28 minute read
trees
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. 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. 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,
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07/ Regent Park focus group collage poster IMAGE/ Scott Torrance Landscape Architect Inc.
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. 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? 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?
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. 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.
—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.
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
01/ A montage showing different arrangements of the film stills facilitates cross-referencing and comparisons. IMAGE/ Martin Hogue
02 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. 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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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 the reader can move back and forth between these representations, their experience and understanding of the site enhanced.
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,
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.
02-03/ 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. IMAGES/ Martin Hogue
Using technology to spark public dialogue
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.
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 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.
01-02/ 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. IMAGES/ Jeremy Kai
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. 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 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!
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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.
COMPILED BY ADRIENNE HALL
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.
APPS
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)
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.
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.
