29 minute read
trees
02 to back-of-house facilities, teaching facilities, a café, and various public amenities—nearly 65 percent of the biome footprint is dedicated to the coastal and escarpment cloud forest plant communities, with the remaining 35 percent of the biome showcasing drier, sunnier inland habitats.
The design of the biome—and the landscapes contained within, including plateaus, undulating rocky plains, and a dramatic interior escarpment emulating that of the Dhofar cloud forest—necessitated a collaborative approach between the scientific team of the Oman Botanic Garden and the landscape architects, architects, engineers, and interpretation designers. Many workshops and site visits were required for the entire team to understand the design implications of the deceptively simple fact that plants require energy in the form of sunlight in order to facilitate the production of carbohydrates from carbon dioxide and water. The chemical energy produced by this photosynthetic process fuels plant respiration and the production of roots, stems, leaves, and flowers. Of all the radiation that hits the surface of the earth, only certain wavelengths are useful to plants. While plants favour a band of frequencies similar to those used for human vision—the visible light spectrum—plants absorb a higher percentage of energy in the red and blue ends of the spectrum.
The roof height of the southern biome undulates based on the tree heights of each of the sub-habitats sheltered beneath its glass. At its highest point, the biome will enclose soaring 25-metre-tall baobab trees (Adansonia digitata) that will emerge from an endemic forest of Anogeissus dhofarica trees. The siting, orientation, and technical design of the biome is entirely dedicated to providing the plants with the optimal light intensity and spectral distribution, while minimizing solar gain. Natural ventilation in the cool winter months will eliminate the need for mechanical cooling and will provide the added benefit of “exercising” the plants to mimic natural exposure to wind. Unlike most “glasshouses” of the world, this one will be harnessing the power of the sun through photovoltaic panels and a solar array to provide a cool, dark monsoon environment for part of the year, for part of the biome, while still providing the plants of drier, sunnier interior habitats with the light levels they require. Fixed exterior louvres—specific to the annual solar cycle of Muscat—and mechanically retractable interior shading systems will allow for daily customization of light levels within the biome throughout the year. The southern biome is on track to qualify for LEED platinum designation.
While Goethe’s theory of the constitution of the colours of the spectrum first suggested that “colour appears where light and darkness meet,” the design of the southern biome is fundamentally based on light. The tropical greens of the cloud forest plants and even the delicate white blooms of the famed frankincense tree will put on their seasonal show for all to enjoy thanks to a detailed understanding of the light requirements of an entire ecosystem, and how to translate this into the design of a unique built enclosure. In this case, form doesn’t just follow function, but form follows spectrum.
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bIo/ oMAn-bASED AnDrEW b. AnDErSon IS A LAnDScAPE ArchITEcT AnD WorLD hErITAGE ExPErT, forMEr chAIr of ThE GrouNd EDITorIAL boArD, AnD A LonG-TIME MEMbEr of ThE
GrouNd ADvISory PAnEL.
01/ Rendering of the southern biome escarpment cloud forest interior at the Oman Botanic Garden
IMAGE/ Andrew B. Anderson
02/ Baobab tree in southern Oman
IMAGE/ Andrew B. Anderson
03/ Low light levels and lush green vegetation of the monsoon IMAGE/ Andrew B. Anderson
04/ Rendering of the southern biome, Oman Botanic Garden
IMAGE/ Andrew B. Anderson
Listening to the Public Pulse
MoDErATED by ErIc GorDon, oALA
bIoS/ GEorDIE ADAMS IS ThE PrESIDEnT of PubLIvATE, A coLLAborATIvE EnGAGEMEnT coMPAny ThAT SPEcIALIzES In InnovATIon AnD coLLAborATIon MAnAGEMEnT, coMMunITy EnGAGEMEnT, croWDSourcInG, InnovATIon AnD EnGAGEMEnT STrATEGy AnD PLAnnInG, buSInESS ArchITEcTurE, PErforMAncE MAnAGEMEnT, AnD E-conSuLTATIon.
JoShuA bArnDT IS ThE DEvELoPMEnT coorDInATor AT ThE PArkDALE nEIGhbourhooD LAnD TruST—A coMMunITy LAnD TruST LED by rESIDEnTS AnD orGAnIzATIonS TryInG To ProTEcT ThE SocIAL, cuLTurAL, AnD EconoMIc DIvErSITy of PArkDALE, In ToronTo, by rEDEfInInG hoW LAnD IS uSED AnD DEvELoPED. [SEE GrouNd 34, PAGES 4-5, for An ArTIcLE on ThE PArkDALE nEIGhbourhooD LAnD TruST.]
DAnIELLE DAvIS IS A LAnDScAPE DESIGnEr WITh TochEr hEybLoM DESIGn Inc. DAvIS IS ALSo ThE ArTISTIc DIrEcTor of ThE cITIESALIvE PoDcAST, WhIch AIMS To fAcILITATE PLAnnInG DIALoGuE AnD MobILIzE GrASSrooTS PLAnnInG EfforTS by offErInG cITIzEnS A vEhIcLE To ShArE ThEIr STorIES AnD bE InSPIrED by oThErS. ErIc GorDon, oALA, IS A GrouNd EDITorIAL boArD MEMbEr AnD PrIncIPAL AT oPTIMIcITy, A ToronTobASED LAnDScAPE ArchITEcTurE AnD urbAn DESIGn PrAcTIcE ThAT AIMS To MAInTAIn A DIvErSE ProJEcT PorTfoLIo ThAT rEfLEcTS An EfforT To SoLvE urbAn AnD LAnDScAPE ProbLEMS of ALL SorTS.
GLynIS LoGuE IS A GuELPh-bASED EnvIronMEnTAL DESIGnEr WITh A DIvErSE bAckGrounD In ScIEncE, ArT, AnD WELLnESS. ShE IS ThE founDEr AnD PrIncIPAL of LoGuE LAnD STuDIo, WhErE ShE crEATES hEALInG LAnDScAPES AnD bIo-InSPIrED ArchITEcTurE To ADDrESS PrESSInG ISSuES Such AS huMAn AGInG, PhySIcAL hEALTh, AnD LAnD DEGrADATIon. ShE ALSo WAS A co-founDInG MEMbEr AnD ExEcuTIvE DIrEcTor of A GuELPh EnvIronMEnTAL non-ProfIT orGAnIzATIon for 12 yEArS.
ErIn Moroz IS ThE DIrEcTor of coMMunITy rELATIonS AnD coMMunIcATIonS for rEGIonAL ExPrESS rAIL AT METroLInx, WhErE ShE AnD hEr TEAM conDucT counTLESS PubLIc EnGAGEMEnT EvEnTS uSInG A vArIETy of METhoDS AnD TooLS To ADDrESS ThEIr unIquE conSTITuEncy.
ShAWn WATTErS, oALA, IS A GrouNd EDITorIAL boArD MEMbEr bASED In WELLInGTon counTy, WhErE hE IS A councILLor In ThE rEGIonAL GovErnMEnT.
01/ Mobile-based engagement strategies make participation quick and easy. IMAGE/ Geordie Adams
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Eric Gordon (EG): Public engagement is an often required or necessary step in landscape planning or urban design projects. The process has some important, enduring questions: who are we engaging? Who are we not reaching? And what are the consequences of this gap?
Erin Moroz (EM): I am going to describe myself as a translator because I work predominantly with engineers through the community engagement process. One thing that’s really struck me is that you get such a variety of input depending on where people are coming from and how they experience something. For example, I had one person who was actually not involved in the project say to me, I don’t care if you run coal trains out to Guelph, we just need more train service. And then a few kilometres down the track, someone is saying, we want the trains electrified. I think there’s a distinction between education and providing information. You should never presume that someone needs to be educated, or even that someone’s perspective on a project, irrespective of full information, doesn’t have value. They may be coming at it from a really specific, localized place, but that may still have great value. When my staff talk about needing to educate people on a certain matter, I correct them: we’re not educating, we’re providing information. We need to be very respectful of the people we’re engaging with.
EG: What are some of the best approaches for broad-spectrum engagement, in terms of bringing in as many people or as many voices as possible?
Geordie Adams (GA): if you can start with objectives and outcomes, and use that as the scaffolding by which you build your engagement, and then if you engage early, and if you make sure there’s something in there for everyone, then chances are you will have a good engagement.
What’s important in almost all the engagements we do is that there’s a level of transparency, which removes some of the prepositioning that might be done by participants or by the sponsors. Everyone can see what everyone else is doing. For a lot of things we do, all of the user-generated data is there for everyone to see. From that perspective, it’s about as clean as you can get in terms of someone being worried that the dialogue is somehow being bent in a certain way.
Shawn Watters (SW): People will get engaged if there’s an issue that’s close to their heart—for example, a development across from their house or something they feel may personally affect them. But typically,
they expect politicians to look after those issues. I don’t think it’s a good idea to leave it up to a few individuals to make decisions on the future of your community.
EG: One of the perceptions of engagement is that a person’s voice will not be heard or that all the feedback gets shelved and there’s no action.
GA: There’s a core piece of work we try to do right at the very beginning, in the planning stages. We ask the client what they’re planning to do with all the great data, ideas, and insights we’re generating.
EG: What strategies or techniques can we use to support key groups who might be in minority groups—whether it be physical, racial, or socio-economical definitions—how do we identify them and support them through the engagement process or design process?
EM: I think you have to identify stakeholders, you have to look at a project and understand where maybe someone’s not being represented and do your best to seek them out. But you might be making assumptions about how they want to be engaged or why. I worked for a school board and things were translated for some parents; we thought that might be helpful but what came back was that they were insulted that it wasn’t in English, because they had moved to Canada and they wanted to be treated as Canadians, quote unquote, and get the same materials as everyone else was getting.
Glynis Logue (GL): One of the biggest challenges we’re facing right now is to really give marginalized communities the empowerment to be the centre of some of our hardest problem-solving events. It’s important to allow different perspectives to come together so that you can create rich solutions. Co-design is an interesting new way of thinking. When the main user is a child, you don’t set up your meeting for 7pm at night—you go out into their community. You spend time with them. You become fully engaged in their needs and behaviours, and then you start to get true solutions coming to the surface. It requires that you shift how you design, who does the designing.
I’ve always called myself an environmental designer, and that’s partly because it evades classification. It has allowed me to work in a trans-disciplinary way. Because we require so much innovation, other people become partners in the design.
Joshua barndt (Jb): So many residents in Parkdale [a low-income neighbourhood in Toronto] have expressed their mistrust of mainstream consultative activities and opportunities, such as community meetings, when there’s a development proposal application for a condo developer, or a consultation on a particular new policy piece. People in this community have attended so many events over the years where they contributed their two cents and have continued to see the neighbourhood change and policy come out that doesn’t serve them. Toronto is increasingly an unaffordable city and the development that’s been approved by city planners continues to not serve the interests of low-income individuals. So there’s a huge amount of distrust just on that level.
It’s important to remember that a lot of people don’t attend these events because they don’t believe their voices are being heard or that what they contribute will actually lead to substantive, meaningful change. One good example is that when community members are invited out to meetings about condo development applications, their comments don’t actually have any formal
02-04/ The Parkdale Neighbourhood Land Trust is a community development organization that is controlled and run by local residents. IMAGES/ Parkdale Neighbourhood Land Trust
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power or influence in the process because even the councillors’ or city planners’ opinions or decisions can be overruled by the Ontario Municipal Board. So people are disappointed by their lack of legitimate influence in the development process. Really what you have there is manipulation and therapy, where people come assuming that their voice will be meaningfully heard and in fact they have no real agency towards the outcome.
What we can do, though, is substantial. In every neighbourhood, we can build local resident-run organizations that residents can trust, that are going to involve them in development decisions in meaningful ways, and by involving people in organizations that are resident-run, we can build back residents’ trust and start to organize development processes that are more respectful of what low-income and vulnerable people need and want.
In Parkdale, we‘ve created a community land trust—a community development organization that is community controlled and run. Our board is elected by other residents and made up of residents, and so we are actually actively participating in organizing community-led development activity. We start by talking to residents about what they need, and then build proposals out of that, to respond to local needs. There are massive opportunities for resident participation when you begin speaking to people before you determine what the project will be.
EG: Are there new technologies that can facilitate the engagement process?
Danielle Davis (DD): New York City made avatars, based on the demographics of the city, and compiled little narratives for them. Then they ran their plan through these different people—or personas, as they called them. The City of Toronto is doing that for their TO Core planning process, as well. When you start thinking about a traffic problem, for instance, the first people you consider are the drivers, right? But when you go through your cheat sheet of twelve avatars…
EG: Three of them cycle to work…
DD: Exactly. Now, how does that frame your decision?
GA: We do something that’s somewhat similar in that we have used a lot of the data to do some intricate scenarios. These are based on what we’ve heard and seen from public engagement, and the scenarios basically make up about ninety percent of what came out of that dialogue. We call it “use cases.” We’re doing an engagement right now that has about ten different use cases—two primary ones and eight secondary ones. We will literally bring in actual individuals who represent those use cases to test what we’re building before we take it live and into the public domain. We ask them: did we miss anything, did we get it right?
DD: What I like about the avatars is that each one has a story and it’s a story about how a real person experiences something. And so it helps build empathy and helps me understand other people’s perspectives a little better.
Jb: Empathy is key to engagement. The way we set up engagement activities or discussions or consultations can create opportunities for people to have a collective experience by which they build empathy. Their position may be informed by the process of hearing other voices in the room, and I think there’s a benefit to that. GL: There’s a whole movement now around empathic design. I didn’t really realize that I was using empathic design, but most of my projects have required the designer to start off as the listener, and this means that you’re emphasizing what is the emotional ecology of the project. Using that perspective suggests that you have to suspend your designer intentions sometimes. You can’t necessarily impose what you think is best. You have to sit back and allow all the different points of view so that you can gain intuitive insight to then get to the heart of what will become the ways to motivate a socially engaged place.
05/ A French student poster from 1968: “I participate, you participate, he participates, we participate, you participate… they profit.” IMAGE/ Creative Commons
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in Parkdale for decades. We had already done community planning to identify three priority housing needs: supportive housing, senior housing, and affordable family housing. So we started the discussion by having speakers—residents who are in current need of each of those forms of housing—at the beginning of the activity, and then the discussion was informed by that. That was a formal way to introduce an empathetic framework by which people begin the process by hearing people’s stories. People are changed by the collective experience, and then the recommendations they offer generally attempt to accommodate the other person. I think it added to people’s understanding, and then therefore to their commitment to finding a creative solution.
As well, we had a lot of recommendations about intergenerationality being an important design framework for affordable housing, which we hadn’t heard when we just asked a question about what affordable housing should look like. But from having people listen to and hear each other, a new discourse emerged as a core design theme.
GL: The empathic design movement is quite recent. Because of the complexity of our cities, starting from an emotional perspective can garner a level of collective interest and ownership that we need. I’ve been doing a number of projects that use art as an avenue to introduce completely new types of dialogue around tough questions, and it’s fascinating because artists rarely start from the problem or from a negative starting point. Instead, it’s often a nonsensical or poetic starting point. And somehow, through ingenious ways, it can spark modes of dialogue and get people engaged to participate and encourage fundamental shifts in what’s possible in place-making. DD: We often try to explain things with facts and figures, but stories have a way of telling things in an emotional way. And that helps to build empathy and helps people care more. What I love about podcast media is that storytelling is a very basic form of communication. Stories give order to disjointed events and help people see different perspectives and how they come together. It’s important for city building because city building is complicated.
There was an interesting project in Australia, where they were doing neighbourhood plans, and they found key people in the neighbourhood and helped them learn how to make videos and podcasts. And then these people in the community went and collected stories from other people in their neighbourhood. So in the end they had this huge collection of stories, and the stories were used as data for the plans. But they also broadcasted all the stories to a website, and each one was associated with a point on the map. It helped a lot of people learn about the neighbourhood and helped break some of the stereotypes. It’s the locals who are determining what’s of interest, as opposed to an outsider coming in and trying to guess whose stories are important.
EM: There’s engagement, and then there’s engagement—there’s still nothing like a face to face conversation. We still do a lot of door knocking, door to door. And if no one’s home, we leave something at their door that says sorry we missed you, and my staff put their business card in it. People like to know that you’ve been there. They like to know that you’ve put in the elbow work to try to get in touch with them. Also, when people are happy with what’s happening, they don’t come out to meetings. It doesn’t mean that they don’t want to talk about it if you were to knock on their door or send them a survey. That’s when some other tools become very helpful to supplement and get a better idea of how to make your project responsive to community.
EG: Do you think it’s possible to hold an engagement process without framing a discussion in some sort of biased fashion?
DD: I’m working on a park design right now and we’re supposed to be doing inclusive design, but at the same time, we have to design in a very specific way. For example, we have to design the seat walls so that homeless people can’t sleep on them…It’s so that parents feel okay about their kids going to the park. To make it inclusive, we make it exclusive.
EM: When you engage with the public, you see all the best parts of the public and humanity, and then you often see the not so best parts. On one project I was working on, people didn’t want anyone sleeping under the bridge, so that became a big issue for the community—to design it so that no one can actually take shelter there.
SW: Big changes are coming to Ontario in terms of accessibility. These aren’t issues only for a person in a wheelchair. It’s children, it’s elderly, it’s people who have disabilities, it’s a big group. The idea of universal accessibility is a really important thing. It just makes your community better. In some ways, governments are handling it a little bit better than the private sector is. They’ve come to the realization that they have to do this in terms of public buildings. But we’re finding a little bit of pushback from the development industry because they’re used to doing things in certain ways. It’s a matter of attitudes changing, being more accepting as a community.
EG: What are your metrics for deciphering feedback and weighing it?
GA: It depends on the type of tool you use to undertake the dialogue. In some cases, we will incorporate different ratings schemes on the user side so that the original idea as well as suggested improvements by other participants are all rated by the community. And that will give you one indicator in terms of how the community and the crowd prioritize input.
We also have different mechanisms that we use. Often we’ll create a campaign team, sometimes a review team, that might include some of those land development officials that have more insight and understanding around aspects of the topic than perhaps the participants do, such as budget or regulatory elements—things that might impact some of the ideas put forward by the broader community. And we’ll go through a secondary review. Often you’ll use the community’s prioritization to review the top hundred ideas in the eyes of the crowd and take those to a secondary panel.
GL: I use accountability as one of the most important measures of success. After every project, I go back and look at the criteria that was developed to make sure it has had a positive impact. I think that’s just a code of ethics that we need as designers. At the end of the day, our designs must function as intended.
EM: Measuring engagement is difficult because you have to start by drawing some assumptions about what different metrics mean. Bodies in a room isn’t always the best measure of how many people feel engaged. If I’ve been in their neighbourhood, if my team’s been out having one on one conversations, I actually assume that’s going to diminish the number who come out to the public meetings because people have had their questions answered.
EG: A loaded question: is the public always right?
GA: The community is not necessarily aware of everything that’s going on around them. Maybe there are budget issues they’re not aware of. But as long as you meet them in the middle and are doing a sincere engagement where you really do want them to participate and inform aspects of your end objective, then you’ll be fine. And if the number one thing they come up with conflicts with what you want, as long as you meet them head on and inform them, I think most people understand that.
SW: If people are getting good information, they can make quality decisions. You’ve got to find the balance between information from elected officials, planners, and consultants. Where I’ve seen things go off the rails a bit is if there’s already an internal decision and the information is manipulated.
GL: Everything’s connected. We are living in a very complex system, and it motivates us to search for new ways of thinking and new answers. We’re no longer necessarily just the designer. We are often having to offer the citizen a seat at the table where they become a designer, too. That doesn’t mean any citizen can design. If you get citizens at the front end of design to be excited to contribute and develop the solutions, I think you’re going to be looking at a future that’s full of vibrant, healthy people and places. multi-stakeholder situation so we can play the adapter role, jump into facilitator, perhaps be designer, and actually move seamlessly through as a team to help people get to where they need to go. They don’t necessarily need to have all that knowledge themselves. As designers we can really be bottom-up in the way we approach problem solving but also be a leader to get the problem to its richest end goal.
Jb: At any given engagement event, you speak to a small number of people, and even through a protracted, long process you’re still not speaking to everyone. And even when you’re speaking to people, their opinion may change in the process. We have to be careful not to assume that just because we’ve heard particular things from certain people that they represent the public. They represent the people you engaged or you involved in the process at that given moment, and you can use that information to try to create a design or a project that meets the needs you heard. But I think that, over time, there’s the opportunity to engage residents in longer-term processes and in organizations that can develop their capacity to more meaningfully contribute, to have the information they need to contribute in really valuable and dynamic ways. But, is the public always right? I don’t know. What do you think?
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TExT by cLEMEnT kEnT
One of the best ways we can remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere is by adding carbon to the soil as humus or organic matter—easier by far than pumping CO2 into deep rocks, for example. As former Environmental Commissioner of Ontario Gord Miller notes, “Creating healthy soils that contain high amounts of carbon and embed carbon dioxide to make the soils rich and productive is something we have to do.” But, as Miller also notes, “We’re not good at that in Ontario.”
The trick is to be radical, in the deepest root meaning of the word. Carbon stored in wood is easy to measure, but what is stored in the soil for the longest is the carbon added to the soil by the delicate interplay between roots, fungi, and bacteria. The area of roots underground can be up to ten times larger than the area of leaves aboveground; this root area is dwarfed, in turn, by the enormous network of threadlike mycelia of soil fungi. These fungi are mostly collaborators, rather than pathogens, for plant roots. Roots exude energy as carbon-rich sugars and, in exchange, fungi provide nitrogen, phosphorus, and minerals to the roots. Fungi, in turn, are eaten by bacteria, worms, and many other soil denizens that turn the root sugars into carbon-rich humus.
Recent scientific studies show that the world’s soils could store an extra 8 billion tons of greenhouse gases—up to 80 percent of what we produce by burning fossil fuels. But we need to shift what we plant. Eric Toensmeier’s 2016 book, The Carbon Farming Solution, focuses on this issue from an agricultural viewpoint. He shows how mixed plantings of trees and row crops or pastures improve soil carbon levels rapidly. The same ideas apply to the designed landscape.
Root depth and permanence are two of the biggest pro-carbon storage aspects of plants. Typical lawn grasses go 3 to 6 inches deep, while a native meadow species such as buffalo grass (Bouteloua dactyloides) can reach an astonishing 8 feet deep in welldrained soil. Tree roots go down 3 to 6 feet in most cases. (However, while doing repairs on my basement floor this winter I found very healthy roots 8 feet down in my sandy subsoil.) Shrubs such as common ninebark (Physocarpus opulifolius) have reached depths of 15 feet.
Planting for root depth is great for the ease of maintaining landscapes. Choose species with deep roots; be sure to break up construction-compacted subsoil; and if you need to water, do so deeply but less often. Deep roots keep leaves fresh in our increasingly hot and dry summers, without the cost of watering systems, and greatly increase the longevity and health of plants. And, if your design has a greensward or lawn, products such as Eco-Lawn from Wildflower Farm can look spectacular in the midst of a hot August with no watering. Not only does this save water, but mowing frequency can be much reduced, the lawn can be full of flowers that attract butterflies and birds, and the all-native seed mix will reach as deep as the soil permits. Imagine telling a client that their lawn will mitigate climate warming at the same time as it reduces maintenance costs. Perennials, shrubs, and trees keep permanent roots deeper in the soil, and that allows carbon to enter the soil more deeply and be retained much longer. A live soil is a living, breathing ecosystem in which nutrient exchange (including carbon-rich sugars) among collaborating partners is in constant flow.
In The Hidden Life of Trees, forester Peter Wohlleben tells fascinating stories of how trees cooperate with each other via their roots and fungal partners. From his long experience and from scientific experiments, he notes that pairs or triplets of trees of the same species will intermingle their roots and share nutrients. So, when space permits, aim to create small clusters of trees or shrubs rather than individual specimens, and they will establish better and live longer.
Cornelia Hahn Oberlander, BCSLA, received the inaugural Governor General’s Medal in Landscape Architecture in the fall of 2016. In a commencement address to graduates of the Ontario Agricultural College, she emphasized our responsibility to care for the planet: “The scale of these environmental challenges demands that we alter our designs and attitudes throughout the land. The planet is finite and land is a resource, not a commodity.” One of the ways we can care for the land is to design with soil health as a priority.
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01/ Mycelium IMAGE/ Kirill Ignatyev 02/ Ectomycorrhizal mycelium associated with white spruce roots IMAGE/ Andre Picard
03/ Switchgrass roots IMAGE/ The Land Institute
04/ Earthworms have a huge impact on soil. IMAGE/ Schizoform
bIo/ cLEMEnT kEnT, Ph.D., IS A rESEArchEr In bEE GEnoMIcS AT york unIvErSITy, An AvID GArDEnEr, AnD PAST PrESIDEnT of ThE horTIcuLTurAL SocIETIES of PArkDALE AnD ToronTo.
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01/ Trails often have multiple barriers to accessibility. IMAGE/ Creative Commons
02/ Wheelchair on accessible ramp IMAGE/ Creative Commons
03/ Tactile paving IMAGE/ Creative Commons
04/ Ramp stairs IMAGE/ Beau Lebens
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TExT by PhIL PoThEn, bArrISTEr & SoLIcITor
This article provides an overview of the Design of Public Spaces Standards regulation, and does not constitute legal advice. Practitioners with questions about the application of the standards, or any other legal matter, should contact a lawyer directly.
Beginning in 2013, a broad and expanding swathe of landscape architectural practice has become subject to Ontario’s Design of Public Spaces Standards. These standards, which form part of a regulation enacted under the Accessibility for Ontarians With Disabilities Act, aim to make public spaces more accessible by proactively imposing technical specifications, performance benchmarks, and procedures that are less likely to exclude, restrict, or otherwise disadvantage people with disabilities.
Like the accessibility standards for employment, communications, and transportation, the Design of Public Spaces Standards balance the moral imperative of equality for people with disabilities with physical and economic constraints. They are also crafted to reconcile accessibility with the wide range of environmental and socio-cultural values and objectives that are manifested in our public spaces.
The Design of Public Spaces Standards respond to the reality that it is often discriminatory design decisions that “disable” people in the built environment. While prohibitions on built form which discriminates against people with disabilities are not entirely new, the Design of Public Spaces Standards represent a more direct, more proactive, and arguably more enforceable approach to regulating what outdoor spaces get built in Ontario.
Ontario’s Human Rights Code enshrines a right to “equal treatment with respect to services, goods and facilities, without discrimination because of...disability.” The Human Rights Code’s definition of discrimination includes any “factor” that results in the exclusion or restriction of persons with a disability, and adjudicators have long held that a physical barrier can qualify. However, the impact of this right on restrictive or exclusionary landscape form has arguably been limited by the onerous procedure for enforcing it, and by the vagueness of its exceptions.
By contrast, the Design of Public Spaces Standards provide clearer prescriptions, which, in many cases, take the form of precise technical specifications. For example, with respect to boardwalk components of recreational trails and beach access routes, the standards prescribe a minimum clear width of 1m, a minimum clear height of 2.1m, a maximum running slope of 1:20, and a 50mm maximum width for any openings. For other spaces, the regulation provides a performance standard. For example, 20 percent of tables in outdoor eating areas are required to “have clear ground space around them that allows” people using mobility aids “a forward approach to the tables.” In still other cases (e.g., outdoor play spaces), technical specifications and performance standards are combined with mandatory consultations to ensure that the needs of users with disabilities are identified and addressed.
The Design of Public Spaces Standards are, further, designed to be enforced actively. The Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act provides for the appointment of inspectors, as well as directors who can order compliance with the Design of Public Spaces Standards and impose administrative penalties of up to $100,000 in total, depending on the severity of impact, the history of the contravention, the number of days it continued, and the nature of the obligated organization.
Unlike the Human Rights Code, the standards apply only to public spaces and landscape elements that are being “newly developed or redeveloped.” Generally speaking, this
