associate at Scott Torrance Landscape Architect Inc., I’m not a stranger to using digital tools for schematic designs,

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Natalie Jeremijenko’s Amphibious Architecture project

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Chris Woebken

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Thermal and infrared sensors at the GRIT Lab planting beds

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GRIT Lab

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Rendering of the GRIT Lab roof

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GRIT Lab

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The GRIT Lab website includes information about plants that are being tested on the roof.

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GRIT Lab

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Toronto Public Health’s heat vulnerability map

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City of Toronto

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Digital crowd-sourcing can be used by landscape architects to engage communities in design.

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Scott Torrance Landscape Architect Inc.

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presentations, and construction documents.

Ability to move through three-dimensional digital spaces allows us to immediately understand what will work in a particular space. As more architectural firms started to use Revit, we found ourselves producing more and more work using the same program. Now our collaboration process is much easier, as all the sub-consultants are able to see the central model and note deficiencies right away. Three-dimensional modeling is definitely an important work tool, but it can also be fun and creative.

Last year we were asked by Luminato’s Education and Community Outreach sector to work with Regent Park Focus Youth Media Arts Centre. We had ten weeks of workshops where the kids of Regent Park were able to visualize what the revitalization would look like if they were designers. We taught them basic Sketch-Up skills and we tried to take them on walks and do photography and hand-sketching. At the end of the day, of course, they knew more than we did in terms of how-to. It was great to engage the generation of 10- to 15-year-olds. Not only were the kids able to learn a new skill, but they were exposed to the landscape architecture profession as well. We have also been working with app developers to integrate open-source technology and crowd-source information in our design process, like an app for public consultation.

Marisa Bernstein (MB): I’m cofounder of Projexity, an online platform that enables people to design, fund, and help build projects in their neighbourhoods. The crux of Projexity is to get new ideas out there, give designers of all levels and abilities the

tools to get involved in shaping their city.

My co-founders and I had seen a lot of projects fizzle out or get value-engineered to death. We were frustrated by the status quo, so we brainstormed and came up with a platform that would give people an easy way to crowd-source all facets of a project.

We launched in April of this year with two pilot projects, one in Philadelphia and one in Toronto at Scadding Court Community Centre’s Market 707 (located at Bathurst and Dundas). Market 707 is comprised of a strip of shipping containers turned streetfood vending vessels. The market has been around for a couple years but because of its orientation to the street, it doesn’t get much visibility. Dundas Street does this weird curve, and you don’t see the market until you’re right there, and traffic zips around really quickly. The street-food vendors had some tables set up right along the street

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edge, but it was pretty precarious; there wasn’t a place for their patrons to sit and eat comfortably away from the street. We met with Scadding Court and suggested they launch a design competition and crowdsource the entire project because they didn’t have ideas of what they wanted, other than a comfortable seating space. So in April they used Projexity to run a design competition, crowd-fund the cost of building the patio, and gather volunteers. They ended up raising $6,500, filled four volunteer positions, and received 15 design competition entries.

The design proposals were then narrowed down through a public vote in which people could choose their favourite concept, and

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then the top three finalists presented their ideas to the community centre that runs the market. Stakeholders from the community were there, along with vendors from the market, and then collectively, after speaking to the finalists, a winner was chosen. We took a process that would normally take a lot longer and, with a lot of community engagement and design ideas from really talented folks in the city, we boiled the process down to five months.

For the project in Philadelphia, South Philadelphia High School (a veritable concrete jungle) used Projexity to connect with 14 volunteers and raise more than $27,000 for a campus-wide master plan featuring a rooftop farm/outdoor classroom and atgrade gardens and permeable surfaces.

Mark Lindquist (ML): I’ve been practising and researching various things with digital media, most recently in Sheffield, U.K. I just moved to Calgary two weeks ago. A lot of what I do involves public participation and using media in ways that can engage the public but also help the public understand what we as designers and planners do.

This started, for me, 15 years ago when I was a graduate student at the University of Toronto looking at the redevelopment of the waterfront in Toronto. At some of the public participation meetings the developers were having, they were just showing a plan and no one was really getting a sense of what the development would actually look like.

I’ve done projects in Canada, the U.S., New Zealand, and the U.K. I’ve been looking at what happens when you augment visualizations with different sense inputs, specifically audio. I picked a site in London, from Google Earth, and used Google Earth’s stillscreen shots as the visual material and then went to the actual site, St James’ Park, and did recordings at different times of the day.

The actual sounds with different visualizations significantly altered how people perceived the visualizations of the places. Now, I’m looking at moving that into a little less of an academic experiment and into a little more applied in a public practice or public participation realm.

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Victoria Taylor (VT): We’re interested to hear what you think is most exciting right now, beyond what you are working on.

What’s going to take us forward into new territories?

RH: A project through Ryerson University and Toronto Public Health is helping to address issues of equitable access.

The project looked at heat vulnerability in the city, and included data such as locations for high-density apartment buildings without air conditioning, surface temperatures, access to canopy in parkland, and income levels. This data has been shared so that the city’s forestry staff can utilize it when planning tree planting. Heat is a big issue with climate change, and an equitable distribution for the urban tree canopy is progressively related to health.

Another public-use example is a project

by Toronto artist Baye Hunter who takes coordinates from GPS units, downloads these into GIS for trees, and, using a Google API low-tech application, creates digital tree tours. In this way, the site shares landscape information and engages the community with an ever-expanding group of tree tours in some of Toronto’s most loved parks.

YA: One aspect that really interests me is the notion of on-demand knowledge and information. If we have a question,

we Google it. But now it’s becoming exceptionally easy to just connect with another human being for answers. If you’re in a park or garden, for example, it’s now possible for you to talk to the person who planted the tree you’re in front of and want to learn more about. Or, if you are trying to identify a bird, there’s a way for you to immediately talk to a bird expert who might be on the other side of the planet but can give you that information. It becomes a completely new way to interact with spaces.

SL: As a practitioner, something that I would like to see on Google Earth is information like sound or wind or sun pockets.

A site visit in June is not the same as a site visit in the winter or fall. It would be great to get that sense digitally, without waiting for those seasons to occur, so you know exactly what it would feel like at that time.

YA: Sensors are becoming cheaper and cheaper; you could put them everywhere.

We have unprecedented amounts of data across all sorts of different areas—whether it’s nature and wildlife observations, or where trees are planted, or temperature, 07/

Regent Park focus group collage poster

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Scott Torrance Landscape Architect Inc.

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DP: Marisa, in terms of crowd-sourcing public space projects, and crowd-sourcing citizen science, where do you see us being twenty years from now, and what are your hopes for the trajectory of that sort of engagement?

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humidity, oxygen levels, and CO2 emissions.

What can we do with that information and data that’s useful at a particular time and location?

LM: The challenges of these sensors is that, first of all, there are no standards of what instruments you use, how they’re calibrated, how you’re actually programming the data; there are no standards in terms of monitoring, collecting, or analyzing the data. Furthermore, the analysis is really complicated because these instruments break all the time.

The analytical part means that we have to make sense of the data. And a lot of times the data doesn’t make sense. There are anomalies that may have to be considered differently than the rest of the data set, like extreme weather events. And sometimes even the way the experiment is set up is not really correct and you realize it as you’re going along. Once you start delving into this data analysis, it’s really complicated. For instance, there is a figure for evapotranspiration that’s commonly used, and the assumption is that it can be applied to any type of landscape. But it’s not necessarily always applicable for different soils, different plants. There’s a figure for grass, but if applied to other plants, the results might be off. So it’s necessary to generate the appropriate figures to begin with, and rethink and recalibrate the data outputs.

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A Philadelphia high school used Projexity to engage volunteers and to fundraise.

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Lauren Mandel

And, of course, ecological succession plays a huge role. A lot of times when people do studies on vegetated roofs, they’ll collect data for only a year or two. The reality is that over time these landscapes change quite radically. Go back in five years and assess the data and you may get a completely different composition in terms of vegetation. And the trick is to not only properly analyze the data, but to ask the right questions. The challenge is to come up with one construction standard that fits all weather conditions and that also serves as the best mechanism for various environmental performance criteria. The jury is still out on that.

A big question for us is: what environmental performance criteria should be prioritized in this region and what aspects of the green roof could address these?

DP: Are there tools you know of that are helping us navigate the complex question of how we figure out what the priorities are before we assess the data?

YA: One thing we do know about the future is that the data we’re collecting now is not going to slow down. There’s only going to be more and more data being collected by more and more sensors, in more and more places. Some of the things Liat brought up about the errors in the analysis, and figuring out and making sense of it, yes, these are issues that we are experiencing today. But we can make an assumption that we’ll get better at analyzing the data down the road.

The other assumption we can make is that we’re understanding more and more about how people are interacting with places.

Crowd-sourcing will continue to be around, but how does it evolve and change, and what sorts of things become possible ten or fifteen years down the road?

MB: Crowd-sourcing definitely has its own momentum, and there’s another momentum that intersects with that: people’s desire to have more transparency in the process and, thereby, more accountability. With Projexity, we want to make things as transparent as possible. Every project is going to come across its own obstacles, but if people know what’s going on, and who is accountable, and where the red tape lies, there’s an easier way to break through that. I think crowd-sourcing public space projects will gain more and more momentum as people become fed up with, and therefore involved in, how their cities are being developed.

DP: Where do you see the role of landscape architecture within a future where crowdsourcing is playing a bigger role, and people are more engaged in general in what happens in their cities?

IM: I saw something really cool the other day: it was a beta 3-D model of Toronto built using a video game engine. You could navigate the city on a massive touch screen and, through a number of menus, explore the impacts of different design or policy decisions in an area. Say Yonge and Dundas, for example—what would that area look like if buildings around the square were 50 metres high? Or 100? A video game has its own errors and idiosyncrasies, but it gives you a little bit more of a real world sense of what that looks like. And that’s a technology that’s available now, not twenty years into the future.

YA: It’s interesting to think about the amateurization of everything. You don’t have to have a PhD to go out and make a breakthrough in science when you have a history teacher in Brazil discovering a new species.

If all these tools and these capabilities are available, or becoming available to people who aren’t professionally trained, then things will open up. I deal with scientists who say that as more and more amateurs get plugged in, this is going to be messy; there’s no expertise. Then there’s the other perspective from scientists who say this is

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amazing, this is the most powerful way to engage the public. This question is relevant to the creation of spaces. If everyone can participate in sharing an idea, what does that mean for larger firms and the way we build cities and the way people interact with cities?

MB: I think there’s going to be an emerging class that comes out of this kind of crowdsourcing. Just-out-of-school designers are rarely given the opportunity to get their projects built, yet often these are the people who are absolutely brimming with bold, forward-thinking ideas. I think our urban spaces could use more bold ideas, and so the question is, how do we give emerging designers a shot at truly enacting positive change within the urban realm? It’s something that we’re trying to do with Projexity and it will require a bit of experimentation to get it right. It doesn’t matter if you don’t know how to put together a set of working drawings; that stuff you can learn later. We’ll get the drawings stamped by someone else, but what we need now are innovative concepts; relevant, sensible, tactile design work applied to real-world urban projects across a multitude of scales and typologies. I think if we can increase participation in these projects, you get more people willing to throw their hat into the mix, then we won’t have as much bottom-line design as we do now.

YA: How does that impact ownership? For me, the dream is: what if I put together a crowd-funding campaign and ten thousand people give me a little bit of money, and we’re able to team up with a land management organization in Costa Rica or Ecuador and do a crowd-sourced nature park? One that was owned by people from around the world who participated in it and worked with people locally on the ground to administer and manage it? That’s never been done before. Cities are made by architects and politicians. What if anyone, anywhere, could get together with people and make an impact in the city, build a structure, build their own park?

MB: Or, in some cases, prevent something detrimental from being built.

DP: With crowd participation and design, we’re talking about tearing down barriers.

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This strikes me as a precedent about how designers in the field are working with the public to create an awareness and an understanding of design tools.

SL: It’s great when crowd-sourcing is positive. But then there’s the opposite, when some people are feeding the public unanalyzed data that’s not necessarily correct and it really hurts the project.

Revit is a great tool for 3-D modeling when you are working with multiple sub-consultants. It would be great to see additional layers being implemented into the families, such as cost. While you are building a model, you can see right away whether or not you have exceeded your budget.

LM: The crux of the issue in my mind would be the metadata. What data are we feeding the Revit system? What’s the figure that we give a tree? What’s the value? It really is relative based on the kinds of questions we ask or the performance criteria we’re after.

That’s the danger in data.

Another issue I think about is the dimension of time. With these digital technologies, we have an immediate response, immediate distribution, dissemination, and everything available at the touch of your fingers. We should also think about a slower pace, a longer duration of time that we employ to observe and assess changes in the environment and in climate patterns, and how our design interventions function relative to these changes.

YA: That’s a really fantastic point, and it connects with the notion of memory. What sort of memory can we embed into the places we spend time in, either long periods or short periods of time, and how do all those memories coincide with other peoples’ experiences? What can we do with that sort of information—this imprint that’s left behind?

LM: In landscape architecture we’re taught to map the dynamics of environmental systems over time, and to work with this dynamism. I think that digital media allows us to truly understand change and to not only respond in real time, but also over time. This will help us understand how to better evolve design.

In my research, for instance, the findings we come up with today may be completely irrelevant in ten or twenty years from now because our cities will have much more impervious surfaces, and stormwater management criteria may change accordingly.

Weather systems may also change. So what worked ten years ago wouldn’t necessarily work anymore. Policy would need to change, practices would need to change.

One idea is to embed sensors into every project that we build, and begin to collect these data streams. What it means is that, as landscape architects, we need to become familiar with these ubiquitous technologies to integrate them into projects.

DP: Let’s go around the table and offer final thoughts.

RH: Expand your horizons. Don’t be afraid of technology or to expand into coding and things like that; there are so many resources to help you do it. There are all sorts of freeware options emerging, and software is available to help create interactive digital maps.

SL: Design for the future. Our urban spaces are all becoming Ikea spaces, where every five years we change them. Let’s design for something that can last, or that can be flexible. We’ll need to get data on how some spaces will look in five years, because it’s going to look completely different just based on how it has been used, how it was maintained, what kind of housing was built around it, etc.

MB: We need to keep pushing the boundaries of design. My take on this is a kind of activist approach—don’t get complacent.

This is your city, make your mark on your city, engage with communities, come to the table with other stakeholders and implement awesome projects. Simple as that.

YA: I think we’re entering this really exciting age in which everyone can participate in and influence the development of public spaces and the maintenance of public spaces. I encourage everyone to get involved with shaping their environment.

We’re jetting into this new age where all this stuff is more powerful and prevalent like never before. And that’s very, very exciting.

WITH THANKS TO ALANA DE HAAN AND JEFF BEATON FOR TRANSCRIBING THIS ROUND TABLE DISCUSSION.

The Cinematic Flâneur

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“Perception itself gives rise to the term ‘landscape,’ which literally means the portion of land that the eye can comprehend in a single view.”

—Carol Burns, “On Site: Architectural Preoccupations,” in Drawing, Building, Text: Essays in Architectural Theory (edited by Andrea Kahn)

TEXT BY MARTIN HOGUE

On Wednesday, December 17, 2008, I strapped a small Flip VideoTM camera to the front of my courier bag and, for over an hour, wandered anonymously around Dundas Square in Toronto during the busy holiday shopping season. Beginning and ending at the second-floor food court above the AMC movie theater, moving up and down escalators, from inside to outside, meandering from one store to another, I observed the sales staff, shoppers, and passersby. Because my camera was hidden from view with only the eye of the lens peeking out, I was able to wander and surreptitiously record these interactions—the world as seen from a spot six inches below my chin.

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The Cinematic Flâneur

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The modern fascination with recording any and all aspects of one’s life might make the resulting film unremarkable in every respect: with cheap technology like smartphone cameras and a variety of social media outlets such as YouTube and Facebook, it seems as if no event, however small, is immune to the publicity of the Web, and that anyone can fancy themselves an author or filmmaker.

Recently, the Swiss landscape architect Christophe Girot has begun to codify the use of short, student-made films as part of a process of site exploration in design studios. In doing so, Girot references a rich tradition from the late 1960s and 70s in which artists used film and cinematic

photography to explore sites and document built work. Best known among these are Ed Ruscha’s 25-foot-long photographic montage Every Building on the Sunset Strip (1966), and Michael Snow’s experimental film Région Centrale (1971), for which the Canadian artist rigged a camera that could freely pivot 360 degrees in every direction to document a deserted mountainous landscape in Northern Quebec.

With a few notable exceptions during this time period, however, the medium of film and/or video has enjoyed remarkably little use in the field of design. For the seminal Learning from Las Vegas (1968), architects Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and

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A montage showing different arrangements of the film stills facilitates cross-referencing and comparisons.

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Martin Hogue

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The Cinematic Flâneur

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Steven Izenour strapped a camera to the hood of their car to document the visual experience of driving at medium speed along the Vegas strip. Venturi referred to these montages as “Ed Ruscha” elevations, highlighting the crossover potential of Ruscha’s seminal project for architects and landscape architects.

It is plain to see why Ruscha’s conceptual discipline in approaching the documentation of the Sunset Strip would appeal to designers: as in a landscape inventory, the incorporation of the word “Every” in the title functions as both a ground rule for the project and characterizes its formal result.

The flatness of the two street elevations suggests that the artist was shooting at a consistent distance from, and parallel to, the building facades, allowing the images to be easily assembled: the resulting work functions more like an orthographic section or elevation like those found in a set of design drawings. In a recent interview, Ruscha offered that he had rephotographed the Strip several times since, evoking obsessive themes and concerns that often appear time and again in many designers’ work.

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Borrowing from Ruscha, Venturi, Scott Brown, and others, my goal in approaching Dundas Square was not simply to use film as a medium of site exploration, but also to tap into the unique potential that might come from combining the disciplinary rigour of traditional filmmaking with that of drawing and design thinking. Bernard Tschumi’s repetitive diagrams and perspectives for the Manhattan Transcripts (1981) constitute a good example of this hybrid approach to representation, since they enhance the traditional stillness and immobility of drawing through the dynamic, transformative prism of film. Tschumi’s splicing of individual diagrams into linear strips read as if they might have been taken from a film spool, each new frame a minute transformation from the previous illustration.

Following a similar, cross-disciplinary approach, I felt that the original footage generated by walking around Dundas Square should serve not as an end product, but as a point of departure. From the film, I extracted a series of squared-off, photographic stills (1 frame per 30 seconds) that could then be used in the making of new analytical drawings. Because the same 144 stills were used to produce three different arrangements, the montages could be easily compared and cross-referenced: in the most conventional arrangement, they appear in a line, from left to right, recalling the chronology of the original film (stills on the left represent the beginning of

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...these representations function both as drawings and cinematic renderings, borrowing from both fields equally to form new, hybrid techniques of site exploration

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the film, and so on). The other representations function like familiar drawing types: in a second variation, the same chronological sequence is preserved but the frames shift up and down in groups so as to reference the sectional levels around the square. In the most expansive montage, the stills are arranged into an imaginary grid so as to form a geographically correct (yet somewhat abstracted) map of Dundas Square and adjacent streets, buildings, and interior spaces.

One of the subtler features in Ruscha’s crossover, disciplinary appeal is his use of text annotations similar to those that might be found in design drawings. These do not simply inform the photographs in a basic sense of helping to identify individual building addresses and cross streets; they also provide a discrete visual structure to the work as well. Further, the deliberate folding of the photographic montage into

a book-sized accordion suggests dueling meters (the page and the photographic frame), recalling a rhythmic cadence typical of complex spatial organization.

Similarly, the original photographic footage is transformed using a range of annotative techniques, recalling not only design drawings but concerns specific to landscape. Throughout the montages, for example, photos are lightened to represent indoor sequences along the walk. Images are cropped into squares so they can be more easily arranged vertically and laterally into lines and fields. Further, a series of visual cues (text, lines, tick marks, etc.) establishes key references such as streets, major stores, even a time stamp. In this way, these representations function both as drawings and cinematic renderings, borrowing from both fields equally to form new, hybrid techniques of site exploration.

Because they employ the same images, no single drawing establishes an authoritative whole. Instead, different versions of the same story emerge: like the flâneur,

the reader can move back and forth between these representations, their experience and understanding of the site enhanced.

BIO/ MARTIN HOGUE IS THE WILLIAM MUNSEY KENNEDY JR. FELLOW AT THE STATE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK’S DEPARTMENT OF LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE IN THE COLLEGE OF ENVIRONMENTAL FORESTRY, WHERE HAS WORKED SINCE 2010.

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In this image, stills extracted from the original video footage are arranged in a grid to form a geographically correct, yet abstracted, map of Dundas Square and adjacent streets, buildings, and interior spaces.

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Martin Hogue

Big Data vs. Small Data

Ground magazine’s Denise Pinto sat down with Lori and Rodney Hoinkes in Toronto’s Liberty Village to discuss their design of a unique app aimed at creating dialogue in public space. With a combined background in real estate and landscape architecture, and a shared passion for community engagement, the two launched their app during the Jane’s Walk festival in Toronto in May, 2013.

Using technology to spark public dialogue

Denise Pinto (DP): Could you introduce yourselves to our readers?

Lori Hoinkes (LH): I was born and raised in Toronto and love the city but am new to Liberty Village. Moving to the area in March, 2010, I set out to learn as much as I could about this new community. I work as a real estate agent, which gives me a chance to share my knowledge.

Rodney Hoinkes (RH): My background is in landscape architecture (BLA, University of Toronto, D.Design, Harvard GSD) but with a parallel track in computing and communication. I have taught in landscape architecture, architecture, urban design, and geography. I currently hold an appointment in landscape architecture at the University of Toronto and have worked with the Centre for Landscape Research for more than twenty years. I am also a serial entrepreneur, having co-founded and led technology development at a number of companies engaged in advanced experiences

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During the Jane’s Walk festival, participants on a walk through Liberty Village used an app designed by Lori and Rodney Hoinkes to interact with public space.

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Jeremy Kai

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for education, design, and community engagement (Immersion Studios, Parallel World Labs—pwlabs.com—and, most recently, ParkBench.com).

DP: You refer in your blog (www.torontorealestateblog.com/ janes-walk-app) to “big data” and “small data.” Can you unpack those terms?

RH: Big data is a term getting a lot of buzz these days. It refers to large-scale activities captured as data that organizations and governments are trying to understand and derive useful patterns from. In design, this is often linked to concepts such as transportation, land-use patterns, energy consumption, and public health. Small data is the antithesis of big data. It’s those elements of our cities that are not captured well in patterns, not readily observed, tracked, and studied. Enigmatic or small data helps distinguish place, while larger-scale patterns such as gentrification, intensification, and traditional views of mixed use tend to result in homogenization of place.

Thinking about the future, designing our communities is not simply a matter of continuing to follow current trends (the typical focus of big data). Rather, it’s looking at unique characteristics, opportunities, and insights fused with trends, which allows inspired designers and communities to design with leadership and creativity while still remaining rooted in the distinctness of place.

Big Data vs. Small Data

LH: For me, big data/small data has a slightly different meaning. Big data refers to the things you readily see and know about a neighbourhood, whereas small data can not be so easily known or observed.

However, small data plays a huge role in defining a place and making it what it is. We wanted to share the small data about our neighbourhood, Liberty Village.

DP: What makes small data so powerful in a neighbourhood like Toronto’s Liberty Village?

LH: From the outside, you could think of Liberty Village as just a bunch of condo towers, but peel back the layers and there is so much more: high-tech start-ups, entrepreneurs with big ideas, artists, a growing number of young families. There are also a number of people working to build the sense of community here and to connect people with each other: Homegrown National Park, Liberty Village Residents Association, Liberty Village Board Game Group, Liberty Grace Church...

RH: The patterns intrinsic to the space and architecture, rooted in past roles and current redevelopment, distinctly shape the usage patterns of the village. The behaviour of individuals, speed of development, and demographic patterns shifting at a pace far faster than census timelines, reveal characteristics on the ground that challenge preconceived notions of this type of condo community.

DP: Describe the moment you first had the idea to make an app.

LH: Doing research for the Jane’s Walk we were leading in 2013, we found we were uncovering so much more than we could possibly talk about in 90 minutes. In addition, we were finding some great photos.

We realized very quickly that an app could help with sharing the information and allowing people to explore the information in a different way.

RH: We felt that to do the topics justice we needed a means of providing alternative views, thought-provoking comparisons and contrasts. This naturally seemed to be the fit for a mobile app.

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DP: Can you describe the app and how it works?

RH: The app is quite simple. It consists of content linked to geographic locations. As users of the app walk around Liberty Village, the app will automatically bring forth content for their current geographic location using the smartphone built-in GPS. The content itself was organized to spark dialogue by providing a primary image that leads to the question “so what?” Each image then has up to four supplemental images that can be enlarged to feed the questioning by providing contrasting views, issues, or insights on the main concept. This was not meant to be a history lesson about Liberty Village, but rather the sharing of ways of thinking about and seeing our communities.

DP: How did you balance attention to the device and attention to your physical surrounds on the Jane’s Walk?

LH: We brought a number of iPads to the walk and shared them among the attendees. In a couple of places, we focused on the content from the app so people could share, discuss, and explore together.

RH: The app served its purpose well, though bright sunlight and typical computer screens are not ideal partners for the most part. The app allowed us to show sights and share insights that were linked but not directly visible to people participating in the walk. It made concepts instantly visible and provided depth that can be difficult to portray verbally. Sub-groups of participants in the walk would at times cluster around a screen and discuss what they were looking at.

DP: So, you’re also working with the Homegrown National Park initiative, in Toronto’s Garrison Creek neighbourhood, to spread this tech to new communities?

RH: While the Jane’s Walk app had a specific initial purpose, it was made with future re-use in mind. We’re now using it for the Homegrown National Park initiative, which follows the communities along the buried Garrison Creek in Toronto (including Liberty Village). The re-use has been targeted at exposing the hidden landscape of the

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lost river and community endeavours to reimagine it as a new type of urban national park owned and developed by the public (crowd-sourced). This has resulted in an app that supports changing data, Internet updates, live events, and more complex place-based data. We are integrating this with other community data from official sources (City of Toronto Open Data), community groups (Lost Rivers), and crowdsourcing (ParkBench.com). Ultimately, we hope to have an app well-suited to local and specific community engagement supporting big and small data.

DP: What are the lessons for landscape architects? How do we incorporate these sorts of digital tools into contemporary practice?

RH: In physical fabrication, we are willing to consider crafting things for our projects and their unique needs, but we don’t often consider that we could do the same in the digital realm. We risk that other disciplines will dictate what is important to the future we are trying to shape. Thankfully, digital tools are also flexible and malleable if pursued with insight and vision. Let’s open our eyes to this opportunity!

BIOS/ LORI HOINKES IS AN ENGINEER AND PROJECT MANAGER BY TRADE BUT AN ACTIVE COMMUNITY ORGANIZER BY PASSION, WITH STRONG TIES TO THE LIBERTY VILLAGE NEIGHBOURHOOD. RODNEY HOINKES STRADDLES THE LINE BETWEEN HIS LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE TEACHING AND RESEARCH, AND ADVANCING THE STATE OF THE ART AS A NEW MEDIA ENTREPRENEUR. DENISE PINTO IS THE EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR OF JANE’S WALK AND CHAIR OF THE GROUND EDITORIAL BOARD.

New Media Resources for Landscape Architecture

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Paper http://www.fiftythree.com/paper A platform for creating freehand sketches, diagrams, illustrations, notes, or drawings on your iPhone or iPad with the capability of sharing them on the Web or e-mailing them to colleagues or clients. (Free)

PODCASTS Urban Design Podcast http://www.urbandesignpodcast.com/ Urban Design Podcast acts as a meeting ground for urban designers, bringing you interviews with professionals involved in shaping cities around the world, working on projects small and large.

COMPILED BY ADRIENNE HALL

APPS Gone are the days when landscape architects depended solely on books and magazines for information. A brave new world of resources has opened up and, with it, an overwhelming array of new tools and new methods, many of them on the cutting edge of rapidly evolving technologies. In the following annotated list, we’ve compiled a selection of new media resources that can assist landscape architects in their work—everything from in-thefield plant identification to displaying your work at meetings. Many thanks to the people who responded to Ground’s request for suggestions.

Dirr’s Tree and Shrub Finder https://itunes.apple.com/ca/app/ dirrs-tree-and-shrub-finder/ id410437012?mt=8 This classic manual is now available in the form of an app. Search more than 9,400 woody plants by scientific name, common name, or characteristics. Currently available for iPhone only; iPad and Android apps to follow. ($14.99) Audubon Trees & Wildflowers https://itunes.apple.com/ca/app/ audubon-trees/id334843956?mt=8 https://itunes.apple.com/ca/app/ audubon-wildflowers/id334844148?mt=8 Useful for field identification and mapping.

Available on iPhone and Android devices. ($14.99) Awesome Files https://itunes.apple.com/ca/app/ awesome-files-iexplorer-mobile/ id415437381?mt=8 Awesome Files is a file manager that allows you to view files and documents on your iPhone or iPad. Recommended by a Ground reader for displaying PDFs at presentations and meetings. ($4.99)

Terragrams http://www.terragrams.com Thoughtful and inspiring interviews conducted by Craig Verzone, ASLA, with prominent landscape architects from around the globe.

Cities Alive http://pdcentre.ca/2013/07/ pdc-podcast-pilot-cities-alive/ Cities Alive is a new podcast initiated by the Planning and Design Centre in Halifax, which aims to facilitate planning dialogue with the public. Produced by University of Guelph BLA grad Danielle Davis, each episode weaves together stories from citizens, change-makers, experts, and artists from the Atlantic region and abroad.

ONLINE TOOLS / REFERENCE Streetmix http://streetmix.net A quick way to play around with street ROW sections that might be faster than CAD. You can save and share your favourite street configurations, too.

Leafsnap http://leafsnap.com/ Leafsnap is a streamlined electronic fieldguide, featuring high-resolution images of leaves, flowers, fruit, petioles, seeds, and bark. Currently focused on the northeastern United States and Ontario.

New Media Resources for Landscape Architecture

Projexity https://projexity.com/ Projexity is a crowd-funding website that aims to pool collective talent and funds to support urban design and improvement initiatives started by others. Founded in Toronto, its start-up projects include a design competition and successful funding for a patio at Market 707 on Dundas Street at Bathurst in Toronto. (See Up Front story on page 6 of this issue of Ground.)

University of Connecticut Plant Database www.hort.uconn.edu/Plants/index.html A handy, quick, and free online guide to trees, shrubs, and vines.

Connon Nurseries Plant Database http://plants.connon.ca/11100004 Connon’s desk companion is now available online, featuring most of Connon Nursery’s stock, searchable by name and characteristics.

ONLINE COMMUNITIES The Land 8 Lounge http://land8.com/ The premiere website for landscape architects socializing on the Web, Land8’s forum is the place find out about international practice, have your portfolio reviewed, and share experiences with new and wizened practitioners alike.

WEB ATLASES Canadian Society of Landscape Architects http://www.csla-aapc.caawards/ award-atlas The CSLA’s Award Atlas is a project-inprocess that maps and catalogues all CSLA awards projects across Canada.

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BLOGS Inhabitat http://inhabitat.com/ Inhabitat reports daily on bits and pieces of design innovation in technology, practices, and materials, all geared towards a smarter and more sustainable future.

Gardenista http://www.gardenista.com Covers everything about the garden, from high-style seasonal arrangements to tips for squirrel-proofing your crocuses.

BLDGBLOG http://bldgblog.blogspot.ca Geoff Manaugh writes a thought-provoking, well-researched, and inspirational journal weaving art, science, myth, and culture with landscape.

Pruned http://pruned.blogspot.ca Writing on all the wacky and wild things that just might inspire a landscape architect.

ASLA Dirt http://dirt.asla.org/ Far more than just the American Society of Landscape Architects’ blog, The Dirt covers weekly news on the built and natural environment in addition to relevant developments in “land and water use, urbanization, transportation, and climate change.”

Grounded Design by Thomas Rainer http://landscapeofmeaning.blogspot.ca/ Thomas Rainer is a landscape architect busy digging, thinking, and writing in Washington, D.C. From discussing “The Most Important Landscape Book Since McHarg’s Design with Nature” to pondering our North American obsession with mulch, Rainer writes from experience with wit.

Spacing http://www.spacing.ca Spacing is the online headquarters for all urban goings-on in Canada, from thoughtful dissemination of current affairs to photos of “The Oldest Catch Basin Grate in Toronto.”

Design Observer - Places http://places.designobserver.com/ Places is an interdisciplinary journal on the contemporary intersection of architecture, urbanism, and landscape, featuring observations, essays, and visual galleries along with peer-reviewed scholarship. Once a print journal founded by faculty at MIT and Berkeley, Places is now published entirely online.

The Polis Blog http://www.thepolisblog.org/ Polis is a truly international blog, written about cities by contributors around the globe. Dedicated to issues of urban welfare and inclusivity, Polis aims to facilitate “dialogue and collaboration toward improving the quality of life in cities.”

The PPS Placemaking Blog http://www.pps.org/ Project for Public Spaces (PPS) publishes food for thought on citizen-centric urban design in their weekly blog. In addition, they have created a database of more than 650 “Great Public Spaces,” which is complemented by their infamous Hall of Shame.

DATABASES Landezine http://www.landezine.com/ A growing geographic database of contemporary landscape architecture projects around the globe, along with beautiful photos and site statistics. Currently focused on Europe with the intent to expand globally.

They invite submissions of projects to be added to the map.

TCLF’s What’s Out There http://tclf.org The Cultural Landscape Foundation is dedicated to increasing public awareness of the importance of cultural landscapes in the United States and beyond. Spanning over two centuries of American landscape design, the What’s Out There® database catalogues more than 1,400 designed and vernacular treasures, searchable by landscape name, locale, designer, type, and style.

HAVE ANOTHER FAVOURITE RESOURCE? SHARE IT WITH US ON TWITTER! @GROUNDMAG. BIO/ ADRIENNE HALL IS A MEMBER OF THE GROUND EDITORIAL BOARD AND A LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURAL INTERN WITH NAK DESIGN STRATEGIES IN TORONTO.

Sites of Value

Garden of the Provinces and Territories

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Sites of Value

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TEXT BY NICOLE VALOIS ORIGINALLY WRITTEN IN FRENCH. TRANSLATED BY NANCY DUNTON

Garden of the Provinces and Territories Owner: Public Works and Government Services Canada (PWGSC) Location: Wellington Street, Ottawa Construction: 1962 Design: Don Graham under the supervision of Edward I. Wood, National Capital Commission (NCC) Sculpture: Tree Fountain / Fontaine arborescente, Norman Slater, industrial designer, Montreal, 1961-62 Fountain of the Great Lakes / La fontaine des Grands Lacs, Emil G. van der Meulen, designer, Adjeleian and Associates, Consulting Engineers, 1962 Restoration: 2005, cost $2.5 million, Ivan Matrtaj, project manager PWGSC. Scope of work: addition of ramps for accessibility and new pumping system, rehabilitation of Tree Fountain, and repointing of masonry “Views of Gatineau Hills and Ottawa River are seen to the north and west.

It is a spot of green open space for pedestrians in a busy section of the city.

It provides a transition from large Government Buildings along Wellington Street to the smaller scale of the City to the west. “ —Fact sheet on the Garden of the Provinces, by D. W. Graham, Assistant Landscape Architect, April 2, 1962.

Personal archives of Don Graham.

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Recent (2013) view of the upper terrace of the Garden of the Provinces and Territories with Fountain of the Great Lakes in the background

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National Capital Commission

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Elevation drawing, circa 1961

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Don Graham personal archive

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Night view of Fountain of the Great Lakes, circa 1962

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Don Graham personal archive

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Designed in 1962 by Don Graham and originally called the Garden of the Provinces, the Garden of the Provinces and Territories (GPT) in Ottawa is a significant work of landscape architecture of the modernist era in Canada. Situated at the western end of Wellington Street, the ensemble of terraced landings enhanced by trees and sculpture constitutes an important space of both representation and relaxation that is unique in the downtown core. It is notable for the elegance of its formal style, the clarity of its composition, and its balanced form—all characteristic of the construction of the era.

Its historic and aesthetic interest and its modernist look are two reasons for the attention paid to it when it was restored ten years ago. As a result of the work of several ardent defenders of modernist architecture in Ottawa, the GPT was written about in the media, was the subject of different conferences, and won a conservation award.1 This article is based on that work as well as on the information uncovered in research.2 It is hoped that this will add to the understanding of the site and, more importantly, will help to sustain interest in it.

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Aerial view towards LeBreton Flats

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National Capital Commission

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Aerial view rendering

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Don Graham personal archive

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Recent view (2012) of Tree Fountain

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National Capital Commission

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As its name indicates, the GPT represents the provinces and territories of Canada.3 The themes of landscape and of the provinces, symbolized by their provincial flags and floral emblems and by the two fountains, contribute to identifying Canada as a vast and inclusive country.4 Built in 1960-1962, the garden represents the mounting nationalism in Ottawa which gave rise to the legislation creating the National Capital Commission (NCC) in 1958. The exact conditions of the mandate remain to be examined, but it is certainly true that the GPT responded to the mission of the newly created NCC “to develop, conserve and improve the National Capital Region in accordance with its national significance.”5 As a composition, the design of the terraces is of an exceptional aesthetic quality. The harmony of forms, the variety of spaces, the integration of works of art, and the choice of materials all attest to this. The low, rough-cut stone wall along Sparks Street is remarkable, an echo of St. Peter’s Church. The gothic motif on the inner face of the wall helps to create a link between the church and the site, as the program intended. The wide landings separated by limestone stairs and low walls constitute a particularly appropriate response to the sloped site.

The use of simple forms in a regular pattern, the balance between hard and soft surfaces, and the choice of materials are all excellent examples of the savoir faire of this period in landscape architecture. The composition recalls the work of modern landscape architects such as Sasaki Associates (for example, their Deere & Company World Headquarters). The formal characteristics illustrate the modernist approach taken by Don W. Graham, who was given carte blanche to create this space. The idea of creating a neighbourhood park, linking the buildings by connecting passages, and integrating works of art was, however, part of the original program. Together, these aspects combined to create an urban

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project that required the participation of a diverse range of professionals. Clearly, Don Graham put his education at Harvard— where modernism held sway6—to good use. It is certainly true that he made use of the team approach, in which the landscape architect works with many different professionals to carry out a project; engineers, sculptors, and experts in different materials all worked with him as a team on the project. In this sense the GPT is also representative of the multi-disciplinarity that was so present in the field at the time.

The GPT is unique. If its environs actually limit the number of people who use it (it seems to be principally used as a shortcut across the block), it is a safe assumption that development of the LeBreton Flats will increase both the use and the appreciation of the garden. Recognized as one of the rare examples of modernist landscape architecture of quality in the capital, it is reasonable to expect that the GPT has potential for heritage designation. In the meantime, the GPT takes its place as part of a rich body of work—even if it is still little known—that marks the designed landscape of this period in Canada.

THANKS TO JOHN ZVONAR, OALA, FOR HIS GENEROUS COLLABORATION BOTH IN ANSWERING QUESTIONS AND IN LENDING THE DOCUMENTS IN HIS ARCHIVES FOR THIS RESEARCH. THANKS TO DON GRAHAM, OALA, FOR HAVING KINDLY AGREED TO AN INTERVIEW. ALSO THANKS TO NANCY DUNTON FOR THE TRANSLATION. BIO/ NICOLE VALOIS IS A LANDSCAPE ARCHITECT AND ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR AT THE ÉCOLE D’ARCHITECTURE DE PAYSAGE DE L’UNIVERSITÉ DE MONTRÉAL WHERE SHE TEACHES DESIGN STUDIO AND PROJECT METHODOLOGY. HER RESEARCH FOCUSES ON MODERN HERITAGE OF DESIGNED LANDSCAPE, PUBLIC SPACE, AND NEW PRACTICE IN LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE.

Footnotes 1 The Garden of the Provinces and Territories received the Certificate of Merit in 2005 at the Ottawa Architectural Conservation Awards for the restoration work. See also J. E. Zvonar, Garden of the Provinces...finally Taking Centre Stage! / Le jardin des provinces prend enfin la vedette (paper presented at Conserving the Modern in Canada: Buildings, ensembles, and sites: 1945-2005, Trent University, Peterborough, ON, 2005).

2 This article draws from the research project Les valeurs patrimoniales vues par le public: étude de cas (supported by the Insight Development Grant program of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council). Research team: Nicole Valois, Claudine Déom, Christina Cameron, Judith Herrmann, Émilie Doré-Vézina, Ève Wertheimer, David Murray, and Eva Novea, as well as many collaborators.

3 This article deals principally with the built form of the GPT, the terraces, which are unquestionably the most interesting part of the garden.

4 The Tree Fountain by Norman Slater refers to the Canadian forest; the work of Emil G. van der Meulen refers to the Great Lakes.

5 National Capital Commission, “About the NCC : History,” www.ncc-ccn.gc.ca/about-ncc.

6 Graham graduated from Agriculture at McGill in 1952. Don Petit, designer of La Ronde, was his professor. Subsequently, encouraged by Edward I. Wood, landscape architect at the Federal District Commission (predecessor of the NCC), he went on to study at the Graduate School of Design at Harvard at the high point of the modernist movement at the school.

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Panoramic view (2012) of Fountain of the Great Lakes

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Canada Research Chair on Built Heritage

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Detail of Tree Fountain

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Canada Research Chair on Built Heritage

Education Corner

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01 TEXT BY ERIC GORDON, OALA

Changes to our professional tool kit

As landscape architects, we often refer to our work as marrying science and art: “science” being the ecological and structural elements of our work, and “art” being our creative skills. However, in a world that is increasingly information-rich, the software tools that gather and analyze environmental data are playing a progressively important and indispensable role in our work. We are in the midst of a shift toward a more data-driven design process, and are now incorporating a new type of “science” into our tool kit.

Geodesign is the current buzzword and umbrella term that refers to design or planning informed by the feedback garnered from geographically contextualized simulations. Typically these simulations are run through a geospatial analysis program—commonly referred to as GIS (Geographic Information Systems). GIS data sets are compiled from a variety of sources, such as topographical measurements, censuses, building information, plant identification, and health and weather tracking systems, etc. Most importantly, the data can be drawn from any particular location—a parcel, building, or even fire hydrant—in the world. This enables certain software programs to make broadreaching calculations or analyses that apply to small areas or, indeed, globally.

GIS is not a new tool. In fact, the first operational GIS program was developed in Ottawa by the Federal Department of Forestry and Rural Development in 1960 by Dr. Roger Tomlinson (often referred to as “the father of GIS”). Originally called the Canada Geographic Information System (CGIS), it was designed to collect and analyze data for the Canada Land Inventory to evaluate land for various uses.

Generally speaking, GIS is best suited to the study of larger-scale environments— neighbourhoods, cities, and so on. As such, the software is now used widely by municipalities all over the world to collect data from census forms, works departments, property/parcel information, zoning regulations, roadways, signage, landmarks, building use, tree coverage, and even 3-D building information, in order to run a variety of analyses or simulations that assist in decision-making and longterm planning.

Current software offerings (ESRI’s suite of products being far and away the most widely used) come with the built-in ability to make a wide variety of “queries” that can yield answers to many questions.

Many of these queries are spatial in origin: “How many people live within 400m of this

Education Corner

bus stop?” or “Show a 5-minute walking distance along the streets from location X.” These queries take just moments to prepare and are a vast improvement over the more laborious and less accurate techniques previously employed. Clearly, GIS is a big step forward from Ian McHarg’s visual overlay approach to landscape analysis, as it allows for the development of any number of numeric overlays, calculations, relationships, proximities, thresholds, and so on.

Having all of this information at your fingertips is very useful, but perhaps one of the most under-lauded aspects of GIS is how perfectly suited it is for follow-up evaluations of past interventions. Because municipalities often collect data on a regular basis, they are effectively building a detailed history from which one can begin to evaluate past decisions and their effects on certain aspects of the environment (traffic, population, pollution, transit use, income mix, etc.). Seldom do landscape architects have the time or budget to do in-depth evaluations of previous work, but GIS makes it quick and affordable. Now, we can use GIS data to evaluate what has worked or failed on a site, and as these data sets grow in size, detail, and accuracy, this resource can help guide and enrich our planning and design.

Of course, this all depends on having practitioners who are trained to use the software and incorporate it into the workflow. And this is the goal of the Integrated Land Planning Technologies (ILPT) program at Fanshawe College in London, Ontario.

Andrew Wilson, OALA, is the program coordinator for the Bachelor of Applied Arts (Integrated Land Planning Technologies) at Fanshawe. He reminds us that GIS is not a “smart” tool but, rather, requires an operator with a comprehensive education in order to realize the technology’s full potential. ILPT’s

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four-year bachelor degree offers in-depth training in the technical capabilities of GIS tools while also providing an equally rich education in planning and landscape architecture and how these tools can be integrated into the practice of planning and design.

The goal is to end up with well-rounded graduates who are ideally suited for the realities of the changing workplace, where tools like GIS will become more central to the typical practitioner’s work flow. As Wilson puts it, “These students are bringing a facility with these technologies, not just as a new drafting technology, but as something that is actually making a difference to the way decisions are made.”

Ironically, much of the expertise these graduates develop in the operation of GIS software centres around an effort to have the computer complete as much of the work as possible. Indeed, some programs enable the user to go as far as to allow the computer to develop a design for the landscape itself. Referred to as parametric modelling, it has become increasingly prevalent in recent years primarily in architectural circles, though increasingly in urban design.

Two years ago GIS software giant ESRI acquired a company and program called CityEngine and adapted it to run with their GIS suite. CityEngine is a 3-D city modeller that creates buildings based on a series of parameters that you set up for the project.

It has the ability to automatically create entire fictional cities in a variety of styles (think Blade Runner) based on a series of inputs the operator provides. It can also populate an area with convincing architectural forms based on real-world zoning regulations and guidelines, over top of existing parcel and road information. With such a feature you can instantly see in 3-D the results of a change in zoning without having to do any manual adjustments to the model. This is a huge timesaver and a great tool for public engagement. Wilson has acquired CityEngine to incorporate it into the ILPT program—yet another tool keeping the Fanshawe program current.

GIS is becoming a borderline essential tool for landscape architects and planners, among others, in much the same way as AutoCAD and the Adobe Suite are now.

Educational programs such as ILPT have recognized this and are poised to supply the industry with graduates who are well prepared to operate within this new reality.

Meanwhile, the rest of us will have to play catch-up.

Although the public sector seems to be up to speed with GIS and its capabilities, how the private sector (especially smaller consultancies for which licensing costs can be a barrier) adjusts to these new tools remains to be seen. Enthusiastic proponents like Andrew Wilson and programs like the ILPT are on the crest of the GIStechnology wave as it breaks through the profession, and with any luck the new stream of graduates with training in geodesign will help the rest of us navigate.

BIO/ ERIC GORDON, OALA, LEED AP, IS OWNER AND DESIGNER AT OPTIMICITY AND A MEMBER OF THE GROUND EDITORIAL BOARD.

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A poster produced by Jerzy Smolarek for his final project in the Integrated Land Planning Technologies program at Fanshawe College; the concept design is for a transit-oriented urban node for the city of London.

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Jerzy Smolarek

Notes

Notes: A Miscellany of News and Events

brownfields The 13th annual Canadian Urban Institute’s Brownie Awards were presented in October, 2013, in Toronto. The CUI Brownie Award for best overall project went to the CIBS Pan Am and Parapan Am Athlete’s Village/Canary District in Toronto. The award for the best large-scale project went to the CANMET Materials Technology Laboratory in Hamilton, while the best small-scale project award went to the Baggage Building Arts Centre at Prince Arthur’s Landing in Thunder Bay. For a full list of winners, visit https://canurb.org/awards.

green roofs In September, 2013, Green Roofs for Healthy Cities announced the winners of the 2013 Green Roof and Wall Awards of Excellence. The awards were presented at the Cities Alive conference, held in San Francisco in October. For details on the winning projects, visit www.greenroofs.org.

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exhibitions The exhibit Carbon 14: Climate is Culture, at the ROM’s Centre for Contemporary Culture until February 2, 2014, is accompanied by a thought-provoking series of programs. On January 26, 2014, a discussion about the impacts of climate on northern communities will be held, with presentations by leading experts and stakeholders. On February 2, 2014, the idea of “climate as culture” will be explored, with topics that include the role of urban design, and arts and culture as motivators for change. For details, visit www.capefarewellfoundation/carbon14.

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water Nine Rivers City: Toronto’s Extraordinary Waterways, a large-scale outdoor photographic exhibition, is now on view at Toronto’s Harbourfront Centre until June, 2014. Featuring works by six contemporary visual artists, the show explores the complexities of the nine rivers that flow through Toronto and feed into Lake Ontario. For more information, visit www.harbourfrontcentre.com/visualarts.

conferences The International Society of Arboriculture Ontario Chapter Annual Conference and Trade Show is a gathering in which arboricultural professionals, practising arborists, and urban foresters come together with top researchers and educators to learn the latest in research, technology, and innovations in arboriculture. The event takes place in Huntsville, Ontario, from February 12-14, 2014. For more information, visit www.isaontario.com/content/ annual-conference.

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books Alissa North, an assistant professor in the Landscape Architecture Program at the University of Toronto’s John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design, is the author of the recently published book Operational Landscapes: Building Communities Through Public Space. Based on the premise that community landscapes need to be “able to be continually remolded to foster urban ecologies, to suit relevant community needs,” each chapter of the book follows the workflow sequences of open space projects, exploring the various types and levels of intervention. Published by Birkhauser and available at bookstores and online, the groundwork of the book was initiated in a graduate seminar course for the Master of Landscape Architecture at the University of Toronto.

awards The 2013 Toronto Urban Design Awards were handed out in September, 2013, at a celebration of architecture and design held in Toronto. From 125 submissions, two projects were selected for Awards of Excellence, Awards of Merit, and one Special Jury Award. The winning entries, complete jury report, and comments can be found at www.toronto.ca/tuda.

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Beekeeping for All, a piece by Myfanwy MacLeod and Janna Levitt for the exhibit Carbon 14: Climate is Culture

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Susana Reisman

Notes

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cities

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new members The Ontario Association of Landscape Architects is proud to recognize and welcome to following new full members to the Association: Mathieu Alain

Jennifer Mahoney *

Adam Barnard

Heather Martin

Louis Beaupre

Matthew Mills

Leighann Braine *

Jocelyn Morris

Stephanie Campbell *

Timothy Murray

Caron Cheng *

Raymond Myers

Brandon Clark *

Lori Philp

Michael Cullen *

Nina Pulver

Sylvie De Brabandere

Sarah Lynn Saari *

Tania Dowhaniuk *

Anna Lee Sangster

Sarah Eakins

Peter Schaudt

Daniella Giovanatto

Julie St-Arnault

Andrew M. Johnson

Sara Sturm

Luke Kairys

Amy Turner *

Jack Krubnik *

Anthony Van Dam *

Kendra Labrosse *

Xucan Zhou *

Aileen Leadbeaer Brian Lind

Asterisk (*) denotes Full Members not having custody and use of the Association Seal.

As of November 15, 2013, the following persons are no longer landscape architects or members of the OALA due to their nonpayment of dues: Suzanne Ernst Normand Guenette Trevor Schmidt

competitions Janet Rosenberg & Studio has been selected as the winning team to guide the development of the University of Manitoba Fort Garry Campus (279 hectares) and the adjacent Southwood Lands (48.5 hectares). The firm’s winning entry, Arpent, was selected from 45 submissions from around the world. The international competition, Visionary(re)Generation, was run by the Berlin-based firm Phase Eins on behalf of the University of Manitoba. An exhibition of the submissions is currently being displayed at the university.

For more information, visit www.visionaryregeneration.com.

invasive pests Research staff from Natural Resources Canada, Canadian Forest Service, have begun an experimental release of a tiny stingless wasp, Tetrastichus planipennisi, in southwestern Ontario in hopes of regulating populations of the emerald ash borer (EAB).

This non-native wasp from Asia was approved by the Canadian Food Inspection Agency for importation and release in Canada following its use in the U.S., which began in 2007. The experiment is to determine whether or not the wasp will provide some measure of control for EAB in Canada.

For more information, visit the Great Lakes Forestry Centre at www.cfs.nrcan.gc.ca/centres/glfc.

In September, 2013, the Global Cities Institute was launched. The new institute at the University of Toronto’s John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design will assemble a global network of individuals, organizations, foundations, and industry innovators dedicated to securing a better future for cities. A series of events, including the Annual Mayor’s Address, the Annual GCI Lecture, and an on-going series of roundtable discussions called Lessons from Other Places, are some of the initiatives to enhance the dialogue on urban issues. On May 15 and 16, 2014, the Global Cities Summit will convene 250 city leaders from around the world in Toronto. For more information, visit www.daniels.utoronto.ca.

resources The Planning and Design Centre in Halifax recently announced the launch of its new podcast, Cities Alive: Bringing the City to Life with Stories. Cities Alive is an evocative and accessible way to learn about what’s going on at the forefront of urban planning and design. The podcast crosses disciplinary boundaries to bridge the gap between the profession and the public. To listen to the podcast, visit http://pdcentre.ca/citiesalive/ITUNES: Cities Alive.

magazines The latest issue of Soiled and Seeded, an online journal dedicated to expanding the conventional approach to gardening, has been released.

See www.soiledandseeded.com to read thought-provoking and engaging stories.

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Vanessa Hussey’s Humber River Flora from the exhibit Nine Rivers City

IMAGE/

Courtesy of Harbourfront Centre

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Cover of Operational Landscapes, a new book by Alissa North

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Courtesy of Alissa North

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Janet Rosenberg & Studio won the recent competition Visionary(re)Generation

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Janet Rosenberg & Studio

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The OALA Editorial Board is looking for volunteers who can help out with various tasks, such as research, transcription, and writing. Any level of commitment is appreciated, from researching upcoming events for the Notes section to transcribing Round Table discussions...

Fun, satisfying work—and the best part, no need to attend meetings!

To get involved, please e-mail magazine@oala.ca.

Artifact

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TEXT BY LORRAINE JOHNSON

Digital communication tools saturate our lives, cluttering our physical spaces with sleek technological gadgets and screens, our mental spaces with images and information. What we don’t see is the hidden clutter of the airwaves, increasingly filled with the frequencies emitted by power lines, radios, TV channels, cellphones, Wi-Fi routers, and more.

With his ElectroSmog World Tour project, Montreal-based artist and programmer Jean-Pierre Aubé has scanned the airwaves and recorded the strengths of frequencies in various cities, reminding us that in a networked world, even the air is now real estate.

For more information about Jean-Pierre Aubé’s work, visit www.kloud.org.

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Jean-Pierre Aubé’s ElectroSmog World Tour project uses an array of antennae to monitor radio frequencies in order to create an image of the presence of the electromagnetic spectrum.

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Jean-Pierre Aubé

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