Round Table
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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
IMAGE/
Scott Torrance Landscape Architect Inc.
