Ground 29 – Spring 2015 – Trash by Ground Magazine

Landscape Architect Quarterly 08/

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Features Wood: From Waste to Resource Round Table Trash Garbage Opportunities New Ground

Publication # 40026106

Spring 2015 Issue 29

Contents

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Up Front Information on the Ground Trash:

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Wood From waste to resource TEXT BY TAMAR PISTER

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Round Table Trash

President’s Message

Editorial Board Message

President’s Message

To the Editor:

The 47th OALA AGM & Conference, held in Guelph, was a success. The theme, Landscape Architects—Leaders for a Healthy Planet, was engaging, educational, and inspiring. As the conference brief stated: “Landscape architects by definition are trained to be stewards of the land, and to seek balance between humans and the environment through design. The future is about regeneration, enhanced livability, and improved health for individuals and communities. The challenge for landscape architects is to take this privilege and rise to be leaders with vision and vigour, to instill the values of stewardship and inspire others to achieve a healthy planet. Will you take the lead?”

The POPS Quiz [Ground27, pp10-11] is an interesting way to get the reader engaged and to appreciate the various types of publicly accessible open spaces that make up the public realm. It is worth clarifying, though, the ownership and “privateness” of three of the sites:

CO-MODERATED BY DENISE PINTO AND DALIA TODARY-MICHAEL

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Garbage Opportunities Is your favourite park a dump? TEXT AND MAP BY MICHAEL COOK AND VINCENT JAVET

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New Ground The Aga Khan Museum and Ismaili Centre INTERVIEW BY VICTORIA TAYLOR, OALA, WITH BEIRUT-BASED LANDSCAPE ARCHITECT VLADIMIR DJUROVIC

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Book Corner Contemplating the sacred: Searching for the Heart of Sacred Space REVIEW BY REAL EGUCHI, OALA

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Letter From…England Visiting the masters of contemporary planting design TEXT BY BEN O’BRIEN

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Notes A miscellany of news and events Artifact Cat on a hot green roof

Letters to the Editor

A special thank you to the Conference Organizing Committee, chaired by Doris Chee, Vice President, and OALA staff for planning and organizing this special event. Thank you, as well, to the Continuing Education Committee for their efforts. A sincere thank you to Linda Irvine, who provided recognition for the 50th anniversary celebration of the landscape architecture program at the University of Guelph. As we look forward to the spring season, the OALA will continue to build on the OALA Strategic Plan. Committees will begin to develop action plans aligned with identified priorities and goals. Together, as volunteers working with exceptional OALA staff, our efforts have made and will continue to make a positive difference. SARAH CULP, OALA OALA PRESIDENT

Editorial Board Message Garbage, technology, ideas, you name it—they are at once easy and hard to discard. In 2010, Ontarians disposed of 9,247,415 tonnes of waste, nearly one-third from residential sources, the rest from construction, renovation, and demolition activities. Ontario is striving to divert more waste from landfills, with new rules (an interesting one is called “Extended Product Responsibility”) that could radically alter construction practices, including landscape construction.

TEXT BY LORRAINE JOHNSON

A new feature this issue: Victoria Taylor’s interview with the designer of the Aga Khan Museum and Ismaili Centre garden/landscape in Toronto is the inaugural column in a semi-regular feature called New Ground, in which we’ll explore newly completed projects. TODD SMITH, OALA CHAIR, EDITORIAL BOARD

#2. The north two-thirds of Grange Park are owned by the Art Gallery of Ontario. The south third, including the closed right-of-way of John Street that is depicted in the photo, is fully owned by the City. All of Grange Park is managed and operated by the City through an agreement with the AGO. #5. Simcoe Park is a public park owned and maintained by the City. The two POPS connecting north from Simcoe Park to Wellington Street are privately owned, though. (One is depicted in Photo #1 and one in Photo #5.) #6. Queen’s Park, although owned by the University of Toronto, is fully managed and operated by the City as a public park. The important distinction to make with POPS is that they are privately owned, managed, and maintained to allow public use and access through a formal agreement. The public realm is thus augmented with no further burden of land ownership, management, and maintenance on City resources. In the dense downtown area this is becoming an increasingly important mechanism to provide a connected open space system when the supply of public parkland is increasingly being challenged. Hope this helps to clarify. I enjoy the magazine—keep up the good work. ALEX SHEVCHUK, OALA PROJECT MANAGER, LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE UNIT PARKS, FORESTRY & RECREATION DIVISION CITY OF TORONTO

To the Editor: Regarding the article “Trees: Below Ground” [Ground28], I need to correct one point. The article provides a captioned image of Cawthra Square Park/Barbara Hall Park (along with a number of other Toronto projects). The text suggests that these projects “lack rainwater harvesting ideas.” You should know that Cawthra has a substantial surface-water harvesting system including slot drains along the park edge, area drains, and roof-water collection. These collection points are connected to an extensive below-grade system of perforated pipes extending to all corners of the soil cell system. Overall, we made a concerted effort to make it a good example of how to passively irrigate trees. MIKE TOCHER PARTNER, THINCDESIGN TORONTO

Spring 2015 Issue 29

Masthead

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Editor Lorraine Johnson

2015 OALA Governing Council*

Photo Editor Todd Smith

President Sarah Culp

OALA Editorial Board Shannon Baker Doris Chee Michael Cook Eric Gordon Ruthanne Henry Jocelyn Hirtes Vincent Javet Han Liu Graham MacInnes Kate Nelischer Denise Pinto Tamar Pister Phil Pothen Maili Sedore Todd Smith (chair) Brendan Stewart Netami Stuart Dalia Todary-Michael

Vice President Doris Chee Treasurer Jonathan Loschmann Secretary Jane Welsh Past President Joanne Moran Councillors Alana Evers Sarah Marsh Chris Hart Associate Councillor—Senior Katherine Peck

Art Direction/Design www.typotherapy.com

Associate Councillor—Junior David Duhan

Advertising Inquiries advertising@oala.ca 416.231.4181

Lay Councillor Linda Thorne

Cover Underpass Park, Toronto, is an outstanding example of a formerly unused space transformed through design. See page 12. Photograph courtesy of Waterfront Toronto. 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 © 2015 by the Ontario Association of Landscape Architects All rights reserved ISSN: 0847-3080 Canada Post Sales Product Agreement No. 40026106

Appointed Educator University of Toronto Elise Shelley Appointed Educator University of Guelph Sean Kelly University of Toronto Student Representative Matthew Perotto University of Guelph Student Representative Amanda Glouchkow OALA Staff Registrar Linda MacLeod Administrator Aina Budrevics Marketing and Communications Coordinator Joanna Wilczynska *This list is accurate as of March 26, 2015. Council election results are not reflected on this list.

OALA

About

About the OALA

Ground: Landscape Architect Quarterly is published by the Ontario Association of Landscape Architects and provides an open forum for the exchange of ideas and information related to the profession of landscape architecture. Letters to the editor, article proposals, and feedback are encouraged. For submission guidelines, contact Ground at magazine@oala.ca. Ground reserves the right to edit all submissions. The views expressed in the magazine are those of the writers and not necessarily the views of the OALA and its Governing Council.

The Ontario Association of Landscape Architects works to promote and advance the profession of landscape architecture and maintain standards of professional practice consistent with the public interest. The OALA promotes public understanding of the profession and the advancement of the practice of landscape architecture. In support of the improvement and/or conservation of the natural, cultural, social and built environments, the OALA undertakes activities including promotion to governments, professionals and developers of the standards and benefits of landscape architecture.

Upcoming Issues of Ground Ground 30 (Summer) Sound Deadline for advertising space reservations: April 27, 2015 Ground 31 (Fall) Cost Deadline for editorial proposals: May 18, 2015 Deadline for advertising space reservations: July 27, 2015 Ground 32 (Winter) Creatures Deadline for editorial proposals: August 17, 2015 Deadline for advertising space reservations: October 26, 2015

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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, Senior Landscape Architect, Novatech, Ottawa 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

's environmental savings with Cascades paper Ground is printed on paper manufactured in Canada by Cascades with 100% post-consumer waste using biogas energy (methane from a landfill site) and is EcoLogo, Processed Chlorine Free (PCF) certified, as well as FSC® certified. Compared to products in the industry made with 100% virgin fiber, Ground: Landscape Architect Quarterly's savings are:

15 trees 55,306 L of water 158 days of water consumption 838 kg of waste 17 waste containers 2,178 kg CO2 14,566 km driven 25 GJ 113,860 60W light bulbs for one hour 6 kg NOX emissions of one truck during 20 days

www.cascades.com/papers

Up Front

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TREES

a new record A small grove of native black gum trees (Nyssa sylvatica) growing in the eastern region of Niagara, in Ontario, may well be home to Canada’s oldest broadleaf tree. Black gum is not common in Ontario. It is usually found in wet woodlands, often on the edge of standing water. The characteristic horizontal branching of young trees often becomes irregular and flat-topped in old trees, creating an unmistakable presence in the forest. Its thick, glossy green leaves glisten and shimmer in the summer sunlight and, by autumn, turn intense shades of red, scarlet, and purple. But the bark of this tree is what really sets it apart: dark grey-brown and blocky in younger trees, becoming deeply fissured and rusty-coloured in middle-aged trees, and then balding in old age into light grey smooth plates. Averagesized trees top 15 metres in height and 40 centimetres in diameter. As a landscape designer and arborist with an interest in conservation, my passion for trees runs deep. I believe that old trees are inherently valuable and special; like living time capsules that provide us with a window to the past. I’d heard about this black gum grove in Niagara from the late Bruce Kershner’s old-growth survey of the Niagara Peninsula, and was eager to visit the trees and see if they were older than some other gums I had visited. So, on a sunny and snowless holiday December morning, I went to find some old trees.

life in that quiet slough forest. They seemed to have sited themselves carefully, often perched near the water’s edge; indeed, these trees seemed to almost meditate at the edge of the slough.

Shortly after heading into the woods, the gums revealed themselves, each one oozing with character—character that had been forged by and adapted to centuries of

One of the most accurate ways of determining a tree’s age is through the use of a precision instrument with a hollow bit that’s twisted into the tree. From the centre of the bit a small core sample is extracted, which provides a glimpse into the heart of the tree and, from its annual rings, its centuries past. After seeing one old gum lying on its belly,

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The distinctive bark of native black gum is one of the features that sets it apart from other trees.

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Nate Torenvliet

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hollow nearly to the top, I wondered if any of these old trees would still hold the secret. Farther along, another giant of a gum, sliced right through in decades past, and hollow too, lay on its back, half returned to the slough from which it came. The first two attempts at getting core samples came up short as the borer twisted into emptiness after just a few turns through the youngest wood. These ancient denizens just weren’t forthcoming. But there was one tree that caught my attention. It loomed before me as I stood there; my knees a little bent, jaw a little lowslung as I gazed up and down it. This one was special. It would be my last try that day and, dead set, I twisted the borer in. With each turn my hope regained lost ground. She was as solid as a rock. I carefully extracted the delicate core. It was complete, and it looked good! Once home, I mounted the core, then sanded it to a polished shine. Under fortyor-so-times magnification I began to read the rings of annual growth, and with a pin prick I marked each decade. The rings were consistently tight and stacking up fast. It reminded me of an old bristlecone pine (Pinus longaeva) sample I had collected in California some years ago; though incomplete, it held 997 annual rings. I also wondered if this gum would be older than the 325-year-old gums I had visited in Grassie, Ontario, a year earlier. I could see stress recorded in the rings, serious stress. There were decades in the past in which this tree all but gave up. Perhaps a bad storm smashed its top out, or maybe years of drought brought it near the edge. Growth ebbed and flowed, and this tree pressed on. After I’d run through the length of the core, one decade at a time, I went back to the beginning—today’s date—and began pressing a second pinhole next to each century: one hundred, two hundred, three hundred…four hundred...four-sixty, fourseventy, four-eighty…And finally, the last ring at four hundred and ninety-eight years ago. I was delighted.

To the 498 annual rings, we can comfortably add the approximately 15 years it took for the tree to grow to the height of the sample. This means that in the spring of 2015, this tree will grow those glossy green leaves for the 514th time, ever since it extended upward from its first leaves in 1501! This is perhaps the oldest broadleaf tree in Ontario (the ancient cedars in Niagara are older), and holds its own against all but the cone-bearing trees in Canada. And so black gum has longevity to round off its list of qualities that make it a tree to remember. It’s hard not to respect its slow and steady travel through time in a world so fast-paced and hurried. Indeed, I’d credit black gum with something of patience for all its time spent meditating in that watery woodland where time almost seems to stand still. TEXT BY NATE TORENVLIET, BLA, ISA CERTIFIED ARBORIST, WHO WORKS WITH ENVIRONMENTAL DESIGN GROUP TO CREATE LANDSCAPES WITH BEAUTY AND A SENSE OF PERMANENCE; WHEN NOT IN THE OFFICE, NATE HUNTS ONTARIO’S WOODS FOR SUPERLATIVE TREES, AND GROWS THE RARE AND ENDANGERED ONES FROM SEED. SINCERE THANKS TO DR. HENRI D. GRISSINO-MAYER AT THE UNIVERSITY OF TENNESSEE-KNOXVILLE AND HIS LABORATORY OF TREE-RING RESEARCH FOR HELP AND FOR VERIFYING RING COUNTS

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Average-sized black gums top 15 metres in height.

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Nate Torenvliet

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Roughly 300 years old, this black gum succumbed to internal decay and fell over.

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Nate Torenvliet

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immigrants, and almost half are considered low income. The other 20 percent live in the 1,700 single family homes surrounding the buildings. Residents from the homes are established immigrants; many arrived in Canada thirty to forty years ago. Although these homeowners’ incomes are below the Toronto average, only 12 percent are considered low income, most of them are retired. 05 URBAN AGRICULTURE

neighbourhood transformation Built in the 1960s, with oversized parking lots and few green spaces, Toronto’s Jane and Finch neighbourhood faces considerable environmental challenges. Flooding is frequent, trees are scarce, and the health of the Black Creek, which crosses the neighbourhood, is deemed poor. The community’s aging building stock means that greenhouse gas emissions, resulting from water and energy consumption, are higher than provincial averages. But this neighbourhood is known mostly for its socio-economic challenges. A simple Google search will result in links such as “Toronto’s most dangerous place to be a kid?” and “Deemed Toronto’s least livable.” In 2014, it received the city’s lowest “neighbourhood equity score,” which combines ratings for economic opportunity, social development, health, participation in decision-making, and physical surroundings. Eighty percent of the population (20,000 residents) lives in 45 high-density, aging apartment towers; most residents are new

The lack of connection between the houses and the towers is evident and has been increasing in the last few decades. Many homeowners blame those living in the towers for the neighbourhood’s reputation, and show little patience for their struggles. This complicated mix of environmental and social issues made this neighbourhood a perfect candidate for introducing the Toronto and Region Conservation Authority’s SNAP program. SNAP stands for Sustainable Neighbourhood Retrofit Action Plan, and aims to achieve sustainable transformation of existing, older neighbourhoods. As part of the SNAP process, a team does a rigorous technical analysis and then develops an action plan. Hundreds of interviews, home visits, and informal sidewalk conversations with Jane/Finch residents led to an interesting discovery: environmental issues were not of high concern, but food was a persistent topic. The team found that, for those living in the apartment towers, food security was the number one issue, more important than jobs and violence. Residents expressed a

profound nostalgia for fresh fruits and vegetables, readily available in their countries of origin, but unaffordable in Toronto. For those in the single family homes, food was also top of mind, and there was a passion for growing it. Approximately 1,200 vegetable gardens and 700 mature fruit trees are spread around the neighbourhood’s backyards—an extraordinary food oasis just across the street from Toronto’s most disadvantaged community. In many cases, aging homeowners with shrinking families are producing more food than they can consume or even harvest. Based on these findings, the SNAP team developed an action plan with food as the main theme. Strategies to improve stormwater management, energy efficiency, water conservation, and the urban forest were built around this theme. Implementation started in the single family homes, where there were opportunities to achieve environmental objectives. Key goals included planting more trees, implementing energy and water retrofits, and, most importantly, disconnecting downspouts and redirecting rainwater. Since residents were receptive to improving their vegetable gardens and fruit trees, the team framed environmental protection measures in these terms.

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The San Romanoway Revival Project, shown here before and as planned, is greening the grounds of three aging high-rise buildings.

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Courtesy of TRCA

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Romanoway Revival Project, focused on three aging high-rise buildings with 4,300 residents. The project has three main components: Edible Balconies; Greening of the Grounds; and Social Enterprise. For the Edible Balconies component, SNAP, in partnership with FoodShare, hired and trained three residents from the towers to build a “gardeners network,” and to mentor neighbours on edible container gardening. 07

SNAP partnered with various public agencies, businesses, and NGOs to launch the “Harvest the Rain Program.” It offered subsidized rain barrels (to water vegetable gardens) and a free home consultation “to show you how to install it and discuss other incentives and opportunities to improve your home and garden.” Within months, the program booked 140 home consultations (representing 8 percent of the homes), considered a triumph in this hard-to-engage demographic. Consultations were held by advisors who had grown up in the neighbourhood, spoke the residents’ native languages, and, most importantly, knew about growing food. This resulted in an outstanding uptake of key sustainability actions. Roughly 30 percent planted a tree in their backyard, and 20 percent signed up to implement energy conservation retrofits. More than 216 downspout disconnections and rain barrel installations were done in the neighbourhood. Approximately 40 percent of those who received a home consultation expressed interest in donating part of their harvest to residents in need. This resulted in a partnership with Second Harvest and The Black Creek Community Farm to launch a pilot to collect excess harvest from the homes and bring it to residents in the towers, an initiative that not only contributes to food security, but also helps re-build a divided community. Following the single family homes implementation, six “green” demonstration projects have been implemented on institutional properties and at high-density residential towers. The most significant is the San 07/

The Edible Balconies initiative encourages residents to grow food.

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Courtesy of TRCA

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Imagining My Sustainable City exhibition, Evergreen Brick Works, Toronto, 2014

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Courtesy of No.9: Contemporary Art & the Environment

For the “Greening of the Grounds” component to revitalize the three hectares of underutilized space around the towers, SNAP partnered with Projexity to crowdsource design ideas. Twelve concepts were submitted from around the globe. The final design will include a large community garden and fruit orchard, supported by rainwater harvesting, and a farmers’ market to be managed by residents. Other environmental aspects include tree planting and naturalization, low-impact development (LID) measures for stormwater management, lighting with renewable sources, and community amenities such as seating areas, an amphitheatre, signage, trails, and public art installations. One of the social enterprise programs under development involves training and certifying residents on urban agriculture and fruit tree management, while paying them honoraria to maintain the garden and orchard. Certified participants will be able to offer their services in the neighbourhood’s homes, and around the city. Implementation of the San Romanoway Revival Project begins in the spring of 2015. The Jane and Finch project is one of five SNAP projects being piloted by the TRCA in GTA neighbourhoods to test diverse approaches to achieve sustainability goals. Key findings that TRCA has learned through this work are: 1) Understand the true motivators and needs of your target audience; 2) Partner with the experts. Don’t spend valuable resources reinventing the wheel; 3) Work with local networks and, whenever possible, hire community members; 4) Achieve efficiencies by implementing multiobjective programs that “make it easy,” by using a one-window-approach; and 5) Base it on science and track your success. TEXT BY ADRIANA GOMEZ, PROJECT MANAGER OF THE SNAP PROGRAM,TORONTO AND REGION CONSERVATION AUTHORITY.

08 CULTURAL DESIGN

art and the environment Moving through Toronto, you have most likely seen the work of Andrew Davies and his firm No.9: Contemporary Art & the Environment. You might have encountered it passing through the airport, on a GO train, at your child’s school, or, most recently, at the Todmorden Mills Eco-Art-Fest in the summer of 2014. When he co-founded No.9 in 2006, Davies was creating a place to explore the intersection of art, architecture, and sustainability. As he puts it, “Addressing sustainability should no longer be an isolated thing, left to scientists and professionals. We have a responsibility to address it in our everyday work, both as architecture or landscape professionals and private citizens. Art and design are capable of having a transformational effect on culture.” The catalytic power of the arts has become something of a mission statement for No.9. As a charitable arts organization, it has evolved into a far-reaching cultural producer, working with guest curators, educators, production staff, and artists to generate art installations, workshops, and events throughout Toronto. The goal is always to create awareness of the environmental crisis, and the opportunities it affords to change and improve, and to foster personal responsibility.

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For example, BGL’s 2008 installation “Project for the Don River” consisted of a black shrunken cruise ship, anchored in the turgid waters of the Lower Don River in Toronto. Absurdly juxtaposed with a giant life buoy, it posed the question of whether the ship or the river itself needed saving.

No.9 has two major streams of work essential to achieving these goals. The first is working as a curatorial organization to create temporary public art installations, and the second is educational work. No.9 does the dirty work of grants, administration, and raising funds, a task Davies describes as immensely challenging. No.9 has worked with more than fifty artists, designers, and sculptors, from photographer Edward Burtynsky to architecture firm Lateral Office. In collaboration with artists, No.9 creates works intended to stimulate cultural change. “If art is only for the elite, it will implode...It should be warm and welcoming, but not dumb, and still challenging...The last thing we want is for art to be inaccessible,” says Davies. Thus, they place work in high-traffic spaces, such as Pearson Airport’s Terminal 1. Since 2008, No.9 has curated a space behind the check-in that is passed by upwards of 23.2 million people per year. Fun is key to spreading the message, as is evident in the work of many of the artists with whom No.9 has collaborated.

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No.9 commissioned Iain Baxter’s Ecoartvan, 2010.

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Courtesy of No.9: Contemporary Art & the Environment

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Jennifer Marman and Daniel Borins’ Art Train Conductor No.9 was a mobile public art project commissioned by No.9.

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Courtney Lee

“School can be a doorway to a new level of understanding,” says Davies. “As a layperson, when you walk through a city you just accept all the elements; you don’t know how things got there. With a little bit of literacy about the built form, you can see it in a totally new way.”

As Davies describes them, both the art and education pieces are passions. “In the short-term, the education stream is very pointed in achieving our goals. The public art is harder to qualify, and therefore harder to fund. However, strong public art speaks to the vitality of a city and health of a community.”

In May, 2014, the larger goal of bringing architecture and urban design workshops to all 44 of Toronto’s wards had been achieved. In collaboration with the Toronto District School Board, the Imagining My Sustainable City program allows Grade 7 students to spend four full class days redesigning a site in their neighbourhood.

Davies’ approach is interdisciplinary. He holds degrees in both fine arts and architecture. He worked as an exhibition designer at the Museum of Modern Art in New York for five years before returning to Toronto and beginning a collaboration with the Evergreen Brick Works, a community environmental centre located in the heart of the Don Valley. No.9’s education work evolved out of this relationship with Evergreen, as the environmental group began focusing on exhibits to teach the public about sustainability.

The program builds multiple links with the existing Grade 7 curriculum, while allowing educators to talk about contemporary issues of governance, density and transit. As well, 19 city councillors accepted No.9’s invitation to watch presentations done by students in their wards. Students have talked about things they might like to see in their communities, such as green markets or opportunities to grow their own food. “We tried to pick sites that addressed contemporary issues, such as where the new LTR will go,” says Davies. “Sometimes we used the playgrounds of the schools themselves if the teachers had a specific interest in making them safe hubs of the neighbourhoods. We decided what areas would be interesting as sites before the program started, but students come with a history about the sites beyond what any outside landscape architect could provide.”

“It wasn’t very long before we realized that being open to receiving that kind of work depends on your knowledge base. So we started bringing kids to the Brick Works, and going to the schools so that we could build that understanding in them. One of our core principles is that cities are the places where we can have the largest effect on the carbon footprint. To facilitate that, we started educating students about the built environment, so that we are providing that generation with the tools to deal with some of these issues.” An early trial of this concept was Canadian artist Iain Baxter’s mobile Ecoartvan. In spring 2010, the Ecoartvan travelled on bio diesel fuel to elementary schools across Toronto. In collaboration with the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto District School Board, and WWF, Baxter delivered half-day workshops about endangered species to more than 11,000 elementary students. By going to the schools, the van solved the problems of permission forms and the time and cost of travelling for field trips. Students could participate in the program, or just look at it at lunchtime.

Ultimately, the message of No.9 is hopeful. “It is an extremely ambitious goal to want to expand this program across the province and across the country. But think about what the ramifications for Canada are. In ten years you’d have a population informed about sustainable neighbourhoods and governance…So the central question this is addressing is: can we design from the grassroots up?” LOOK FOR THE NO.9 EXHIBITION WATER'S EDGE AT THE PAN AM GAMES IN TORONTO AND THE NO.9 ECO-ART-FEST AT TODMORDEN MILLS, TORONTO, IN THE SUMMER, 2015. TEXT BY KATIE STRANG, A MASTER’S OF LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE CANDIDATE AT THE UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO WHO IS GRADUATING IN THE SPRING, 2015.

Wood: From Waste to Resource

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TEXT BY TAMAR PISTER

The versatility of wood as a resource has led to some innovative efforts to make better use of this valuable and, more often than not, wasted material

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There is widespread consensus on the social and environmental benefits of trees in cities. A 2014 TD Economics Report also identifies the economic value of trees in Toronto, estimating their worth at $7 billion, or about $700 per tree. Yet due to the environmental stresses on urban green spaces, such as land development, pest infestations, extreme weather events, soil compaction, and over-salting of roads, thousands of urban trees die each year—including an estimated 200,000 trees in Toronto alone. Their removal involves a somewhat complicated web of private and public stakeholders. And so, in an urban context, we find ourselves in the paradoxical situation of viewing trees as a resource and wood as waste.

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The City of Toronto’s woodlot currently handles all wood from east-end trees killed by emerald ash borer. The City currently chips and grinds most of it into mulch.

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Lija Skobe/LEAF/City of Toronto

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Toronto disposal waste wood site, Nashdene Yard Sawmill

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Courtesy of City of Toronto

However, individuals across industries and interests are slowly carving out an exciting market for urban wood utilization, demanding higher value for an otherwise discarded material. For designers, urban wood is often coveted for its natural aesthetic, as well as its local narrative, and others see opportunity in decreasing the costs, both economic and environmental, of waste disposal.

company, a process that can cost upwards of $3,000 per tree. In Toronto, private tree companies can dispose of wood independently, or opt to pay a fee and drop off pre-grinded wood to the city’s wood waste transfer stations. As the majority (in Toronto, 60 percent) of urban trees are on private property, a large portion of urban wood across Canadian cities is being removed in a somewhat unregulated and untraceable way. The large numbers of trees infected with emerald ash borer (EAB), a deadly invasive beetle that is killing millions of trees across southern Ontario and the Great Lakes States, has been a catalyst for dealing with an immediate surplus of urban wood. This led to roundtable discussions in 2013 between municipal urban forest officials in the Greater Toronto Area (GTA) and disparate industry stakeholders, such as resource suppliers, processors, high-value resource

When removing trees on public property, municipalities coordinate with tree companies and regional government services to transfer this “waste” to official city waste disposal lots, which in turn process some of the wood into mulch, firewood, or compost for local parks. When removing dead trees on private property, the landowner is responsible for finding and paying a tree 03

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producers (for example, designers), and high-volume resource producers (for example, biomass and firewood producers). The results of these discussions included a slew of marketing strategies, pilot projects, and online resources to promote and help grow the urban wood utilization movement. In 2013, IIDEXCanada (a national design and architecture exposition and conference), the City of Toronto, and Ideacious.com partnered to create the first IIDEXCanada Woodshop. The exhibit, held annually

at IIDEX in Toronto, features the work of local designers utilizing fallen ash trees infected with EAB. Jason van der Burg of Urbanworm Design, an architect and the designer of Leaning Loop in the 2014 IIDEXCanada Woodshop exhibit, explains, “Beetles really only burrow under the bark and on the surface of the cambium, which strangles the tree but results in logs that have no burrow holes beyond the outer surface once the bark is removed. The material is thus entirely suitable for any use after it has been milled and dried. We wanted to show that you could make a perfectly functional consumer product out of material that is currently regarded as wood waste.” Many of the barriers to utilizing urban wood lie in large-scale tree-to-lumber logistics. City trees are often heavily branched, can be stunted in growth, or have nails and metal pieces embedded in the bark. Cutting, drying, milling, and storing wood is also a physically demanding, time-intensive, and messy project. However, there are a few operations, such as Eco Tree Co., that do undertake all these processes.

According to Lori Smith, a behind-thescenes organizer of both Trashswag, an online crowd-sourced map for people to share and post reusable materials spotted outside, and Design X Nature, an annual design competition to utilize salvaged materials, a major limiting factor in the urban wood utilization movement is the inconsistencies in the supply and demand chain—for example, the hefty financial risk sawyers must undertake to mill urban wood without a guaranteed buyer. Similar to other “buy local” movements, the social and environmental benefits of utilizing local lumber can come with a higher financial price tag for consumers. Since the GTA roundtable discussions in 2013, Sawmill Sid, a portable sawmill company that serves the Ontario market, has been commissioned by the City of Toronto to mill “The Maple Leaf Forever Tree,” as well as for pilot projects showcasing the use of EAB-infested wood. In their most recent partnership—undoubtedly the most innovative for its potential to be scaled up— the portable sawmill was brought to the Nashdene Public Works Yard, one of the

Wood: From Waste to Resource

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city’s wood disposal sites, to process city trees into lumber to be used for city operations as well as marketed to the private sector. Rob McMonagle of the Economic Development & Culture office in the City of Toronto notes that the next step of this pilot project, which wrapped up in January, 2015, will be in evaluating any operational issues and calculating disposal cost savings, as well as revenue and job creation potential. There is a role for landscape architects and others involved in public realm design to play an active part in ripening the cultural paradigm of utilizing local resources. Chatham-Kent was one of the first municipalities in Ontario to be hit by EAB, and when redesigning the Kingston Park Pavilion

in 2011, Brown+Storey Architects Inc. chose to use salvaged local ash for the pavilion’s wall cladding. Celebrating significant felled trees by incorporating salvaged logs from nearby development into site designs, prioritizing local urban wood as a material, or simply making design decisions based on tree species availability can have large-scale impacts when implemented across industries.

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The non-profit organization LEAF held an urban wood utilization tour in July, 2014.

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Michael Barlas, LEAF

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The Leaning Loop, designed by Jason van der Burg of Urbanworm Design, used wood from EAB-infected trees.

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Courtesy of Urbanworm Design

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Lars Dressler, of Brothers Dressler, selecting unprocessed wood from the City’s woodlot; notice the EAB scars along the outside of the log.

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Lija Skobe/LEAF/City of Toronto

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Designer Sathvik Sivapraksash used slabs selected from Urban Tree Salvage for an innovative blind system.

Sometimes industry innovation must start with its basic materials. As Frank Lloyd Wright said, “When we use the tree respectfully and economically, we have one of the greatest resources on the earth.”

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Lija Skobe/LEAF/City of Toronto

BIO/ TAMAR PISTER IS A GRADUATE STUDENT IN LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE AT THE UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO AND A MEMBER OF THE GROUND EDITORIAL BOARD; SHE PREVIOUSLY WORKED AT LEAF, A NON-PROFIT ORGANIZATION DEDICATED TO THE PROTECTION AND IMPROVEMENT OF THE URBAN FOREST.

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LEAF’s urban wood utilization tour

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Colleen Bain, LEAF

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Our panel explores the literal and metaphoric territories of waste CO-MODERATED BY DENISE PINTO AND DALIA TODARY-MICHAEL

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Toronto’s network of more than 2,400 public laneways is an overlooked resource that is being revisioned by The Laneway Project.

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Ariana Cancelli, The Laneway Project

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02 BIOS/

JOE BERRIDGE IS A PARTNER AT URBAN STRATEGIES, A PLANNING FIRM, AND TEACHES AT THE UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO. HE IS CURRENTLY WORKING ON CITY CENTRE AND WATERFRONT MASTER PLANNING PROJECTS IN TORONTO, SYDNEY, SINGAPORE, AND CARDIFF.

Hon Lu (HL): I think of it as untapped resources. How we re-fashion resources is the question of the 21st century.

RENEE GOMES IS THE DIRECTOR OF DEVELOPMENT FOR WATERFRONT TORONTO, THE AGENCY TASKED WITH COMPREHENSIVE REVITALIZATION OF TORONTO’S WATERFRONT. SHE IS ALSO A MEMBER OF THE BOARD OF DIRECTORS FOR EVERGREEN. SHE HAS BEEN INVOLVED WITH A RANGE OF URBAN PLANNING AND DEVELOPMENT PROJECTS IN TORONTO AND IN THE U.K. ASTRID IDLEWILD IS A TORONTO WRITER, COMMUNITY ORGANIZER, AND FOUNDER OF DENIZEN.TO. SHE’S AUTHORED WORKS ON URBAN HISTORY, ON THE MEANING OF "PUBLIC" IN PUBLIC SPACING, AND ON CITIZENSHIPS OF BEING. PLACEISM AND INTERSECTIONALITY GUIDE HER VALUES ON PARTICIPATORY CITIZENSHIP, PLACE DESIGN, AND EQUITY IN PLANNING POLICY. SHE EARNED HER MASTER’S DEGREE IN URBAN PLANNING AT MCGILL IN 2012, SPECIALIZING IN URBAN DESIGN. HER NOVEL RESEARCH ON ILLUMINATION PLANNING HAS PROFILED THE HISTORY AND EXAMINED THE IMPACTS OF URBAN STREET LIGHTING AT NIGHT ON PUBLIC HEALTH, CIVIC SPACES, AND FAUNA. HON LU HAS PROJECT-MANAGED SOME OF CANADA’S MOST ENVIRONMENTALLY COMPLEX BROWNFIELD REVITALIZATION PROJECTS. HE WORKS AT INFRASTRUCTURE ONTARIO (IO), A PROVINCIAL CROWN CORPORATION THAT PLAYS A CRITICAL ROLE IN SUPPORTING THE ONTARIO GOVERNMENT TO MODERNIZE AND MAXIMIZE THE VALUE OF PUBLIC INFRASTRUCTURE AND REAL ESTATE, MANAGE GOVERNMENT FACILITIES, AND FINANCE THE RENEWAL OF THE PROVINCE'S PUBLIC INFRASTRUCTURE. HE IS ALSO ON THE BOARD OF TORONTO TREES AND PARKS FOUNDATION, WHICH WORKS IN PARTNERSHIP WITH VARIOUS ORGANIZATIONS ON A RANGE OF ENHANCEMENTS TO TORONTO'S NETWORKS OF PARKS AND PUBLIC SPACES. DENISE PINTO IS DIRECTOR OF JANE’S WALK AND FORMER CHAIR OF THE GROUND EDITORIAL BOARD. MICHELLE SENAYAH HAS A BACKGROUND IN ARCHITECTURE, URBAN DESIGN, AND COMMUNITY ENGAGEMENT, AND IS PASSIONATE ABOUT CITIES AND WHAT HAPPENS IN THEM. AS PRINCIPAL OF SENAYAH DESIGN, DIRECTOR OF COMMUNITY OUTREACH AND PROGRAMMING AT OPEN STREETS TO, AND CO-DIRECTOR OF THE LANEWAY PROJECT, MICHELLE WORKS WITH TORONTONIANS ON THE PLANNING, DESIGN, AND IMPLEMENTATION OF PROJECTS IN THE PUBLIC REALM; CURRENT PROJECTS RANGE FROM POP-UP FESTIVALS TO DESIGN CHARRETTES TO PERMANENT SPATIAL TRANSFORMATIONS. DALIA TODARY-MICHAEL, A LANDSCAPE DESIGNER AT POPOVICH ASSOCIATES, IS A MEMBER OF THE GROUND EDITORIAL BOARD. HER INTEREST IS IN UNDERSTANDING COMPOSITE SOCIAL REALITIES OF INTERPRETED (VIRTUALLY CONSTRUCTED) SPACE AND EXPERIENCED (PHYSICAL) SPACE AND THE EVENTUAL IMPRINT THEY WILL HAVE ON URBAN FORM, THE DERIVATIVE NATURE OF FUTURE CITIES, AND THE IDENTITIES THAT INHABIT THEM.

Denise Pinto (DP): What interests you about trash? Is it the idea of ground-filter mediation or light pollution or laneways or even discarded ideas—not only the physical, but also the conceptual? When you think of the word “trash” in the context of urban landscapes and cities, what comes to mind? Renee Gomes (RG): I tend to think about it in an international context, and the first thing that comes to mind is the difference between urban issues in growing cities here and in less developed countries. Astrid Idlewild (AI): I’d say trash is a surplus of everything that’s unneeded, regardless of who’s using it. Michelle Senayah (MS): I think of it as things that are overlooked and undervalued, and that maybe could be re-thought.

Joe Berridge (JB): My peak trash experience happened in a wonderful urban development in Stockholm called Hammarby Sjöstad that is completely re-thinking trash. For starters, the cooking heat source is human sewage gas. Sixty percent of the electricity is generated by waste-to-energy plants. They recycle absolutely everything and they turn that back into energy, treating waste not as an end state, but as something that can go through several more states and become something useful. RG: It’s very hard when you don’t have an existing infrastructure that allows you to even think about these things—not only physical infrastructure but also institutional infrastructure. JB: More and more, the European Union is essentially banning landfill, so it’s forcing

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Melbourne, Australia, has successfully transformed its network of downtown laneways into vibrant commercial spaces.

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Michelle Robinson

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Hammarby Sjöstad re-uses everything at least twice. Domestic cooking and local buses and ferries are fuelled by human biogas and electricity derived from waste-to-energy systems.

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Joe Berridge

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change people’s thinking and behaviour and awareness about their use of resources. One example is three-stream waste collection, meaning that in new homes our development partners must provide facilities for the collection of recyclables, organics, and waste material, each in a separate stream or chute. Another example is sub-metering of units, so people are more aware of their individual energy consumption. JB: Think about the typical 1970s apartment building: there isn’t any waste separation that happens on each floor. And it’s tricky to get people to lug things all the way down to the ground floor. You have to find some way that’s more clever.

HL: In Egypt, they have the Zabbaleen, which is a society that collects people’s garbage from apartment towers and all over the city. We have an equivalent in the Chinese ladies of Toronto who collect beer bottles and scraps. There’s no institutional framework to enable them to do this—these are seniors making a living collecting garbage to survive. It’s a question of race and resource and solution-making. DP: It intersects with the idea of waste from a very human place: who are we discarding, not only what are we discarding?

people to be more imaginative. To take all this stuff and bury it in the ground is an appalling thing to do when it’s a source of embedded energy. MS: There’s a social readiness to think about these things, but it falls down at the institutional level. All my projects deal in some way with things that are not used to their full potential. For example, I’m a founder of the Laneway Project, which is re-working Toronto’s laneways—these forgotten, underappreciated, and underconsidered spaces in the city. Or Open Streets TO, where we’re looking at time that’s going to waste, with low trafficvolume times on our major roads. We need to contemplate resources in this city that we are wasting, and stop thinking about them as waste and start thinking about them as resources. RG: At Waterfront Toronto, we’re implementing some projects to help

HL: A project I found fascinating was a demolition project on the waterfront. The idea was: can we take an entire building and find a use for it—and create an economy at the same time? Everything was disassembled, including the gypsum in the drywall, and we found a Mennonite community in Southern Ontario that could reconstitute drywall to build new drywall. JB: There’s a Swedish example I love: the management office of the garbage collection and waste energy company is built out of found material that people dumped in their site. So they actually reconstructed the entire building out of bits and pieces of other buildings. The message has got a lot of symbolic value but it’s also incredibly practical. AI: To the 3Rs, I’d add another: reconsider. Until recently, I think there’s been a lack of understanding of the extent to which even within the recycling system there’s still a lot of wastage.

DP: Would you say that there’s a public awareness change that correlates with the way that our professions have changed in their thinking towards waste? HL: What I’m perceiving is a de-territorialization of professions, which I think is necessary. In the nineteenth century, city processes became sort of segmented and rationalized. I think the question now is: how do we re-capitalize and re-blur those relationships, because the solutions are systems-based. RG: That’s something I find in the work I do. There’s a need to move together and bridge across sectors, because that starts to create more resilient, more lasting projects, with many layers. HL: The parks revolution on Toronto’s waterfront is phenomenal: it was a heroic effort to take a contaminated site and bring it into a pristine park. And to push that boundary even further: the thing is that we could’ve done better. We took a lot of soil from elsewhere and brought it down to Toronto. Couldn’t we have actually built a system that captured all that dirt that was being moved out of the waterfront somewhere else? DP: We’ve talked about soil and water, but I’d like to turn it over to Astrid to talk a little bit about light pollution. AI: When one brings up lighting pollution, people think about how they can’t see the stars at night, without realizing that there is consistent research emerging in the last 25 years which corroborates how lighting at night can disrupt and impact our circadian biology. Evidence continues to mount that this chronodisruption is interfering with the ability of our bodies to recharge and repair themselves at night, leading to bigger health problems down the road. So this really dovetails with a public health concern. DP: When I think of light pollution, I think of birds and tall buildings at night in city centres… AI: The FLAP initiative [Fatal Light Awareness Program] in Toronto works with commercial buildings in the core to try to avert bird deaths caused by lighting at night emitted by the interiors of buildings. The problem is that we have so many residential skyscrapers now, and condo dwellers turn on their lights when and as they choose.

Round Table

So this really emerges as a question of how we look at the design of buildings themselves. We must look at ways to curtail the light we are emitting at night. DP: Are there ways that light pollution plays into some of the work that you’re doing in the context of built form, laneways, or nighttime programming? MS: In the context of laneways, it’s not light pollution but it’s the quality and the distribution of light that are the problem. AI: When looking at a stretch of luminaires along, say, a laneway, and those luminaires shine directly in your eyes, it produces a night blindness, an overwhelming of one’s low-light vision receptors. The commonsense response to “bad lighting” has been to increase the quantity and light output, when really this is the completely wrong way to approach it. We should be looking at redesigning luminaires, redesigning what kinds of lighting technology we’re using, and how it’s being used. With newer systems, options such as adaptive lighting (managed remotely or on-site through sensor-based automation) can dim street lighting when sensors aren’t detecting human activity in the vicinity. MS: Instead of looking at it from the lighting perspective, we can look at it from a cutting of waste and inefficiencies perspective. That in turn leads to better-lit city spaces that then

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lead to reduced waste of space, or better use of spaces that are more comfortable and usable. It’s an example of those sorts of cross-silo connections we were talking about. AI: General street lighting produces an abundance of bright spots and shadows. With those shadows, of being unable to see into the darkness, comes the sense of not feeling safe, which in turn can facilitate under-use of spaces. So how we light our cities connects with how we’re making the most of a public space. Otherwise, we’re wasting the potential of our spaces. 07

JB: Landscape architects have a huge role to play in this. In Holland, the materiality of public spaces is actually being reformatted—for example, there are bike paths that have solar panels. They’re producing light and absorbing light, which is a phenomenal transformation.

ures are, so that we can start to take away some of this regulatory trash? JB: No...Let’s face it: a professional can come up with some stunningly stupid ideas from time to time as well. On the other hand, there’s a whole nightmarish castle of regulatory and legislative nonsense that obscures the fact that we’re all trying to make a better world.

I’d like to talk about another kind of trash: regulatory trash. There’s a famous example: when Waterfront Toronto started, they determined that they needed something like 325 environmental assessments to do the plan. They negotiated it down to something like 175. That is regulatory trash!

DP: Is there a balance that we can find? MS: It’s important that the regulatory structure not become set in stone because then it stops being responsive, and the world is an ever-changing place, right?

DP: Should it be up to professionals like yourselves to work through a process to continually come up with what those public health and safety and environmental meas-

AI: So much of this seems to boil down to simple economics. When one can make an economic-based case to address a question or a problem, then things can happen a lot quicker. RG: This is why it’s important to remember that while we can, or think we can, come up with all these ideas as professionals in our respective fields, ultimately most of what we do moves through the democratic process. So we have a big responsibility to be part of the public dialogue and make sure that ultimately the public (who is responsible for

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Open Streets TO 2014 brought people out into public spaces for communal activities.

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Larissa Kucharyshyn

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Greened pedestrian or vehicular laneways can soften the urban landscape and provide environmental benefits.

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Melanie J. Watts

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The only way the dramatic changes to Times Square in New York City could be approved was through the serial issuance of temporary road closures, an example of regulatory waste.

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Joe Berridge

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electing the politicians who are making the decisions about our finances and what we collectively invest in) has an appreciation of the environmental drawbacks of various things. We need to be part of the dialogue with respect to what our collective priorities really are. DP: I wonder if I could turn it over to a question about things that we don’t like to think about, things that are maybe taboo subjects. What is it that is discarded or that we don’t like to face, and that we shy away from in a detrimental way? Trash, for example, is something we don’t want to look at in a literal sense, but then also in a conceptual sense… AI: The Safe Streets Act, 1999—I’m going to start there. This legislation in Ontario criminalized informal economies occurring within public spaces, which means that we are reducing citizens who are unable to get

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Underpass Park in the West Don Lands neighbourhood of Toronto has helped transform this area from one that was underutilized to one that is used and valued.

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Courtesy of Waterfront Toronto

work in other ways to a kind of human trash. The Harris government was basically saying that they wanted more control over who’s making what kind of money in ways which may be monitored over-the-table through income taxes. JB: The biggest waste you have in any society is essentially the waste of human talent and ambition. In Europe right now, the percentage of people who are not working is incredibly high. You’re looking at a society that is unable to utilize the energies and ambitions and talents of a large part of the population. MS: We don’t have a large-scale systemic problem like that, but we do have a systematic disregard of local-level knowledge on some macro-level projects. For instance, there might be something important in the way a given space is used or the way it functions in its neighbourhood; that knowledge is only at the local level, and if it isn’t brought through to the project planning process, then decisions lead to it becoming a bit of a waste of space or an underused space.

RG: We have a responsibility not just to have dialogue but to make sure it’s productive, as opposed to just having the doors open for everybody to throw their ideas on the table and whoever yells the loudest gets to change the course of the institution. HL: I think we also have to embrace the messiness of waste. One hundred percent consensus is not possible. The messiness of democracy, of society, of landscapes— it’s just the nature of our civilization. JB: Making everything perfect takes time and it’s expensive. An interesting type of building going up in a number of places right now is the cheap, flexible sort of low-

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AI: That goes back to the whole issue of control of public space. MS: You’re encouraged to move through it, but not to sit and... JB: In Toronto, we’ve just created this wonderful space—Queens Quay Boulevard. It’s about a mile long and the intention of that space is essentially to do nothing. It’s fantastic. HL: I always believe in the local as a fantastic place to start because the global is so phenomenally hard to even conceptualize. In my neighbourhood I’ve been watching a wonderful community group working on a project in a remnant hydro corridor. To me, it’s very exciting because they turn around hope. I want to know that we actually have an ability to repurpose, recycle, renew, invent, reimagine. That is the hope 10

tech building. In Manchester, there’s an old television factory, and they just cleaned the whole of the inside out, and put in shipping containers, as offices, and you can rent them by the day, by the week, by the month, by the year, stupidly cheap, and it’s become a gangbusters employment zone. You don’t have to do anything other than clean them out, keep it simple, stick some containers in that, and what happens happens. RG: One of the toughest things for us as planners to recognize is that we can’t and shouldn’t plan everything. AI: Toronto is a city built on order. Dalia Todary-Michael (DTM): But informal economies are extremely important and significant. 11

AI: Our aversion to risk-taking in this city, to being bold, is legendary. In wasted spaces, much like the vacated Sears space at the Eaton Centre in Toronto, we could be incubating marketplaces in which a series of small shops could mimic a bazaar or flea market. This would open new opportunities for citizens to get new footholds on starting small businesses or making an independent living. We aren’t really encouraging that in real-estate spaces which are hedged (and wasted) on all-or-nothing stakes.

JB: I’d like to talk about wasting time. It’s a crucial thing to be able to do in the city, to find places to waste time. When you go to relaxed cities, you see people sitting for incredible amounts of time in parks or on benches.

we should bring to the table. We need to act incrementally but also strategically and heroically. JB: Every form of trash has a value of some kind. And the trick is to find clever ways to realize that value. Trash is buried treasure.

DP: Interesting that you used the word wasting, because you’re talking about leisure. MS: There are so few benches in our public places and people are not encouraged to stay in the space.

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Underpass Park includes a range of public art and play spaces.

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Courtesy of Waterfront Toronto

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Is your favourite park a dump? TEXT AND MAP BY MICHAEL COOK AND VINCENT JAVET

Canadians, on average, produce more than 2 kg of waste per person per day. In 2010, Ontario disposed of 9.2 million tonnes of solid waste. Today, the majority of this waste ends up in 30 high-volume sites around the province, or is exported to neighbouring jurisdictions; landfills in Michigan and New York are regular (and sometimes controversial) recipients. Around the province, more than 800 smaller, licensed landfills also continue to serve as the final resting place for a variety of public and private waste streams, and the Ministry of the Environment tracks approximately 1,500 formerly licensed landfills that are now closed. In a not too distant past, we buried garbage anywhere and everywhere, ultimately weaving our trash into the fabric of many of our parks. In Toronto alone, 160 former landfill sites have been identified, most of which predate the modern license system and are tracked and monitored by city staff rather than the province. Thirtyfour of these are known to produce methane; another 12 have been identified as leachate sources. Dozens of Toronto parks, including waterfront sites, ravine and valley destinations, and neighbourhood green spaces, sit atop sites where garbage or mixed fill were buried between the 1800s and the 1970s. The story is the same in many other Ontario communities.

The modernization of solid waste disposal from the 1950s onward has produced another class of more intentional garbage parks, where monitoring and restoration work has allowed the reclamation of decommissioned landfill sites. These parks host a spectrum of programs, from sports fields and other active amenities to increasingly ambitious naturalization programs, and demonstrate an evolving body of professional practice. Despite being an apparently easy source of amenity open space, these parks must also confront serious physical, technical, and environmental challenges. Around the province, contaminants and damage from accelerated ground settlement forced the reclosure of a number of early landfill-to-park conversions; naturalization strategies have since proven to be more flexible and productive. This map and the more detailed profiles on the following pages feature these modern garbage parks, along with a survey of the province’s breadth of licensed landfills, from among which restoration efforts will produce Ontario’s next generation of garbage parks. Which of these will be our next garbage opportunity?

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Woodville Avenue Dump, Toronto, June 11, 1914, photographed by Arthur S. Goss

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Courtesy of City of Toronto Archives

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PARKS ON GARBAGE REGULATED WASTE LANDFILLS *

LANDFILL PARKS 3

AMENITY PARK

LARGE LANDFILL ( >1.5 million m ) LANDFILL

NATURALIZED PARK

CLOSED LANDFILL

PLANNED PARK SITE

* condensed sample

BREWER PARK Ottawa

GERMAN MILLS PARK Markham KEELE VALLEY LANDFILL Vaughan CATARAQUI PARK Kingston

RIDGE PARK NORTH HUMBER PARK Toronto

SPRINGBANK PARK

HEBER DOWN CONSERVATION AREA

BRAEBEN GOLF COURSE Mississauga

CONSUMERS DR SOCCER FIELDS D’HILLIER PARK Whitby BEARE ROAD LANDFILL

MALDEN PARK Windsor

BROCK ROAD LANDFILL Pickering

TOMMY THOMPSON PARK

CENTENNIAL PARK (Etobicoke) Toronto GLENRIDGE QUARRY NATURALIZATION D

EUSTON PARK London

NEWALTA PASSIVE PARK Hamilton

ROTARY PARK St. Catharines

McLENNAN PARK Kitchener

BAYVIEW PARK Burlington

ELM STREET NATURALIZATION Port Colborne

POLLINATOR PARK Guelph

KAY DRAGE PARK Hamilton

STATION ROAD NATURALIZATION G Wainfleet

See pages 20-21 for information on sites A to G.

SUN VALLEY

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B 02

B 05

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Location: Guelph, ON Size: 45 ha Landfill Operations: 1961-2003 Park Opened: 2011

03 A

McLENNAN PARK Location: Kitchener, ON Size: 39 ha Landfill Operations: 1958-1976 Park Opened: 2011 “Mount Trashmore” to locals, McLennan Park served as a popular informal toboggan hill since its decommissioning in the late 1970s. The formalized park, including regraded sledding slopes, mountain bike trails, ball courts, and dog park, opened in 2011. 02/

McLennan Park, Kitchener

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Jordan Bonifacio

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McLennan Park, Kitchener

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Courtesy of City of Kitchener

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BraeBen Golf Course, Mississauga

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Courtesy of BraeBen Golf Course

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Pollinator Park, Guelph

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Victoria MacPhail

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Malden Park, Windsor

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Courtesy of City of Windsor

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Tommy Thompson Park/ Leslie Street Spit, Toronto

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Courtesy of Waterfront Toronto

B 06 B

POLLINATOR PARK

BRAEBEN GOLF COURSE

Guelph’s Pollinator Park [see Ground02 and Ground26] has proven to be a popular example and an enduring opportunity for researchers, university students (including University of Guelph landscape architecture students), and an interested and enthusiastic public to participate in landfill reclamation and naturalization efforts at the former Guelph Sanitary Landfill.

Location: Mississauga, ON Size: 80 ha Landfill Operations: 1980-2003 Course Opened: 2005 This golf course’s 27 holes sit atop Peel Region’s former Britannia Landfill, an 8-storey mound laid down over twenty years on land west of Mavis Road. Planning and design work for the landfill’s golfing future had begun as soon as the site opened. This proactive engineering and design effort facilitated the transition from landfill operations to golfing in just two years after closure.

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EUSTON PARK NATURALIZATION Location: London, ON Size: 11 ha Landfill Closure: 1971 Park Opened: 1986

F 10

Euston Park was a gravel pit turned municipal landfill turned amenity park, sandwiched between residential areas in southwest London. Its sports fields abandoned as a result of uneven settling of the landfill, the park is now home to naturalization efforts that aim to transform the site into a positive influence for an adjacent ESA (an oxbow wetland known as The Coves).

F 11

LESLIE STREET SPIT/TOMMY THOMPSON PARK Location: Toronto, ON Size: 500+ ha Landfill Operations: 1959-Present Park Opened: 1973 (weekends only)

09 E

MALDEN PARK Location: Windsor, ON Size: 71 ha Landfill Closure: 1973 Park Opened: 1998

Built from relatively clean demolition rubble and more toxic fly ash and dredgeate, the Leslie Street Spit/Tommy Thompson Park has become Ontario’s premier demonstration site for the capacity of intentional design and ecological succession to produce value from waste materials. The park’s popularity and profile continue to grow, even as the Spit continues to receive much of the tonnage razed and excavated by Toronto’s redevelopment boom.

Windsor’s Malden Park blends amenity space, ornamental ponds, and emergent wetlands, with an extensive naturalization project atop a 25-metre mound of claycapped garbage. 13/

Station Road Naturalization Site, Wainfleet

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Krystal McLeish

13 G

STATION ROAD NATURALIZATION SITE Location: Wainfleet, ON Size: 7.3 ha Landfill Operations: 1950s-2008 Park Opened: 2012 One of a number of exciting landfill restoration projects being undertaken in Niagara Region, the Station Road site in Wainfleet includes two wetland ponds. Drier portions of the property have been engineered to encourage the adjacent woodland and grassland communities to recolonize the site at their own pace. At other former landfills such as the Elm Street site in Port Colborne, Niagara Region staff have experimented with more active naturalization strategies, including nucleation plantings. BIOS/ MICHAEL COOK IS A LANDSCAPE AND URBAN DESIGNER AT BROWN+STOREY ARCHITECTS AND A MEMBER OF THE GROUND EDITORIAL BOARD.

F 12

VINCENT JAVET IS A SENIOR RESEARCHER WITH GREEN ROOFS FOR HEALTHY CITIES AND A MEMBER OF THE GROUND EDITORIAL BOARD.

New Ground

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New Ground

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03 INTERVIEW BY VICTORIA TAYLOR, OALA, WITH BEIRUTBASED LANDSCAPE ARCHITECT VLADIMIR DJUROVIC

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Renderings of the Aga Khan Museum and Ismaili Centre landscape in Toronto

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VDLA

Situated on a high western slope of the Don River, 15 kilometres northeast of downtown Toronto, are the gardens of the recently opened Aga Khan Museum and Ismaili Centre. Generously funded by the Aga Khan Foundation, the museum and the gardens are a unique cultural gift. Emerging after the controversial demolition of the John B. Parkin-designed Bata Shoe Company headquarters is an angular white granite museum surrounded by an array of planted allees, remarkable Metasequoia specimens and a sculptural Thuja perimeter. While the site offers northbound Don Valley Parkway commuters a stunning perspective, it is only through exploration on foot that landscape architect Vladimir Djurovic’s vision can be fully appreciated.

Victoria Taylor (VT): How did you begin your research for the design, and what design strategies did you emphasize in your competition proposal to the Aga Khan Foundation? Vladimir Djurovic (VD): We started by studying “classic” Islamic gardens with their adaptations and variations across different cultures and continents. From that wealth we abstracted what we felt was their essence and tried to present it in a way that belonged to this new context. Most successful Islamic gardens have simple layouts with just a few main components that when properly combined can create something way beyond the sum of those parts. In addition to that, the involve-

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VD: Our formal garden layout is based on the traditional Charbagh (four quadrant garden). The five large water mirrors (four quadrants and their centre), with their strict geometrical composition, modulate and scale the space between the Aga Khan Museum and the Ismaili Centre, while offering ever-changing reflections that become an integral part of the place. The result is a contemplative space, a simple modern reinterpretation of an Islamic garden. VT: What are your impressions of the role of landscape design in the public realm here versus how it is used to animate public space in Eastern cities like Beirut? VD: Unfortunately, in Beirut, public spaces are a rarity and landscape architecture is still in its dormant stage. However, this gives us tremendous drive to come up with meaningful spaces that have a lot to offer, for the community. 06 06-07/

Hariri Memorial Garden, Beirut, Lebanon

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Matteo Piazza

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Gebran Tueni Memorial, Beirut, Lebanon

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Matteo Piazza

ment of all the senses in order to create a complete sensual experience became a guiding principle in the conception of this project. Our formal garden has a clear geometric layout and a reduced palette of constituent elements: loose gravel, a bustan (fruit orchard), and water. VT: Typically, a Western-trained landscape architect studies little of the ancient Persian art of garden design. Historical sites such as Humayun’s Tomb in Delhi and the Alhambra in Spain are not part of the design discourse in our training. As a young, contemporary designer, trained in the West but based now in the East, how was the Aga Khan Museum project an opportunity to draw from your two worlds? VD: The project was the ultimate opportunity to draw from historical precedents across the globe. Gardens that are centuries old felt more alive than many contemporary ones I have experienced. Their timeless qualities were our main source of inspiration. VT: How did you integrate the clients’ interest in Islamic design into the landscape plan for the Aga Khan Museum?

VT: What were the unique site features that inspired or directed your design? VD: It was more of a reaction to the site than a search for its soul. It’s in a dense environment, surrounded by streets and highways. However, it has an elevated, proud, generous, and panoramic presence. Our design closed in, where necessary, to create privacy and intimacy as in the formal garden, yet opened up to the surrounding views as in the Ismaili Centre’s southern garden. VT: How do the plant selections play into the story of your design? VD: In every country we work in, we get very familiar with the plants and lean towards native and local varieties that are rooted in their ecological context. As a unifying gesture for the project and both buildings, the entire road façade is lined with native maples, while the formal garden incorporated native serviceberry trees. The selection also took into account seasonal transformations to ensure features of interest with each season.

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VT: Architect Fumihiko Maki used light as his inspiration for the museum design. What are some of the ways that light plays into the landscape narrative you have created for this project? VD: Light is a subtle yet powerful component of our scheme. On many levels it solidifies the desired experience. On the water mirrors’ surfaces, it creates endless compositions across time, while totally dematerializing the surrounding buildings, a strong Islamic notion for reaching the divine. Plays of light and shadows across the garden and over the loose gravel add a lot to the delicacy of the desired sensual hints that make this place what it is. 07

VT: What are the different ways and levels a visitor to the site might engage with your design? Are there plans for museum programming to be integrated into the gardens? VD: There is no doubt that the presence within the park of two institutional buildings has greatly determined the nature and character of the park itself. Although the park caters to different activities, groups, and ages, due to its size it can’t compete with the large green areas located in the vicinity as far as providing spaces for physical activities. Its nature is a more contem-

plative one. The Formal Garden was conceived as an extension of the Aga Khan Museum. The idea was to provide an outdoor space where different activities and exhibits related to this institution could take place. We imagine that, with time, the garden will be transformed with each event and exhibit, fulfilling its role as an integral part of the museum.

THE GARDENS OF THE AGA KHAN MUSEUM AND ISMAILI CENTRE Address: 77 Wynford Drive, Toronto, Ontario M3C 1K1 Hours: The park and surroundings are open during the day from dawn to dusk, unless there is an event booking, and can be visited for free. The museum is open Tuesday to Sunday (10am to 6pm). Extended hours Wednesdays (10am to 8pm). Closed Mondays. Website: www.agakhanmuseum.org Phone: 416.646.4677 Email: information@agakhanmuseum.org Garden Tours Beginning in the spring of 2015, join a knowledgeable guide for a garden design and horticultural tour ($10 adults; $5 students and seniors) of the Aga Khan Park to learn about the design and the many trees, shrubs, and flowers that are planted there.

BIO/ VLADIMIR DJUROVIC IS A BEIRUT-BASED AWARD-WINNING LANDSCAPE ARCHITECT WHO RECEIVED HIS UNDERGRADUATE DEGREE IN HORTICULTURE FROM READING UNIVERSITY IN ENGLAND AND HIS MASTER’S DEGREE IN LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE FROM THE UNIVERSITY OF GEORGIA IN THE U.S. VICTORIA TAYLOR, OALA, DESIGNS SPACES INFORMED AND INSPIRED BY CONTEXT, ECOLOGY, COMMUNITY ENGAGEMENT, AND SOCIAL AND HORTICULTURAL POSSIBILITIES.

Architectural Tour Tuesday to Sunday at 2 pm ($10 adults; $5 students and seniors plus museum admission): Explore the architecture of the Aga Khan Museum, designed by Fumihiko Maki (Japan), and learn about key features of the site.

Book Corner

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value, whether from a spiritual perspective or not. Thus, life, in and of itself, can be deemed sacred. 04

While the author focuses our attention on naturally occurring and designed sacred landscapes from his Buddhist perspective, his insights can inform even the most skeptical among us. Few would deny that there are forces in landscape and in nature that we cannot understand. Spiritual inquiry provides us with one means to deal with these unknowns, and can help reawaken a reverential relationship with the living earth.

Book title: Searching for the Heart of Sacred Space: Landscape, Buddhism and Awakening Author: Dennis Alan Winters Publisher: The Sumera Press, 2014

The author chronicles in great detail his extensive travels to the East since deciding in the early 1970s to leave the profession of architecture and let go of his associated “infantile, egotistical” attitudes.

His exposure to ecologically based land-use planning, starting in 1974, eventually led to the design of the Milarepa Buddhist Meditation Centre in Vermont for his Cornell University Master’s Degree thesis in landscape architecture. When he presented his thesis to His Holiness the Dalai Lama, His Holiness asked, “Tell me, what is the basis of this design? From where does it come; what is its source?” This remark was critical to Winters’ realization that his “long-range intent to design spiritual centres and gardens for meditation and healing required firm physical, mental, emotional and spiritual foundation.” Hence, his decade’s long quest to reveal a non-objective “truth of design” for himself, which he ultimately discovers is grounded in what he calls “the spark of awakening”:

REVIEW BY REAL EGUCHI, OALA

How do we discern what is a sacred space or landscape? Broadly defined, to the author it seems to be one that helps to strengthen mental, physical, and spiritual health in a balanced relationship with the social and natural environments.

What insights about design and sustainability can a book about Buddhism and landscape, written by a landscape architect, provide to me, a pantheist/humanist? To remain open to the potential insights the book could offer, I decided to take the word “sacred” to mean: to hold in highest esteem or as having extraordinary 01/

Dennis Winters’ book explores the notion of sacred landscapes.

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Courtesy of The Sumera Press

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Tibetan Plateau

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Dennis Winters

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Pretapuri, Western Tibet

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Dennis Winters

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Daisen-in, Kyoto

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Dennis Winters

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“The spark of awakening is the source of wisdom and virtuous activities; of happiness, kindness and love; of the capacity to cry at the sight, sound and touch of beauty. And like the Buddha, it’s the source of artistic expression.” For the author, truth of design requires digging deeply, with the intention of making things better and more beautiful. His goal is to discover those places where aesthetics, ecology, and spirituality align. One such place is Pretapuri. Winters paints a picture of an ecotone that is rich with ecological activity, yet also one he deems a sacred place. His discussion aligns the geomantic and scientific traditions. The author is in awe of what he calls a “transactional” space: a vibrant landscape of movement, abundance, and diversity; a liminal landscape “connecting me to the subtle operations of nature…the landscape where I felt most ‘me.’” Pretapuri, as with other landscapes explored, reveals to Winters that the experience of a sacred landscape is integral with the experience of the sacred self. We are left believing that shifting our awareness of the true depth of our relationship with landscape is critical to unleashing our capabilities as landscape architects. 05/

Milarepa Centre, Vermont

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Dennis Winters

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Tenryu-ji, Kyoto

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Dennis Winters

Pretapuri is one pilgrimage forming part of Winters’ epic journey in his search for meaning in which his questions, observations, and tentative conclusions grow integrally through inner monologues and dialogues with his companions—the “cosmic whisper” and Brother Tane, characters created to suggest moments of insight and philosophical inquiry. More often than not, the stories and parables Winters shares are very challenging to follow. While sketch illustrations included by the author were drawn to deepen his experience, maps/plans (there is one) and photographs (there are four) would have made it much easier to follow along in the journey. But one must wonder if they were purposely omitted to challenge us to follow with greater focus and awareness. It would have been helpful if Winters had included one of his own designed sacred landscapes to illustrate the direct applicability of his thinking to landscape architecture. But then perhaps the purity of his message would have been lost. The author offers his six signs of a sacred landscape that also serve as fundamental auspicious elements necessary for the design of sacred landscapes: context, containment, coherence, composition, clarity and the artistic expression of contemplation.

In addition to contemplative landscapes, Winters draws our attention to Chod practice and associated landscapes. We are informed that Chod is a Buddhist and Bon practice of cutting through the ego and overcoming obstacles. Quoting his teacher Zasep Rinpoche: “Find a landscape that brings on fear…Then you cut the fear: fear of dying, fear of rejection, fear of derision, fear of disappointment. As a result from having realizations of Chod practice, you can better take care of the earth.” Perhaps we could include opportunities for Chod-like practice in our gardens/landscapes? We could create gardens in which we can learn to be comfortable with the wild; where a bees’ nest in a rotting log doesn’t pose a threat; where a native plant being consumed by native insects challenges our need for control and permanence; where coyotes, raccoons, skunks, and squirrels co-habitate with us; where confronting fear allows us to “better take care of the earth.” We could design our landscapes as “transactional” zones, with qualities the author experienced and ascribes to Pretapuri: “Where growth and life met decay and death.” Can we awaken our sense to what a garden/landscape is and view it as a sacred place for these processes to co-exist? BIO/ REAL EGUCHI, OALA, IS PRINCIPAL OF EGUCHI ASSOCIATES LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTS WHOSE CURRENT FOCUS INCLUDES BODY-CENTRED HEALING COMBINED WITH AN EARTH-BASED SPIRITUAL PRACTICE.

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Sutlej River Valley, Pretapuri, Western Tibet

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Dennis Winters

Letter From… England

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TEXT BY BEN O’BRIEN

I can trace my moment of epiphany to a park tour in New York City in the summer of 2012. The first day was devoted to the High Line, and when I stepped onto the old railway I was awestruck by the scale and intricacy of the plantings. Unlike any other designed landscape I had seen, the High Line was a masterpiece of planting design. Plants became my joyful obsession and, after graduating, as part of my initiation into the world of plant-people, I decided I needed to visit the works of the masters. On a trip to England to visit such world-famous gardens as Great Dixter, the Beth Chatto Gardens, and Sissinghurst, the places that left a lasting impression on me were those by the renegades of the gardening world. Piet Oudolf’s perennial meadow for the Hauser and Wirth Gallery in Somerset, the late Henk Gerritsen’s wild gardens at Waltham Place, and James Hitchmough’s exuberant borders at the University of Oxford Botanic Garden and the London Olympic Park were not only wonderful places to visit, but also held invaluable lessons for an aspiring planting designer. One of the common bonds linking these three designers is their commitment to ruthless pragmatism. As Oudolf and Gerritsen write in their book Dream Plants for the Natural Garden: “In a natural garden, we expect a certain degree of balance. No pesticides, no artificial fertilizers and no army of gardeners to keep the plants alive. It is about a garden filled with animate life (insects and birds) which will happily share in the feast without becoming pests, since our plants can deal with them.” Their vast palettes are composed of plants with fitness and toughness. This is borne as much from a desire for “wildness” and a naturalistic aesthetic as it is from the economic and managerial constraints imposed by their preferred venue: the urban public realm. Among the three designers, Hitchmough is perhaps most fascinated with how maintenance requirements manifest themselves in plantings. His rigorously trialled seed mixes are specifically tailored for the harsh realities of nutrient-poor urban soils and minimal budgets for park management. While others may shy away from these daunting restrictions, Hitchmough has developed staggeringly biodiverse, novel plant communities that are tailored specifically for these environments. His plantings work because their component species

Letter From… England

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are highly compatible; all are from environments where fire is a routine occurrence. Thus, the plantings are easily maintained in sandy, dry soils by the simple strategy of annual burning. More than being easy to maintain, however, Hitchmough’s Merton Borders at Oxford and his plantings at the London Olympic Park are feasts for the senses. They speak to a quality that all three designers possess—a pragmatic response to existing conditions combined with the deft touch of an artist.

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Henk Gerritsen’s gardens at Waltham Place, Berkshire

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Ben O’Brien

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Piet Oudolf’s garden at the Hauser and Wirth Gallery, Scotland

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Adam Woodruff

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Waltham Place

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Ben O’Brien

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Hitchmough’s borders at the University of Oxford Botanic Garden

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Ben O’Brien

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Piet Oudolf’s garden at the Hauser and Wirth Gallery, Scotland

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Adam Woodruff

In varying degrees, from Oudolf’s vivid tapestries of colour and texture to the quiet subtlety of Gerritsen’s natural gardens to Hitchmough’s trademark raucous flowering meadows, the work of each designer is a commentary on a new definition of beauty in the context of a designed landscape. As Oudolf comments in the trailer for an upcoming documentary about his life’s work, “It’s the journey in your life to find out what real beauty is, but also to discover beauty in things that are at the first sight not beautiful.” This is not a new idea in landscape discourse, but in contemporary practice it remains radical. As much as Oudolf, Gerritsen, and Hitchmough all play on conventional motifs by contrasting and combining different forms, textures, and colours, their landscapes are just as much about the unconventional notions of, as Oudolf says, “seeing beauty in ugliness, beauty in death, beauty in decay, beauty in the unexpected.” This new idea of what beauty can mean in the context of a garden alludes to a body of theory that aspires to link aesthetics with ecological health and natural process. By embracing the passage of time (beauty in death and decay), spontaneity (beauty in the unexpected), and wildness (beauty in ugliness), the resulting gardens go beyond the “pretty.” Instead, their beauty is informed by the authenticity, vitality, and romance of wild nature. What unites these three designers, and their respective works in England, is that they are as concerned with a scientific understanding of plant ecology, biodiversity, and ecosystem dynamics as they are with culturally progressive ideas of beauty and art. Their work embodies not only a genuine love of plants, but a love of what plants can do. By exploiting the unrealized agency of plants in designed communities, they create environments that are experientially immersive, intimately engaging, and deeply enriching for both humans and nonhumans alike.

BIO/ BEN O’BRIEN IS A BLA GRADUATE AND 2014 OLMSTED SCHOLAR FROM THE UNIVERSITY OF GUELPH WHOSE COMPANY, BEN O’BRIEN LANDSCAPE DESIGN, IS IN PRINCE EDWARD COUNTY.

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Notes: A Miscellany of News and Events

conferences Grey to Green: A Conference Exploring the Economics of Local and Regional Food Systems and Resilience will take place in Toronto on June 1-2, 2015. The event features the cutting edge of design and policy practice and will showcase more than 50 leading thinkers and doers across a diverse range of fields. The multi-disciplinary program is packed with project case studies, useful designs, business models, and analytical tools. Keynote speaker Roger Schickedantz, Director and Architect at William McDonough + Partners, will profile a variety of paradigmatic projects that include rooftop food production at varying scales, ranging from experimental hydroponic greenhouses to a commercially viable 80,000-square-foot production facility.

As well, the conference features a trade show and tours of sites such as Corktown Common, Sugar Beach, Sherbourne Common, Eastdale Collegiate Institute Rooftop Farm, Access Point on Danforth, and Ryerson University’s rooftop and community garden projects. Professional training courses offered as part of the conference include Introduction to Rooftop Urban Agriculture; Green Walls 101: Systems Overview and Design; Green Infrastructure: Policies, Performance and Projects; Integrated Water Management for Buildings and Sites; Integrated Water Management for Buildings and Sites III: Water Storage and Cisterns; and a new soil workshop developed by Compost Canada. For more information, visit www.greytogreenconference.org.

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urban agriculture magazines The long-awaited sequel to the book Continuous Productive Urban Landscapes has recently been published. Second Nature Urban Agriculture: Designing Productive Cities, written by André Viljoen and Katrin Bohn, updates and extends the authors’ concept for introducing productive urban landscapes, including urban agriculture, into cities as essential elements of sustainable urban infrastructure. The book is available online and from bookstores. For more information, visit www.routledge.com.

competitions

The Thames River in London, Ontario, has and continues to be one of the city’s most definable community resources. London Community Foundation, the City of London, and Upper Thames River Conservation Authority are launching a two-tiered international design competition to redevelop the land along the Thames River. The competition will be seeking a master plan vision for the river as well as site-specific approaches for two areas where the design teams will define inaugural projects to reinvigorate public connection to the river. This project will strive to enhance community quality of life, and environmental and economic development. “We’ve seen the power of river revitalization projects in other communities across North American and the impact is astounding. We are ready to embrace this ambitious goal in London. The revitalization of the Thames River has the power to mobilize Londoners and bring new life to our community,” says Martha Powell, President and CEO of the London Community Foundation. For more information, visit www.lcf.on.ca.

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Mark Winterer, owner of Recover Green Roofs, will speak about the Whole Foods green roof at the Grey to Green Conference.

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Recover Green Roofs

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Ben Flanner, president of Brooklyn Grange Rooftop Farm, will speak about the economics of rooftop urban agriculture at Grey to Green.

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Brooklyn Grange

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Whole Foods green roof in Lynnfield, MA.

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Recover Green Roofs

Scapegoat, a not-for-profit, bi-annual journal exploring design practice, historical investigation, and theoretical inquiry, is open to proposals on the theme of “Night” for an upcoming issue. The issue will look at the aesthetics, politics, and technologies of the urban night, which is on the agendas of city governments everywhere, as clashes over night-time noise and illumination focus broader tensions over gentrification. As well, this issue will look at the ways in which night has come to interest artists, city governments, activists, and others. Edited by Scapegoat’s Christie Pearson with Will Straw, writer and professor of communications in the Department of Art History and Communication Studies at McGill University, the journal welcomes proposals for essays, design projects, and reviews. Proposals are due 15 September 2015. For more information, visit http://scapegoatjournal.org/.

books The American Society of Landscape Architects has named the Boston-based Gardner Museum’s exhibition catalogue Composite Landscapes: Photomontage and Landscape Architecture to its list of the best books of 2014. Edited by Charles Waldheim, the volume gathers work from contemporary artists and landscape architects who examine one of landscape architectecture’s most recognizable forms: the montage view. To purchase a copy or for more information, visit www.gardnermuseum.org.

images A new book by Nadia Amoroso, Representing Landscapes, published by Routledge, explores the visual representation of landscapes, creative cartography, and digital technologies. Included are profiles of a wide selection of drawings and models done by students across the globe from various landscape architecture programs. The book is available online and in bookstores. For more information, visit www.routledgetextbooks.com.

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infrastructure

The multi-billion dollar investment in the expansion and improvement of Toronto’s public transport system, including along portions of Eglinton, Finch, and Sheppard Avenues, provides an opportunity to combine a series of small, high-impact interventions with major infrastructure projects. The Middle City Passages Toronto competition is an opportunity to investigate how new transit infrastructure along Sheppard East might interweave with existing local, small-scale pedestrian networks. It is also a chance to test how forging connections between local paths and transit infrastructure can further support development and improve local living conditions. Organized by Metrolinx and the University of Toronto’s John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design in partnership with the City of Toronto, the competition is open to young professionals and emerging practices in architecture, urban design, landscape architecture, urban planning, and related disciplines. For more information on the competition visit www.daniels.utoronto.ca/ middlecitypassages.

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Documents for the Middle City Passages Toronto competition

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Courtesy of Middle City Passages Toronto

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William Sleeth

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Courtesy of Tim O’Brien

in memoriam William M. Sleeth (1955-2015) Born on June 22nd, 1955, in Hamilton, Ontario, William spent his childhood and early teen years in Stoney Creek. He earned a Bachelor’s of Landscape Architecture from the University of Guelph in 1980 and developed his professional career at the City of Kitchener, where he was responsible for stewardship of many parks, trails, and natural areas. William was a recipient of the 2015 OALA Public Practice Award, presented at the Awards Ceremony on March 27, 2015, in Guelph. William was a man of many talents, and shared generously with family, friends, and community. His passion for life manifested in many areas, including garden design, paddling, hiking, and downhill skiing. His creative skills are on display in his extraordinary naturalized home garden on the Speed River, his most significant touchstone and location of his annual solstice party. William was an inspiration to those who knew him and will be deeply missed.

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Artifact

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02 TEXT BY LORRAINE JOHNSON

There’s a long history of landscaping to attract wildlife—creating habitat gardens for birds, butterflies, pollinators, etc. More unusual, though, are gardens specifically designed to provide fun for felines. The roof of the Toronto Humane Society’s River Street building includes a 2,300-square-foot garden space that welcomes cats, provides roaming room for rabbits, habitat for hamsters, greens for guinea pigs, and day-space for dogs. Animal-friendly plants, including many native species and small trees, shade the creatures (and their human care-givers) at play time. And surely this is one of the only gardens in Toronto where kittens are encouraged to climb into the container plants..

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The roof garden of the Toronto Humane Society is designed to provide outdoor space for the shelter’s animals.

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Courtesy of Toronto Humane Society

BIO/ LORRAINE JOHNSON IS THE EDITOR OF GROUND.

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