Ground 40 – Winter 2017 – The North

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Landscape Architect Quarterly 08/

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Features Governance and Sovereignty in Ontario’s North Tundra Trials and Triumphs

Publication # 40026106

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Round Table Northern Perspectives

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The DEW Line Winter 2017 Issue 40

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Editor Lorraine Johnson

2017-2018 OALA Governing Council

Photo Editor Zhebing Chen

President Doris Chee

OALA Editorial Board Julius Aquino Shannon Baker Zhebing Chen Jasper Flores Eric Gordon Ruthanne Henry (chair) Vincent Javet Eric Klaver James Nelson MacDonald Phil Pothen Katie Strang Andrew Taylor Beatrice Saraga Taylor Dalia Todary-Michael Jane Welsh

Vice President Jane Welsh

Web Editor Jennifer Foden

Associate Councillor—Senior Justin Whalen

Associate Web Editor Julius Aquino

Associate Councillor—Junior Trish Clarke

Social Media Manager Black Current Marketing

Lay Councillor Linda Thorne

Art Direction/Design www.typotherapy.com

Appointed Educator University of Toronto Peter North

Advertising Inquiries advertising@oala.ca 416.231.4181 Cover Aerial view of Kimmirut, Nunavut.

Photograph by NVision/N.Ratte-C. Grosset. See page 12.

Ground: Landscape Architect Quarterly is published four times a year by the Ontario Association of Landscape Architects.

Treasurer Kendall Flower Secretary Stefan Fediuk Past President Sarah Culp Councillors Steve Barnhart Cynthia Graham Cameron Smith

Appointed Educator University of Guelph Brendan Stewart University of Toronto Student Representative TBD University of Guelph Student Representative Jenny Trinh OALA Staff

Ontario Association of Landscape Architects 3 Church Street, Suite 506 Toronto, Ontario M5E 1M2 416.231.4181 www.oala.ca oala@oala.ca Copyright © 2017 by the Ontario Association of Landscape Architects.

Contributors retain copyright of their work. All rights reserved.

ISSN: 0847-3080 Canada Post Sales Product Agreement No. 40026106 See www.groundmag.ca to download articles and share content on social media.

Executive Director Aina Budrevics Registrar Ingrid Little Coordinator Sarah Manteuffel

OALA

OALA

About

About the OALA

Ground: Landscape Architect Quarterly is published by the Ontario Association of Landscape Architects and provides an open forum for the exchange of ideas and information related to the profession of landscape architecture. Letters to the editor, article proposals, and feedback are encouraged. For submission guidelines, contact Ground at magazine@oala.ca.

Ground reserves the right to edit all submissions.

The views expressed in the magazine are those of the writers and not necessarily the views of the OALA and its Governing Council.

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

Upcoming Issues of Ground Ground 41 (Spring) Shift Ground 42 (Summer) Somatic Deadline for advertising space reservations: April 17, 2018 Deadline for editorial proposals: February 15, 2018 Ground 43 (Fall) Consume Deadline for advertising space reservations: July 17, 2018 Deadline for editorial proposals: April 12, 2018 Ground 44 (Winter) Stress Deadline for advertising space reservations: October 16, 2018 Deadline for editorial proposals: July 12, 2018

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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, FCSLA, Partner, The Planning Partnership, Toronto Ryan James, OALA, Senior Landscape Architect, Novatech, Ottawa Alissa North, OALA, Associate 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 Victoria Taylor, OALA, Principal, Victoria Taylor Landscape Architect, Toronto Jim Vafiades, OALA, FCSLA, Senior Landscape Architect, Stantec, Toronto

Contents

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Up Front Information on the ground The North:

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Governance and Sovereignty in Ontario’s North TEXT AND MAPS BY JAMES NELSON MACDONALD AND KATIE STRANG

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Tundra Trials and Triumphs Collecting data in the Arctic TEXT BY MARY ANNE YOUNG, OALA

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Round Table Northern perspectives MODERATED BY ERIC KLAVER, OALA, JAMES NELSON MACDONALD, AND KATIE STRANG

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The DEW Line Militarized landscapes of the North TEXT AND PHOTOGRAPHS BY MICHELA SUTTER

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In Discussion Landscape as geopolitics: Interviews with Pierre Bélanger and Lucy Lippard CONDUCTED BY VINCENT JAVET

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Design by Detail Darwin’s Hill TEXT BY VICTORIA TAYLOR, OALA

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Letter From…Ontario’s North TEXT BY JOSEPH CLEMENT

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Issues Monuments and meaning TEXT BY MICHAEL MCCLELLAND, OAA, AND STEWART MCINTOSH, OALA

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Notes A miscellany of news and events Artifact Sprouting words TEXT BY LORRAINE JOHNSON

TO VIEW ADDITIONAL CONTENT RELATED TO GROUND ARTICLES, VISIT WWW.GROUNDMAG.CA.

Winter 2017 Issue 40

President’s Message

Editorial Board Message

President’s Message

Editorial Board Message

I have spent my whole life in Toronto and have thought our winters harsh, but reading the articles in this issue has made me think otherwise. There is life thriving, just as there is in any other season.

What does “The North” mean to you? This issue explores the question from many perspectives. It also continues Ground magazine’s reflection on reconciliation, in particular with Pierre Bélanger’s discussion of decolonizing the landscape.

To some, winter is the time to get work done. I was talking to our construction crew, and their next job was in Northern Ontario to replace eight bridges in remote locations where there are no trains or buses or landing strips. It will take them three days to get to their base camp from Toronto, including driving on ice roads in the height of winter. Getting all the equipment, machinery, and people to these remote locations will be a challenge, but also an adventure.

This makes me think differently about winter. I believe our threshold for tolerance to seasonal changes is perhaps higher than we think. Enjoy the season!

The OALA has enjoyed a great year of activities. Along with our pursuit of a Practice Act, we have worked with Council and committees to prepare an updated 20182020 OALA strategic plan. The new strategic plan will be unveiled at our annual general meeting, to be held in Toronto on April 6th. In 2018, the OALA celebrates its 50th anniversary, and we have many activities planned for this milestone. The Canadian Society of Landscape Architects will hold their annual general meeting at our joint OALA/CSLA conference, which means that the nation’s landscape architects will be in Toronto in April for the event. See you there!

DORIS CHEE, OALA OALA PRESIDENT PRESIDENT@OALA.CA

Our hope is to engage in meaningful conversations about the profession. Further to this goal, we welcome letters to the editor. Let us know how this 40th issue of Ground stimulates your thinking about where the profession is heading.

The recent OALA membership survey revealed a high degree of interest in technology and social media. In response, we are now making Ground available through the digital platform Issuu (see www.groundmag.ca).

This will make the sharing of articles on social media and elsewhere much easier, and we hope you’ll take advantage of this.

Also with this issue, we are launching a new column— Design by Detail—by Victoria Taylor, OALA, a Ground Advisory Panel member and a former, long-time Ground Editorial Board member. Victoria’s new column delves deeply into unique and boundary-pushing design details, and explores ways that these details communicate design intent and affect our experiences of landscapes.

Ground magazine has come a long way since its first issue in 2008, thanks to the help of many people, including founding editor Lorraine Johnson, and many volunteers, past and present, on the Editorial Board and the Advisory Panel, along with OALA staff Aina Budrevics and Sarah Manteuffel. With our expansion online, there are now a host of others behind the scenes, including our on-line editor, Jennifer Foden, and our social media expert, Rebecca Black. The Editorial Board is very excited to be celebrating Ground’s 40th issue and the magazine’s 10th anniversary in 2018!

RUTHANNE HENRY, OALA CHAIR, EDITORIAL BOARD MAGAZINE@OALA.CA

Up Front

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01 NATIVE PLANTS

first nations nursery 05

The short drive south from Sarnia to Aamjiwnaang First Nation takes you through the almost apocalyptic landscape of Chemical Valley, with imposing monuments to industry alongside the St. Clair River. Even when you try to ignore the huge and looming structures of the oil companies lining the road, you can’t escape the evidence of their—that is, our—polluting ways: the air is thick with the smell of it.

So it was with some relief that I turned into the parking lot of Maajiigin Gumig (“place where plants start to grow”) native plant nursery at Aamjiwnaang. Here was a different sort of monument and industry—a gleaming greenhouse producing plants to restore the landscape to health.

Now in its second year, the nursery is an initiative of the Environment Department of the Aamjiwnaang Band Council. Supported in part by a donation from Shell Canada’s

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Community Investment Fund and an inkind donation from Union Gas, the nursery, though still new, has been developing at a steady pace. According to greenhouse technician Kyle Williams, who does all the propagation at the greenhouse, the nursery grew 15,000 native plants last year, the majority of which were purchased by the Sarnia-based company Return the Landscape (www.returnthelandscape.com), which does native plant restoration work in the community.

“Native plant gardening is getting to be a bit more popular,” says Williams, who points out that three-quarters of the species used in a conventional border planting at a nearby community centre are indeed natives, such as switchgrass, little bluestem, bearberry, and serviceberry. In an effort to demonstrate the ornamental potential of indigenous plants, Williams has created a small garden bed at the greenhouse entrance. As well, he plans to talk with community Elders and learn the Ojibwe names of plants, furthering the educational value of his work.

Another significant connection between the nursery and the community is that all the seeds used for propagation come from Lambton County, most of them from Aamjiwnaang, which has roughly 80 percent natural cover, including interior woodland. When an area is being developed, Williams often carries out plant rescues.

I ask Williams about his favourite native plants, and he immediately points to a beautiful mass planting of hairy beardtongue (Penstemon hirsutus): “This should be used a lot more in gardens,” he

Up Front: Information on the Ground

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Maajiigin Gumig native plant nursery, at Aamjiwnaang First Nation,near Sarnia,is Native-owned and –operated.

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Lorraine Johnson

TO VIEW ADDITIONAL CONTENT RELATED TO THIS GROUND ARTICLE, VISIT WWW.GROUNDMAG.CA.

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Up Front

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enthuses. He also notes that in Sarnia properties along lakefront, people are often looking for plants to stabilize the soil and keep sand from engulfing their patios: “Drought-tolerant marram grass is perfect.”

It’s clear that for Williams, who grew up in Aamjiwnaang and has spent years exploring in nature, plants are his passion: “I love growing things,” he says. As we look at the rain garden he’s created beside the nursery, where water from the greenhouse roof is directed to propagation beds for bulrushes and other wetland plants, we hear the insistent call of a green frog. William tells me that there’s a tree frog he’s heard in the greenhouse: “I’ve spent hours looking, but I can’t find him!” It’s tempting to see a lesson in this tree frog: when you plant native plants, the creatures will find home.

TEXT BY LORRAINE JOHNSON, AUTHOR OF 100 EASY-TOGROW NATIVE PLANTS AND THE EDITOR OF GROUND.

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Beardtongue (Penstemon) is a native plant that Kyle Williams thinks should be used more often in garden designs.

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Lorraine Johnson

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Native plant production beds at Maajiigin Gumig nursery,Aamjiwnaang First Nation

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Lorraine Johnson

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Rendering of the Western Gateway, Trillium Park,Toronto

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Rendering by CICADA DESIGN INC; photograph by Nadia Molinari

08 PARKS

ancient connections Toronto’s Trillium Park will no doubt win many awards, but I suspect that for Walter Kehm, OALA, senior principal responsible for design development (working with Patrick Morello, OALA, of LANDinc, the project’s firm of record, whose team was fully involved in the design process), the most meaningful accolades come from users— like the numerous people he engaged with during our early September stroll along the park’s paths. To a person, these walkers, bikers, rollerbladers, and joggers enthused about the landscape with genuine affection.

One person we met said she was already composing the email she planned to send to friends and neighbours, telling them to get down to this waterfront landscape ASAP. Yes, everyone loves a park, but this felt different: the emotional response was like meeting a stranger and connecting immediately with an impromptu hug.

Visiting Trillium Park is, in some ways, very much like reconnecting with an old friend who has spent too long a stranger. The 7.5-acre site—out of bounds to the public for more than four decades and used as a

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parking lot for Ontario Place’s administrative offices—offers a whole new vantage point for viewing Toronto’s skyline, which in itself is something that happens rarely within the life of a city. While taking this in, you realize that it’s more than the view that’s unique: the design itself includes many features that push the boundaries of what we can ask for from public places. Huge granite boulders piled into rock walls invite climbing—here, instead of the expected “keep off” sign, there’s one acknowledging that of course people will clamber up and down, but please do so carefully, “at your own risk.”

A fire pit, circled with large rocks for seating and arranged to face the four cardinal directions, and planted nearby with sweetgrass, is simply there, without regulations

Up Front

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about when and how one might actually use it for bonfires. And as for the park’s relationship to the lake, the shoreline is, surprisingly, unfenced for the most part, even at a five-foot drop with a pebbled slope down to the water. In other words, this is a park that feeds our need for connection with elemental nature—rocks, water, fire, plants—even when such connections call for caution.

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Trillium Park bridge and “ravine”

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Nadia Molinari

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Toronto skyline view from the south end of Trillium Park

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Nadia Molinari

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Moraine Bluff at Trillium Park

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Nadia Molinari

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An open-air pavilion,inspired by evergreen forests and the iconic structures of Ontario Place,provides covered shelter for gatherings.

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Nadia Molinari

It’s also a park that acknowledges First Nations involvement with the site. The Mississaugas of the New Credit First Nation, represented by former elected chief Carolyn King, participated in the consultation process and were instrumental in directing the park’s iconography and features. For example, carved into the granite walls framing a ravine-referencing pathway are moccasins, part of a province-wide initiative spearheaded by King called the Moccasin Identifier Project, which was officially launched at the opening of Trillium Park. Nearby is a boulder carved with an exhortation to “walk gently on the land.”

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Another significant statement of First Nation presence and involvement in shaping Southern Ontario’s landscape are the park’s three marker trees, references to 12

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Moccasins are carved into the granite walls of the “ravine” in reference to the Moccasin Identifier Project spearheaded by the Mississaugas of the New Credit First Nation.

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Nadia Molinari

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park development. As King notes, when she went to the first consultation, she raised her hand and announced to the assembled planners: “Any new park in Ontario needs to include First Nations.” Her message has been taken to heart in the planning and design of Trillium Park, and the landscape reflects it. “We played a part in all of it, and we couldn’t have asked for more,” says King, with evident pleasure in the results.

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Bonfire Bay fire pit

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Nadia Molinari

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Aboriginal marker tree at Trillium Park

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Nadia Molinari

the Indigenous traditional practice of shaping tree growth in such a way that the trees function as directional guides for navigation [see Ground 19 for an article on marker trees]. In another important gesture to living heritage, most of the plants used throughout the park are indigenous to Ontario’s various ecosystems.

It is perhaps because of such features that even in its newness—it opened in June, 2017—the park feels ancient. Its paths, which include a portage route and a floating dock for canoes, connect with First Nation trails that have been used for centuries.

The park’s design treats such features not as historical legacies but as living practices that need to be acknowledged, celebrated, and incorporated as a matter of course in

Walter Kehm likewise finds lessons in the design process—lessons that can be applied to other public spaces. “Designers always want to control things,” he says.

But in this park, his goal was to work collaboratively with the Mississaugas of the New Credit, to work collaboratively with the ecology of the site, and to design a park in which users are encouraged to express the creativity that arises out of the place itself.

As Kehm puts it, “Let people express themselves, and then they take ownership.”

Perhaps this is one of the most meaningful aspects of this new park, and one of the keys to its success and the sense of enduring presence it emanates: “There aren’t any gimmicks,” says Kehm, “just water, trees, plants, and rocks.” He says this as he points to boulder after boulder and tells me the weight of each one. I realized that each one is like an old friend—to him, and to the land.

TEXT BY LORRAINE JOHNSON, EDITOR OF GROUND AND AUTHOR OF BOOKS ABOUT LANDSCAPING WITH NATIVE PLANTS.

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“A big part of the course is about walking people through a simplified design process,” he explains. For example, if someone is surrounded by noise and distraction in their landscape, Bissonnette discusses the use of border plants to absorb sound or the ways in which a water feature can be calming.

“Design for people in a garden context is all about psychology,” he says, “not just how something looks, but how it makes you feel.”

The only program of its kind in Canada, according to Bissonnette, it is the process, not just the product, that is important: “The catharsis of the experience is in designing and maintaining the space. That’s where the healing comes from.”

Following the fall workshop in Windsor, Bissonnette took the program on the road, teaching it in London in the spring of 2017 and offering it for free to any Southern Ontario organization willing to provide a venue for the workshop and do registration and promotion.

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The course Bissonnette has developed, Reclaiming the Sacred, takes adult survivors of sexual abuse through a series of principles that empower them to design, and thus control, outdoor places of healing.

His approach is based on the most common emotional effects of trauma; together, participants examine ways to deal with those effects. “If you’re anxious,” says Bissonnette, “what can we do to make your landscape restful? If you’re depressed, how can your garden be invigorating?”

HEALING

survivor-designed spaces One could easily argue that, as places of contemplation and retreat, all gardens are healing. As well, there is a long tradition of creating specifically labelled “healing gardens” where people with particular needs—physical, emotional—can go to find respite and relief.

Dan Bissonnette, who has been working in various aspects of the horticultural industry for thirty years, has developed a different approach to the healing power of gardens.

Instead of being places of escape, he advocates for an active process of working through trauma—exploring it and healing from it—by teaching people how to design their own sacred spaces. “It is about catharsis and empowerment,” he says, “acknowledgement, not escapism.”

Bissonnette had been teaching courses on healing gardens for the general public for a number of years when he realized that he could modify the materials for specific populations: “Reclaiming the Sacred was created partially out of concern that there was little available in terms of long-term therapeutic options for adult survivors of sexual abuse. While there are certainly community resources for these people during the first few years of their healing journey, there isn’t much to offer them in the long term.” He began by connecting with the local Windsor chapter of the Sexual Assault Crisis Centre and consulting with survivors and therapists; in the fall of 2016, he launched the first workshop, which took place over five sessions.

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“The people who take this course have had brutal experiences in which someone didn’t respect the sacred space of their own body,” says Bissonnette. “This course empowers them to control what happens in their own sacred spaces, and to find some room for joy in their landscapes.”

One survivor who has taken the course, Patrick McMahon, stresses that every person’s healing journey is unique. “It was an effective tool for me, but each person needs to find what works for them, and be open to different ways of healing,” he suggests. Working with Bissonnette, McMahon designed and built a 3.5-ft by 4-ft waterfall in his yard. “It’s a place of reflection and peace, and I know that I can always go there,” he says. Most of the rocks for the water feature came from McMahon’s parents’ cottage near Haliburton, a place he describes as a sanctuary: “And now I have a little piece of that in my own backyard.”

For more information on Reclaiming the Sacred, visit www.reclaimingthesacred.org.

TEXT BY LORRAINE JOHNSON, THE EDITOR OF GROUND.

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Patrick McMahon’s waterfall forms the heart of his healing garden.

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Dan Bissonnette

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Healing gardens,such as Barb Bellaire’s Windsor backyard,can take many different forms but are united by an emphasis on providing a healing place for people.

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Barb Bellaire

Governance and Sovereignty in Ontario’s North

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Indigenous Reserves Crown Land - General Cultural Heritage Designation Provincial Parks Recreation Remote Access Waterway Woodland Caribou Provincial Park

“Far North” Boundary Line

TEXT AND MAP BY JAMES MACDONALD AND KATIE STRANG

Far North Boundary

Kesagami Park

Wabakimi Provincial Park

Crown Land + Reserves fig.1

TEXT AND MAPS BY JAMES NELSON MACDONALD AND KATIE STRANG

When the Hudson’s Bay Company sold Rupert’s Land to the Dominion of Canada, it was done without acknowledgement of Aboriginal title to the land, leaving these land claims to be settled through the Numbered Treaties. These treaties established much of the Crown land in Ontario, and continue to be disputed. The maps here show the contrast between the large area claimed by the Crown, and the diminutive reserves established by the treaties.

Most federal Crown land is in the Northern Territories—where it is also Inuit land.

The remainder exists as pockets within the provinces; primarily as national parks, reserves, and Canadian Forces bases.

In Ontario, most privately held land is clustered near the southern border, leaving an expansive 87 percent as Crown land, primarily north of the Great Lakes.

Ten percent of that is held as parks and conservation areas, while much of the rest is categorized as general use and

managed under the Public Lands Act. This land, administered by the Ministry of Natural Resources and Forestry, can be used for many activities, including logging and mining, or sold. The ministry sells patents and leases for use based on the province’s economic and sustainability goals.

Although these goals have changed over time, Crown land has a long history as an economic catalyst. The Dominion Lands Act of 1871 bestowed huge areas of Crown land to the Canadian Pacific Railway for its

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Treaties Morris Map 1943

Far North Boundary

Adhesion to Treaty, No. 5, 1908, 1909, and 1910 Adhesion to Treaty, No. 9, 1929 Crawford's Purchase, 1783, Algonquins and Iroquois Crawford's Purchase, 1783, Mississaugas John Collins' Purchase, 1785 Johnson, Butler Purchase, 1784, 1787, 1788 Treaty No. 11, 1798 Treaty No. 13, 1805 Treaty No. 13A, 1805 Treaty No. 16, 1815 Treaty No. 18, 1818 Treaty No. 19, 1818 Treaty No. 2, 1790 Treaty No. 20, 1818 Treaty No. 21, 1819 Treaty No. 27, 1819 Treaty No. 29, 1827 Treaty No. 3, 1792 Treaty No. 3, 1873 Treaty No. 3.5, 1793 Treaty No. 3.75, 1795 Treaty No. 35, 1833 Treaty No. 381, 1781 Treaty No. 4, 1793 Treaty No. 45, 1836 Treaty No. 45.5, 1836 Treaty No. 5, 1798 Treaty No. 5, 1875 Treaty No. 57, 1847 Treaty No. 6, 1796 Treaty No. 60, 1850 Treaty No. 61, 1850 Treaty No. 7, 1796 Treaty No. 72, 1854 Treaty No. 82, 1857 Treaty No. 9, 1905-1906 Williams Treaty with the Chippewa, 1923 Williams Treaty with the Mississaugas, 1923

Indigenous Reserve

Land Treaties + Reserves fig.2

transcontinental line, and apportioned Southern Ontario into farmland for settlers.

In the 1940s, the Ministry of Natural Resources disposed of lands for private recreational purposes and, in the 1960s, it took this policy further, acting as a developer proactively creating cottage lots. Environmental concerns halted this process, although Crown land can still be sold for cottages by municipalities that apply for permission.

In 2011, the Far North Act came into effect, establishing a new direction for land

planning beyond the Far North Boundary, or north of Woodland Caribou and Wabakimi provincial parks. The intention is to protect 225,000 square kilometres of boreal forest (21 percent of Ontario) and establish community-based land-use planning that is consistent with Indigenous treaty rights.

However, this move is not supported by the Nishnawbe Aski Nation, the primary occupants of the Far North, who maintain that the freezing of so much of their territory prevents them from participating in modern economic development.

You can continue to explore the evolution of Crown land in Canada by using Ontario’s Crown Land Use Policy Atlas, an online mapping tool provided by the MNR (www.crownlanduseatlas.mnr.gov.on.ca).

BIO/ JAMES NELSON MACDONALD IS A LANDSCAPE DESIGNER AT FERRIS + ASSOCIATES IN TORONTO AND A MEMBER OF THE GROUND EDITORIAL BOARD. JAMES IS PASSIONATE ABOUT COMBINING HIS INTERESTS IN MAPPING, DATA VISUALIZATION, AND RESEARCH ON TOPICS SUCH AS CLIMATE CHANGE, CANADA’S NORTH, AND GEOPOLITICAL BOUNDARIES. KATIE STRANG IS MEMBER OF THE GROUND EDITORIAL BOARD, AND A DESIGNER AT BSQ LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTS.

Tundra Trials and Triumphs

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Collecting data in the Arctic

01 TEXT BY MARY ANNE YOUNG, OALA

Another day of fieldwork in Nunavut begins at 5am, with the screaming of a helicopter overhead, wind whipping at the walls of my shelter. I sigh, and get ready for the day ahead—long johns, down jacket, rain gear, and a bug net, plus binoculars, a satellite phone, SPOT device, field guides, and data sheets. My co-worker and our Inuit guide meet me at the helipad, and we are flown to our first field site of the day. After we confirm our day’s plans with the pilot and he leaves with a thumbs-up, we are once again left on the tundra with only the mosquitos for company.

My work days do not typically begin in such a dramatic fashion. At Dougan & Associates, our projects (primarily ecological consulting) focus on Southern Ontario, a landscape vastly different from the Arctic tundra.

However, since 2014 we have been collecting vegetation and wildlife baseline data for a mining project in the Kivalliq region of

Nunavut. Along with specialists in other fields such as water quality, archaeology, fisheries biology, and toxicology, our work is being used to guide design and management decisions to avoid and mitigate impacts from this project on the complex northern ecosystem. As the project manager, I worked with my team to devise a multi-year field program to document the abundance and distribution of key “valued ecosystem components” for the project’s 280 km2 regional study area— predatory mammals, ungulates, small mammals, raptors, upland breeding birds, and vegetation. Walking the entire study area is not practical, so we developed survey methods to study key species and habitats, then extrapolate to the landscape scale using regional land classification mapping developed by the Government of Nunavut.

We carefully plan our methods in advance of the fieldwork, as we have a limited time frame to collect all the data we need for our

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Mary Anne Young’s co-worker Dylan White uses the high ground of an esker to survey the location for a monitoring plot.

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Mary Anne Young

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Snowbed willow (Salix herbacea) is one of the smallest woody plants in the Arctic.

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Mary Anne Young

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Micro-botany in the tundra

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Mary Anne Young

TO VIEW ADDITIONAL CONTENT RELATED TO THIS GROUND ARTICLE, VISIT WWW.GROUNDMAG.CA.

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while it was raining sideways. In the middle of summer! Needless to say, our equipment included layers of clothing, bug nets, and sturdy rain boots.

The idiosyncratic logistical hurdles of working in the North range from having to plan your field gear months in advance in order to have it shipped to the site, to losing days of potential fieldwork time to fog delays, which ground the helicopters we rely on to take us to and from our data collection sites.

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reports. However, in remote areas, uncertainty abounds, and work in the North has its own distinct set of challenges, idiosyncrasies, and unexpected delights. From the ever-changing weather, to the logistical hurdles of working at a mine site, to learning a completely new set of flora and fauna, these kinds of projects offer a wide variety of learning opportunities.

Regardless of the season, the Arctic environment can be merciless, even in summer. The permafrost, not far underfoot, is impermeable to water, which makes the tundra full of breeding opportunities for insects—and humans are the slowest, juiciest prey out there. Warm, still days bring out the voracious mosquitos. Imagine the worst mosquito swarming that you’ve ever experienced, then multiply it by three. Or five. Or ten! Each morning we would hope for wind, until the days we ended up working in 50 km/hr winds, in 10 degrees (Celsius) temperatures,

Having the opportunity to learn the flora of a completely different landscape than what I’m familiar with has been an amazing opportunity. The plants are tiny and have adaptations such as dense hairs and leathery leaves for the high winds and low precipitation of the tundra. They flower fleetingly, but magnificently. Often, I would start out identifying plants while standing, then move to my knees, then end up lying on my stomach to get a close enough look. Despite my focus on vegetation, working on the tundra also allowed me to have some amazing wildlife encounters: the ever-curious Sik Sik (Arctic ground squirrel) peeking out of their burrows and chattering. Herds of caribou wandering past. Glancing up after picking our way around a rocky lake to see a wolverine not far off, keeping a close eye on our crew’s progress. The tundra may be vast, but it is far from barren. It has been an honour to experience it.

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Mary Anne Young takes a selfie, in bug-protection gear,on a warm, calm day on the tundra when the mosquitos are out in full force.

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Mary Anne Young

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Double rainbow photographed from the daily “taxi service”—a helicopter

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Mary Anne Young

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Curious Sik Sik (Arctic ground squirrel)

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Dylan White

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Barren-ground caribou

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Dylan White

As our baseline characterization project wraps up, I look back fondly on my memories of fieldwork on the tundra and hope for more opportunities for projects in remote areas.

What better way is there to skip rush hour than by catching a ride on a helicopter?

BIO/ MARY ANNE YOUNG, OALA, IS A LANDSCAPE ARCHITECT, ECOLOGIST, AND ARBORIST AT DOUGAN & ASSOCIATES ECOLOGICAL CONSULTING AND DESIGN IN GUELPH, ONTARIO. HER DESIGN WORK INCLUDES WETLAND RESTORATION, FOREST EDGE MANAGEMENT, WILDLIFE HABITAT ENHANCEMENT, INVASIVE SPECIES MANAGEMENT, AND OTHER ECOLOGICAL RESTORATION DESIGNS.

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A Round Table discussion on the role of design and planning in Canada’s Far North MODERATED BY ERIC KLAVER, OALA, JAMES NELSON MACDONALD, AND KATIE STRANG 01/

Aerial view of Kimmirut,Nunavut

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NVision/N.Ratte-C.Grosset

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KSENIA EIC, NWTAA, OAA, MRAIC, IS A MANAGING ASSOCIATE AND ARCHITECT AT TAYLOR ARCHITECTURE GROUP (TAG), AN ARCHITECTURAL PRACTICE BASED OUT OF YELLOWKNIFE, NT. TAG ENGAGES IN A BROAD RANGE OF PROJECT TYPES AND SCALES—FROM SCHOOLS TO ARENAS TO SMALLER INTERIOR OFFICE RENOVATIONS—IN COMMUNITIES THROUGHOUT THE NORTHWEST TERRITORIES, NUNAVUT, AND YUKON. KSENIA HAS FIVE YEARS OF NORTHERN EXPERIENCE AND IS PARTICULARLY INTERESTED IN ARCHITECTURE THAT ENGAGES COMMUNITIES AND RELATES TO CULTURAL IDENTITY. HER MASTER’S THESIS FOCUSED ON CREATING A CULTURAL DIALOGUE THROUGH HOUSING STRATEGIES IN FIRST NATIONS COMMUNITIES. TIM ENSOM IS WORKING ON HIS PH.D AT WILFRID LAURIER UNIVERSITY, STUDYING PERMAFROST. HE LIVES IN YELLOWKNIFE. DAVID FORTIN, MRAIC, IS ASSISTANT PROFESSOR AND, AS OF JANUARY 2018, DIRECTOR OF THE MCEWEN SCHOOL OF ARCHITECTURE AT LAURENTIAN UNIVERSITY IN SUDBURY. A MEMBER OF THE MÉTIS NATION OF ONTARIO AND THE RECENTLY FORMED RAIC INDIGENOUS TASK FORCE, DAVID IS ALSO CURRENTLY RESEARCHING PRAIRIE MÉTIS CONTRIBUTIONS TO ARCHITECTURAL THINKING IN CANADA AS PART OF A SOCIAL SCIENCES AND HUMANITIES RESEARCH COUNCIL GRANT. A LEED-ACCREDITED PROFESSIONAL, DAVID CURRENTLY TEACHES A GRADUATE STUDIO FOCUSING ON INDIGENOUS DESIGN AND AN INTRODUCTORY BUILDING SCIENCE COURSE EMPHASIZING THE IMPACT OF CLIMATE CHANGE ON ARCHITECTURAL THINKING. CHRIS GROSSET, NUALA, FCSLA, IS A PARTNER WITH NVISION INSIGHT GROUP, AN INDIGENOUS CONSULTING FIRM BASED IN IQALUIT AND OTTAWA. CHRIS HAS BEEN A CONSULTANT AND LANDSCAPE ARCHITECT WORKING IN NORTHERN CANADA SINCE 2001. HIS CONSULTING PROJECTS INCLUDE THE ASSESSMENT OF THE SOCIAL, CULTURAL, ENVIRONMENTAL, AND ECONOMIC CIRCUMSTANCES ASSOCIATED WITH INDIGENOUS LAND CLAIM IMPLEMENTATION, COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT, LAND USE, PROTECTED AND SACRED AREAS, AND GROWTH IN CAPACITY FOR LOCAL CO-MANAGEMENT COMMITTEES. ERIC KLAVER, OALA, BCSLA, IS A PARTNER AT PLANT ARCHITECT INC. AND A GROUND EDITORIAL BOARD MEMBER. JAMES NELSON MACDONALD IS A LANDSCAPE DESIGNER BASED IN TORONTO AND A GROUND EDITORIAL BOARD MEMBER. HEIDI REDMAN, BCSLA, IS A LANDSCAPE ARCHITECT AT LEES + ASSOCIATES. SHE WAS PROJECT MANAGER ON THE IQALUIT MUNICIPAL CEMETERY PROJECT AND HEADS THE FIRM’S NORTHERN OFFICE IN WHITEHORSE, YUKON. LOLA SHEPPARD, OAA, IS A REGISTERED ARCHITECT AND FOUNDING PARTNER, WITH MASON WHITE, AT LATERAL OFFICE. SHE IS AN ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR AND THE UNDERGRADUATE OFFICER OF THE SCHOOL OF ARCHITECTURE AT THE UNIVERSITY OF WATERLOO. LATERAL OFFICE IS COMMITTED TO DESIGN AS A RESEARCH VEHICLE TO POSE AND RESPOND TO COMPLEX, URGENT QUESTIONS IN THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT, ENGAGING IN THE WIDER CONTEXT AND CLIMATE OF A PROJECT—SOCIAL, ECOLOGICAL, OR POLITICAL. LATERAL OFFICE HAS BEEN PURSUING RESEARCH AND DESIGN WORK IN THE CANADIAN NORTH FOR THE PAST EIGHT YEARS, TESTING THE POTENTIAL FOR ARCHITECTURE AND INFRASTRUCTURE TO BE CULTURALLY RESPONSIVE, GEOGRAPHICALLY SCALABLE, AND ENVIRONMENTALLY ADAPTABLE. CO-EDITOR, WITH MASON WHITE, OF THE BOOK MANY NORTHS: SPATIAL PRACTICE IN A POLAR TERRITORY (ACTAR, 2017), SHEPPARD IS THE RECIPIENT OF THE 2012 RAIC YOUNG ARCHITECT AWARD. BOB SOMERS, OALA, JOINED SCATLIFF+MILLER+MURRAY (SMM) IN 2000 AND THROUGH HIS DESIGN, PROJECT MANAGEMENT, AND COMMUNICATION ROLES BECAME A PRINCIPAL IN 2007. BOB IS PART OF THE LEADERSHIP TEAM AT SMM WITH A SIGNIFICANT ROLE IN A FULL BREADTH OF PROJECTS IN LAND DEVELOPMENT, RECREATION PLANNING, AND URBAN DESIGN. IN ADDITION TO BOB’S ACTIVE ROLE IN THE FIRM’S MANITOBA PROJECTS, HE HAS BEEN THE MANAGING PARTNER OF THE SMM REGINA OFFICE SINCE 2013, AND PLAYS AN ACTIVE ROLE IN THE SASKATCHEWAN LANDSCAPE. BOB WORKS CLOSELY WITH THE SMM BIOLOGICAL TEAM SINCE OVERSEEING THE THREE-YEAR REVEGETATION PROJECT ALONG THE EAST-SIDE ROAD OF LAKE WINNIPEG THAT RECEIVED A 2015 CSLA NATIONAL MERIT AWARD.

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James Nelson MacDonald (JNM): No doubt everyone on this Round Table has a different perspective on what “the North” actually means.

KATIE STRANG IS A GROUND EDITORIAL BOARD MEMBER AND A DESIGNER AT BSQ LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTS.

TO VIEW ADDITIONAL CONTENT RELATED TO THIS GROUND ARTICLE, VISIT WWW.GROUNDMAG.CA.

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Summer camp near Kimmirut,Nunavut

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NVision/N.Ratte-C.Grosset

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Community-designed and -built Whale Plaza,Coral Harbour,Nunavut

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NVision/N.Ratte-C.Grosset

Chris Grosset (CG): When I tell people that I work in the North, they sometimes say, “Oh, you mean Muskoka or Sudbury?” To a Southerner, that’s the near North. But there’s also the geographic North and the Far North. There’s also the idea of our Canadian identity as being “northern”—it’s an idea we have about ourselves. Everyone across the whole country—north, south, east, west— has their own impression of what “the North” means to them.

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are a multitude of Norths—in terms of culture, ecology, climate, infrastructure, and spatial practice, etc. In my experience, the presence or absence of roads fundamentally recalibrates a whole host of things: how we build, how mobility works, how cultural infrastructure and social infrastructure can be shared or networked, how landscapes are thought of. As a Southerner, when you fly into communities there’s a moment that forces you to shift so many of your preconceptions about how you operate.

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Mountain avens (Dryas octopetala) on the tundra,Nunavut

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NVision/N.Ratte-C.Grosset

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A map of Northern Canada,with its frame of reference starting from the North Pole and looking down

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Courtesy of Taylor Architecture Group

being this “other” thing far away, the frame of reference is starting from the North Pole looking down, so you are seeing Canada in a completely different way (the way people living in the Territories do). I would say that the majority of people living in Nunavut and the NWT consider themselves Northerners and that they live in the North and that everything south of Nunavut and the NWT is “the South.”

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My “North” is predominantly the Territories, so it’s a geographic and a political North. It’s defined as both a cultural landscape and Indigenous landscape, and also a physical environment with its own challenges in terms of landscape architecture.

Ksenia Eic (KE): When I was living in Yellowknife, I defined the North that way, too, although recently I’ve been including Northern Quebec and Northern Ontario, which have a lot of the same climactic—and even social and political—challenges that the Northwest Territories, Nunavut, Alaska, and the Yukon have. On our company’s website, there’s a map of Northern Canada, and it’s inverted, so that instead of the North

Tim Ensom (TE): Initially, my view of the North was in a relative sense. It was a cardinal direction, and it was a direction in which you would go to travel. Now that I’ve lived in Yellowknife for a few years, I think of the North as a physical landscape and a certain climate.

Another change to my perception of the North that came fairly recently was the idea of “Down North,” which is a term I read about in a book called The Prospector North of 60.

You’re actually often going downhill when you go north, because you’re heading farther down in a watershed. So, “Down North” was an interesting way to view the North.

Lola Sheppard (LS): In some ways, we spent our entire book Many Norths trying to answer that question, and one soon realizes that there is no singular “North.” There

Bob Somers (BS): I tend to think of the “North” as anywhere north of where I am. But the idea of where the roads end…that’s also what starts to define the North to me, and it starts to define the challenges of that landscape. Where the road ends is where it becomes culturally and physically—and the landscape in general—very different.

LS: Where the roads end, what takes over is an awareness of the vastness and power of the landscape, which is humbling. I remember standing in Iqaluit and looking out at the bay, and seeing so clearly where the town ends, and feeling a sort of immensity—not an emptiness, but an immensity—that begins. Driving down the road from Labrador or Northern Quebec is very different. You look at the landscape and you know it’s vast, but you see the infrastructure lines; you see the train tracks, and mining infrastructure, and the land is being colonized, so you can forget how small you are in relation to the landscape. I find that in Nunavut, you never forget that, which is a powerful thing.

Eric Klaver (EK): Everyone seems to be suggesting that the North is kind of an “other” to where they are. Is it the immensity that creates a kind of otherness to the North?

KE: No. When I was in Yellowknife, I felt like I was in the North, or, at least, in the southern part of the North. The absence of roads doesn’t really define the North for me because there are roads in some of these places. Not having road access does make a huge difference, but when you’re living in Iqaluit or Inuvik—the larger centres of the Far North—you feel like you’re part of something different from the South.

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David Fortin (DF): Growing up in Prince Albert, we thought of ourselves as Northern Saskatchewan people, but geographically, even Prince Albert isn’t that far north, nor is Edmonton, where my family is now. I spent a decade of my life planting trees in Northern British Columbia, and, for me, there’s something about the North that has to do with remoteness in a sense, an idea of disconnecting. I remember being up in helicopters in Northern B.C. and having that same feeling Lola was describing—especially when they dumped you off at your camp for two months, and there’s no road other than the winter roads. That kind of isolation is part of the psychogeography of the North. As long as you’re connected to Southern society, and you feel like you have access to that, then you feel more weighted, I would say—a Southern weight. But when you break free from those connections, that connective tissue, you feel it. You feel it once you’ve been severed from that connection.

Heidi Redman (HR): I’ve always identified as coming from the North. I grew up in Prince Rupert, which calls itself the “North Coast of B.C.,” and although it’s only at 54 degrees, and hence not geographically North, they really identify as Northerners. Now that I’m living in the Yukon, I feel like it’s definitely the North, but the boundaries of the Yukon become more blurred as I live here. A lot of the First Nation groups have territories that overlap into Northern B.C., and to Alaska, and there are watersheds that start to blur that, and different languages…

JNM: What have your experiences been of working with people who are from the North and maybe have a different reading of the place and the landscape?

TE: The most important thing is that meaningful work and effective work really rely on having a presence in the North, particularly in the community where you’re doing the work. The first thing people ask is, “When are you coming here?” or, “When are you coming back here?” That just seems to be the basis of the relationship, and in turn the relationship is the main ingredient for doing a project that has long-term benefit in the community.

Katie Strang (KS): Do you feel that you can do meaningful work in the North without living there?

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TE: Absolutely, but I think going there to visit a few times is really worthwhile, because it’ll inevitably help you learn more than you would have otherwise, and it’ll help people get a sense of who they’re working with.

KE: Some communities are very distrustful of what people are going to be doing there: “Who are you?” and “What do you really understand about this place?” I think it is really important to try to work closely with them, but it’s actually very difficult to go there and try to get meaningful input sometimes.

They feel like, “I’ve seen this a million times.

People come in here, they build something that they think is great, and then they leave.”

CG: In terms of how people from Northern or remote communities perceive Southerners, in my case it’s been almost 20 years of doing work in Nunavut communities, and I’ve experienced so much of what you’re talking about—people not really believing that it was meaningful engagement.

What I’ve observed is that they often have good reason to feel that way about the way that Southerners have done their work.

Information has been collected in the community and then taken away, and maybe never brought back or presented back to them. Or we present it as our own ideas. To me, that gives good reason for people to be mistrustful about our intent, or whether we can do meaningful work in the North if we’re not from that place.

KE: Another problem is that flying up there is very expensive. So, you might have a budget for one schematic design presentation, and you’re trying to get feedback, but it’s kind of too late.

CG: Often, we’re dealing with clients who are either in the South or are Southerners transplanted to the North. So, perhaps we also need to think about educating our clients about these types of issues…

HR: One of the most meaningful engagements I can remember was in Iqaluit when we visited the seniors drop-in centre and had tea with the Elders there. We had a translator, and we spent the afternoon, and it was a slow afternoon because everything was going through the translator. But we got a lot of meaningful input, and it really taught me the importance of showing that you’re willing to listen and take the time.

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JNM: How would you measure engagement as being successful?

CG: The more you learn about a place or culture or people, the more you realize what you don’t know. The perspective I’ve gained from learning and doing projects, making mistakes, trying to correct the mistakes and do better the next time—all this has helped me along my career path. The most success I’ve experienced is my work to support groups in co-management. Through the Nunavut Land Claim Agreement and through a number of land-claim agreements with First Nations in other locations, there’s a real commitment to co-management, which means decisionmaking is coming from the community level, or from an Indigenous organization level.

It’s being done jointly with government. My work in the last few years has been about providing support to those co-management committees that deal with parks or with land use or with protected areas—helping them to understand their responsibilities, their roles, and then also helping them to actually take over their role as the joint managers, and really empower them to do what’s culturally in their desire to see done with the land, or just to have direction in what type of development does occur, or what types of regulations are required. It’s pretty meaningful work.

DF: A lot of the questions around trust are not, obviously, limited to the North. It’s a Southern issue, too. It’s a cultural framework and a cultural worldview that is going to be suspicious in a lot of different contexts. I think Indigenous people are always going to be like that, and for good reason. That’s a really difficult one from a practice perspective, but as an academic, we have a little more freedom because we’re not on billable hours and so we can engage with communities in ways that practitioners can’t. Our university has been focused on the idea of designing for the North from its inception, but on doing that in the right way. There’s an Ojibwe word, “weweni,” which means “in a good way.” You hear that a lot in Indigenous communities— about doing things in a good way. That fly-in designer, the fly-in architect scenario is never going to build trust with anybody, as we all know. Long-term meaningful engagement with communities is really the only way that that can happen. This is a national discussion, not only in the North, when we’re talking about Indigenous communities.

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BS: Oftentimes, it is all about pulling the ego aside. We know certain aspects of our profession, but we don’t know the communities that we go into when we start. We might do some research and have some history, but especially in remote communities, their exposure to our profession might be very limited.

JNM: Lola, what was your engagement process in writing your book [co-edited with Mason White], Many Norths: Spatial Practice in a Polar Territory?

LS: It varied. It happened over multiple trips to multiple regions of Northern Canada.

Some of the research was done through fieldwork—one of us going to a place and meeting people and asking questions, and then following up by finding documentation or making our own documentation of a spatial phenomenon or a cultural phenomenon.

In other cases, we used the research of others—anthropologists or sociologists, for example. I’m thinking of Claudio Aporta’s mapping of Inuit trails around Baffin Island.

That was ten years of work, and there’s no way we were going to replicate that depth, across 30 case studies.

Sometimes we saw our role as simply visualizing things that are described in words by others. Once you can visualize and spatialize cultural phenomena, you can think about how they feed into design. So, Many Norths is, in part, about expanding the tools and types of analysis that architects might employ when thinking about the North, beyond the traditional ones.

KE: Lola, when you were doing all these studies and mapping exercises, was there anything you thought was particularly surprising, or where you thought, “Oh, this would really be useful for architects”?

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Steel memorial wall and central axial pathway at the Iqaluit cemetery,which terminates at an archway of bowhead whale jaw bones,caught by Inuit hunters in a 2008 community hunt

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TSC Photography/Courtesy of Lees + Associates

LS: So many spatial realities fascinated us.

Any environment, if you look at it closely, is full of surprising realities. And perhaps none more than the North: how materials are delivered, the impact of the seasons, the impact of permafrost, the invisible networks of social infrastructure. Our respect and fascination for the North is that we recognize that as designers, we don’t yet have valid models for designing—everything needs to be examined and thought anew, in deep consultation with communities. Because the importation of Southern models of architecture and planning has utterly failed the North.

When you consider design for the North, I think it demands real research and a shedding of preconceptions. As an architect, if you work on a school in Hamilton or Toronto, we assume we know how to approach it.

(Whether we do or not is a different question.) But in a context such as the North, it becomes our responsibility as professionals to ask a lot of questions—not simply verbally, but also through drawing—to think about the role of seasonality, relationship to the land, connections between interior and exterior, innovative ideas about programming, among many other questions.

What has struck us most in our travels to the North is that as a profession we’re starting to develop strategies for building, but further imagination is needed. Some succeed, some succeed less. However, design of landscape and public realm is even further down the line of priorities for most com-

munities. Buildings have a kind of urgency, because it’s easier to declare: “We need a school, we need housing. The need is tangible.” My sense is that thinking of the collective realm hasn’t entered the consciousness of many Northern administrators. And the question of what a Northern collective realm might be, needs to be imagined as communities continue to grow and some begin to be “urban.” We don’t even have the vocabulary to talk about many things. “Public space” is a Southern term, as is “street.” When you go to Iqaluit, or Rankin Inlet, there are no sidewalks, so the street and the notion of public and private domain shift. I’m curious what others on the panel think about the role of landscape architecture and the public realm, more broadly.

HR: My one experience of working in Nunavut was on a cemetery, trying to understand what makes a sacred space and what the cultural traditions are around that. They wanted to have the site and the graves facing the water, and preserving the tundra that was already there. I think those kind of themes can play out in other places, too. It seemed to come down to the relationship of the people and the land, and the landscape architect trying to be the translator between that.

CG: Landscape is really far down the priority list right now in a lot of Northern communities, where infrastructure deficits are so huge. Also, you’re dealing with politicians and bureaucrats who perhaps don’t appreciate that the cultural connection to the land is just as strong when it’s 10 months of winter as it is to people in the South who understand land as a sort of summer place. But there isn’t a lot of emphasis put on creating outdoor spaces for people to enjoy throughout their colder seasons in the North. There’s a need for us as landscape architects to start to shine a light on how important it is to create good community spaces and public spaces.

Another responsibility is to recognize that in a lot of these communities, the Indigenous populations were forced into the communities. We have to grapple with that history of relocation and forced movement off the land from their traditional lifestyle into a Southern structure and a Southern idea of what community is. When the first foundations of these

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communities were put in place, Indigenous people weren’t asked what they wanted to see, or what they thought about the placement of roads or the location of their houses. The basic structure that we’re trying to develop within now, was set long ago and without a cultural perspective. There’s a lot of work to do to make these communities more reflective of how Inuit live, for example, and how they relate to the land.

Then, we have the issue of the actual land itself. We have to encourage politicians, and particularly the federal government, which controls a lot of the activities of development on these vast areas of land, to respect Indigenous use of the land, and their traditional land-management practices. We have an important role to just be there to support the advocacy that Indigenous communities are doing to gain self-determination of that land.

BS: We’ve done some community planning work up in Northern Manitoba, and the concept of public space or outdoor space in the North is quite removed from what we might experience in the South. All outdoor space almost becomes public space in a lot of these communities. All too often, we’re seeing how prototypical subdivision layouts done in Northern communities just don’t work.

KE: When you’re in the High Arctic, and there’s no vegetation, essentially, the entire community is just gravel, dirt roads…What are some strategies you’ve used in these contexts, where you can’t put down grass or plantings?

CG: Early in my career, I realized that I saw the landscapes in terms of my Southern cultural perspective. I was always waiting for the summer months, when the water was open and the vegetation was in bloom. The Inuit communities I was working with saw that period as the shortest period of the year; they really understood their landscape in terms of snow and ice.

That was the primary landscape.

I don’t get a lot of chance to do site design, because I spend most of my time assisting communities with the policies to get their land claim rights recognized. But when I do get to design, I’m typically designing for snow.

How do you create earthworks so that you

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get interesting shapes in the snow, or interesting wind patterns to sculpt the snow? Or create areas where snow will collect so that the community’s spring festival has a place where they can do igloo building?

There are great ways you can work with the ground, the surface material, the gravel, the stone… I did a project called the Whale Plaza, and, through a community design charrette, we looked at what materials we had. The men in that community had wanted to do a healing project, so we looked at some of the traditional stone-built features that were out on their hunting grounds. This group of men didn’t remember how to build with stone, so we worked with them to get funding so they could learn from a stonemason. Then, through the design charrette, they designed a plaza using stone and using sand and gravel, and using bones from a whale they had harvested. We were able to use those elements that were part of their culture and part of their landscape.

HR: In one of our projects we salvaged tundra from areas that were going to be developed into a road or pathway, and then placed it over other disturbed areas. It was a much lighter touch than the heavier-handed approach on Southern projects. As well, my understanding of winter changed—thinking about things like creating oversized gate latches, so people can open them when they’re wearing heavy mitts (you won’t get

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Scatliff + Miller + Murray worked with the local community of Gillam,Manitoba, and considered northern environmental conditions and culture in developing a Community Plan.

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Courtesy of Scatliff + Miller + Murray

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Gillam Town Centre Plan

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Courtesy of Scatliff + Miller + Murray

on an off-the-shelf fence that you order from the South, but it’s something that can be designed into the project).

DF: Northern lifestyles are very different from the South—even just living in Sudbury is very different from Toronto. It’s a spread-out city.

They’re trying to revitalize the downtown, but the majority of people who live here want an acreage where they can Skidoo and live that outdoor lifestyle. Even though there’s almost 200,000 people here, it’s hard to get people to invest in public space in the downtown.

One of my colleagues here, Roch Belair, is a Sudbury architect who grew up in Timmins.

He designed the Fort Albany School in Northern Ontario, and they listened to the community, which was talking a lot about geese and how geese are really important to the changing seasons in Fort Albany. At the charrette, they’d keep coming back to wanting to include that. So, the design includes a goose head over the top of one of the doorways, in section. Basically, it’s a literal goose head. When I was taught design, that was antithetical to anything that’s good to do—it’s tacky, it’s cliché…The building is built in a half circle. The landscape architect, Mark Elliott, OALA, from Sudbury, included a big medicine wheel in the centre, with pathways going in the four directions. It would probably be considered heavy-handed, but the community really loves this space. They see that the designers listened to what they were saying. They see their value systems. In all indigenous

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communities, but especially in the North, there’s a fine line between inappropriate cultural appropriation and trying to do something meaningful that connects communities rather than simply implanting your own metrics for what makes good design.

So many of us think it’s a good piece of architecture if it gets published in X number of magazines. But in those communities, those people don’t care. Those books and magazines don’t even exist in their world.

So, at the end of the day, if it’s got a goose head and people love the goose head, and they go there and they gather around that space and the communities embrace it, it’s a winner.

BS: We just recently completed a school near Hudson Bay, where you’re not going to grow grass or trees. It went through a P3 procurement process, and we didn’t have any interface with the community. We were required to build a soccer field to full FIFA standards. Maybe it would have been better to build it on gravel so kids could learn on those spaces? And why are we teaching kids soccer in the North? Are hunting and fishing not things we should be teaching in the schools? Is it a kind of cultural appropriation, saying that what we do in the South is the thing we should import to the North?

DF: In some ways, it’s problematic, because it reaffirms a kind of anthropological tourism—people treat Iqaluit as if it’s on another planet. But those kids in the North, they watch the NBA religiously. They’re watching the same films as the rest of us. So, you need to be careful about stereotypes...

That’s why negotiation with the community is absolutely critical, so you can get a pulse on what everybody’s feeling about the project.

JNM: Have you observed climate change affecting your work?

HR: I’ve only been working in the North for about five years, and in that time, for example, in the cemetery we designed, we’re hearing that opening and closing the graves is becoming more challenging, because the permafrost is warmer in the summer and starts melting more quickly. It also affects the design side, too—trying to come up with schemes for, say, having all the graves in one area so that you’re disturbing a mini-

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mum amount of land area. Climate change is definitely in the conversation.

TE: I haven’t seen things over the long term—I’ve only been working in Northwest Territories for four years—but I have heard from other people I work with that it’s diminishing predictability about the environment, and that this will be a big part—and already is a big part—of the increasing challenge of living and working in the North. An example is hydro power. Just north of Yellowknife, we have a hydro dam that enables the community to almost get away without burning diesel fuel for electricity. But the past three or four years have been quite dry…

CG: I’ve had the opportunity to work on a few sites for almost 18 years, so have visited them repeatedly and have seen actual vegetation change, loss of land through slumping or mass erosion events, and then either wildlife introductions or wildlife loss because of habitat change. But what’s most striking to me is listening to stories told by Elders or by hunters, and hearing their experiences of climate change and their challenges with the ice loss or the erosion of the thickness of the ice. This is causing navigation problems, and it’s causing safety issues. And one of the big challenges they’re having culturally is passing knowledge from generation to generation now, because the knowledge that the Elders had amassed about climate and the way that climate would act, has changed. It’s very difficult for younger people who want to learn about how to navigate their land or how to read the climate; they aren’t necessarily able to learn those lessons through the traditional passing down of knowledge.

KE: With permafrost being less predictable, it’s affecting foundations. Piles used to be quite common, but now they’re tending to go to Triodetic space frame foundations. If there is any issue with the permafrost, it’s a rigid frame, so, hopefully, it won’t crack the whole building…

DF: I just read a thesis by a Waterloo student, Katherine (Kat) Kovalcik. It’s called “An Index of Bearings and Groundworks,” and it’s about being grounded, in a philosophical sense, to the place where you are, and then she goes on to describe an index of all the different ways buildings touch the ground in the North.

The ground is a living and changing environ-

ment, and, as designers, we have to think of it in those terms. It’s not a predictable, static entity; it’s something that’s going to change and morph, and how does that relate to the cultural way of being up there?

BS: We’re seeing a lot of changes to the landscape from climate change in Northern Manitoba. We worked on a project along the east side of Lake Winnipeg, and most of the communities along there are fly-in communities or winter road communities.

The government is on the hook to provide enough diesel and other supplies to the community, mostly through those winter roads, but because of our shrinking winter season, those winter roads aren’t as usable anymore, and you can’t guarantee that they’ll be open. Now, all of a sudden, the government has to fly in resources, and so an economic model is developing for actually building a road along the east side. There was an initiative started about ten years ago by the province of Manitoba to build approximately 1,000 kilometres of all-weather road along the east side of Lake Winnipeg that connected a lot of these communities. We got involved because a lot of this land was going through a potential UNESCO World Heritage Site, known as Pimachiowin Aki, and they had to ensure that any road-building preserved the traditional landscape that existed—the landscape that is there, that will be there, and that will evolve over time.

We employ a number of biologists on staff who do native plant re-vegetation work.

We work with First Nations communities throughout that region to not only capture native seed, but also to put that seed into production. We put about half a dozen new varietals that had not been put in commercial seed production, and worked with these groups to develop new methods of getting that seed back on the ground. It was a great opportunity for us, as landscape architects, but it was a clear indication that what we have relied on for 100 years—all these winter roads coming through this province—is not as reliable any more. Some of the ice roads are now usable maybe two weeks a year at most, and even some of the largest trucks can’t go on them.

You’re starting to see great volatility in the landscape.

The DEW Line

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Militarized landscapes of the North TEXT AND PHOTOGRAPHS BY MICHELA SUTTER

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In the 1950s, during the Cold War, the Canadian and U.S. governments spent a lot of money—and fast—on military agendas to protect national security and sovereignty against a perceived communist threat. As a result, 63 radar stations were developed across the Arctic coasts of Alaska, Canada, and Greenland to detect Russian planes flying over the North Pole. These radar stations were known as the Distant Early Warning Line or “DEW” Line, a significant engineering feat for its time designed by the Lincoln Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and built between 1955 and 1957.

The approach to Bar-3

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The approach to Tuktoyaktut

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Permafrost slumping in the Mackenzie River

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The DEW Line is infamous for its toxic legacy, contaminating not just the Arctic landscape, but its regional cultures and peoples, as well. The coastal Inuit experienced permanent modifications

Unmanned North Warning System (NWS) station

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Cooking muktuk in an abandoned oil barrel near the DEW Line

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Arctic cotton growing in rusted oil barrels left from the DEW Line

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Drying whitefish

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Hawk

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Wires and other abandoned waste materials intertwine with local flora, creating a mix of beauty and ruin on the site.

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to their way of life in an extremely short time, and the total cost for remediating the chemicals left behind was approximately $575 million dollars. This extensive remediation project lasted decades, between the years of 1989 and 2014.

When I learned of the DEW Line, I quickly became infatuated with these geodesic Fuller-domes that were scattered across the Arctic coast for a military agenda that no one spoke about. Most people I asked had never heard of the DEW Line, and its unpopularity even in the present day had me curious enough to continue to ask questions—questions that eventually led me to visit an old DEW Line site to see for myself.

As a part of a larger trip to the Canadian Far North, I was fortunate to visit the community of Tuktoyaktuk or “Tuk.” Tuk is a

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community of 898 on the Arctic coast of the Northwest Territories where Bar-3, one of the DEW Line stations, is located. I travelled from Inuvik to Tuk by boat because prior to November 15th, the opening of the InuvikTuktoyaktuk highway, the only means of reaching the coast in the summer was by water or air. Two local Inuvialuit were planning to head from Inuvik to Tuk to pick up their granddaughter, so they kindly allowed me to tag along for the ride.

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The photographs shown here capture moments in the present that feature relics of the past life of Bar-3 as a DEW Line station.

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My visit to the DEW Line was short and sweet. Bar-3 is currently in operation as part of the North Warning System (NWS), an unmanned radar station implemented in 1990 by Canada’s North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD), so there really wasn’t much going on.

Nearby, however, locals were drying fish and cooking muktuk out of old and rusty leftover barrels.

MICHELA SUTTER IS A MASTERS OF LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE STUDENT AT THE UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO CURRENTLY PURSUING THESIS RESEARCH IN THE MACKENZIE DELTA OF THE WESTERN ARCTIC.

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Interviews with Pierre Bélanger and Lucy Lippard

Diavik Diamond Mine,which opened in 2003 in the Northwest Territories, excavates deep into the sub-Arctic tundra landscape.

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Log driving in Vancouver,B.C.

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Diamond mine excavation

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TO VIEW ADDITIONAL CONTENT RELATED TO THIS GROUND ARTICLE, VISIT WWW.GROUNDMAG.CA.

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CONDUCTED BY VINCENT JAVET

Society’s revived interest in, migration to, and investment in the urban condition is a narrative that has become a cliché in the past few decades. Our ongoing rapid urbanization and the commodification of the world at large has resulted in complex and multilayered socio-economic and environmental issues for the landscape architecture profession to address.

Lateral thinking across vast, complex, and interrelated subject matter has allowed landscape architecture to be positioned as the profession to tackle questions posed by 21st-century urbanism. With globalism and capitalist economics postured to remain the status quo into the foreseeable future, the profession must begin to question its role in the unmaking, formalization, privatization, and sterilization of land, at scales ranging from the city to the territory.

Ground invited two critical thinkers in the realm of land use, politics, art, and landscape—Lucy Lippard (writer, curator, and activist) and Pierre Bélanger, OALA (Associate Professor of Landscape Architecture at Harvard University’s Graduate School of

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PIERRE BÉLANGER, OALA, IS A LANDSCAPE ARCHITECT, EDUCATOR, BUILDER, AND CURATOR. AT HARVARD UNIVERSITY’S GRADUATE SCHOOL OF DESIGN, HE TEACHES AND COORDINATES GRADUATE COURSES AT THE INTERSECTION OF ECOLOGY, INFRASTRUCTURE, MEDIA, AND URBANISM IN THE INTERRELATED FIELDS OF DESIGN, COMMUNICATIONS, PLANNING, AND ENGINEERING. BÉLANGER HAS PUBLISHED TWO CORE BOOKS ON INFRASTRUCTURE AND URBANISM: LANDSCAPE AS INFRASTRUCTURE: A BASE PRIMER (TAYLOR & FRANCIS, 2016) AND ECOLOGIES OF POWER: COUNTERMAPPING THE MILITARY GEOGRAPHIES & LOGISTICAL LANDSCAPES OF THE U.S. DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE (MIT PRESS, 2016), CO-AUTHORED WITH ALEXANDER ARROYO. BÉLANGER WAS THE RECIPIENT OF THE 2017 OALA RESEARCH AND INNOVATION AWARD FOR HIS EXTRACTION PROJECT. VINCENT JAVET IS A MASTER OF LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE CANDIDATE AT THE UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO AND A MEMBER OF THE GROUND EDITORIAL BOARD. LUCY LIPPARD IS AN INTERNATIONALLY KNOWN WRITER, ACTIVIST, AND CURATOR. SHE HAS AUTHORED 24 BOOKS (THE MOST RECENT OF WHICH IS UNDERMINING: A WILD RIDE THROUGH LAND USE, POLITICS, AND ART IN THE CHANGING WEST), HAS CURATED MORE THAN FIFTY MAJOR EXHIBITIONS, AND HOLDS NINE HONORARY DEGREES. LIPPARD IS THE RECIPIENT OF NUMEROUS AWARDS, INCLUDING A GUGGENHEIM FELLOWSHIP AND TWO NATIONAL ENDOWMENT FOR THE ARTS GRANTS. SHE LIVES IN NEW MEXICO.

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Design)—to provide their insights in a discussion that is at its centre one of land and its manipulation and exploitation as a commodity within a capitalist society. The interviews were conducted with each participant individually, by email.

Vincent Javet (VJ): In her book Undermining, Lucy Lippard states that the lives of urbanites depend on an increasingly devastated countryside; fracking, agribusiness, clearcutting, water contamination, and air pollution are the prices paid by non-city dwellers. This is the reality we grapple with in order to sustain a quality of life to which we have become accustomed. What are some tools and models for overcoming or moving into the 21st century whereby these realities can be more carefully navigated?

Pierre Bélanger (PB): That quality of life you speak of is entirely the result of a settler-state condition in which the colonial metropolis continues to drain resource hinterlands. It’s part of empire-building that has been in existence since the Romans, who set the precedent in Europe and North Africa, then extended by the Dutch, Portuguese, and

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Bonnie Sherk’s The Farm in the 1970s in San Francisco, and newer ones like Andrea Reynosa’s John Street Pasture, Marguerite Kahrl and Marjetica Potrc˘ in Italy, Loraine Leeson in London—these come to mind, and there are many, many more.

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Spanish, and perfected by the British across the world. It is about the centre dominating the periphery. Your question assumes that consumption patterns don’t need to change, so as to maintain that domination of consumption through extraction.

Anthony King’s 1990 book, Urbanism, Colonialism, and the World-Economy, is helpful here: “All cities can be described as colonial: at the local level, the powers that form them organize their hinterland and live off the surplus the non-urban realm provides.

At the global level, existing cities organize the surplus of both their own society as well as that of others overseas; the local relationship of town-to-country becomes the metropoliscolony connection on a world scale.”

That pattern of so-called urbanism (read colonialism) comes at the expense of the Indigenous lands and sovereign territories beyond and below cities. That colonialism is inscribed in national parks, forestry practices, highway systems, trade regulations, licensing procedures, land-use zoning categories, etc. Those territories, however, are beginning to see their revenge, and the majority of city dwellers are thoroughly unprepared for the change that is underway and about to happen. They ignore this reality at their expense.

Let’s be clear: if the urban revolution was the deliverance from the settler-state and colonial oppression, then we have never been urban. We live in an industrialized, colonial, settler-state system so large and so vast that we (settlers and descendants of settlers) no longer see it or understand it. Most Canadians are born within it, have never pledged allegiance to the Queen or to the Crown that dominates it, but are happy to profit from it while that system exploits 95 percent of Crown lands of this country, lands that were stolen by the dispossession of Indigenous territories and displacement of Indigenous peoples. That terror and terrorism of the Canadian state and of the Crown across territories is more than 150 years old, and is still ongoing.

Most people living within cities of the South, along the U.S. border, are oblivious to that fact. The state upholds that ignorance in the territorial allocation of government funding at the expense of tangible and equitable territorial investment, namely in the lack of infrastructure towards First Nations Reserves, unjust racist policies, and absence of Indigenous infrastructure across the North.

But it’s much harder to imagine how to communicate urban life to rural residents despite their fondness for shopping malls, which would probably be the best place to start.

This gap is one of the reasons Donald Trump was elected. Mini-skyscrapers and gridlock traffic projected on cornfields and trailer parks? Rural residents already have a clear and up-close image of industrialization and its absence.

And suburbia? The middle ground? Is there a way to reach in both directions?

Growth is the main problem. How can we learn that bigger is not better, decades after Small is Beautiful? Can landscape architects take on issues such as affordable tiny houses? Yard sales and thrift shops instead of consumer craziness? The important idea of sustainability gets vaguer as it is exploited by greenwashers. A class system that denigrates those who can’t afford consumer craziness just makes bigger look better and makes it much harder to communicate without talking down. Frugality and scaling down are hard sells in this country. They are values from the Great Depression that have lost their grip on North American society, and we could desperately use them today.

Lucy Lippard (LL): I’m not sure how to more effectively communicate urban life to rural dwellers. (I’ve lived in both contexts, and they are very different.) Oddly, it may be easier to communicate rural life, or at least rural models, to city dwellers, many of whom retreat to “the countryside” for vacations or weekends, or at least idealize it. Community gardens, vertical farming, schoolchildren’s programs to show where their food comes from, older works like 07

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written on these imperial origins and its colonial instruments, which include engineering, architecture, and urban planning. However, Jane M. Jacobs’ book Edge of Empire (1996) is a good beginning. Landscape architecture falls underneath these practices, and is entrenched within them. To ignore these origins overlooks the greater reality of how land underlies everything that we work on, and land is essentially geopolitical. It does not belong to the state and never has. If landscape architects genuinely want to rethink practice, they need to think about whom they work for, whom they are funded by, and whom they are accountable to, not just in the future, but to generations unborn. In other words, planning—and, by association, landscape architecture, architecture, and engineering—needs to be decolonized.

VJ: Are we merely products of capitalism?

And what might new acts or strategies for subversion within our industry look like?

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VJ: Landscape architects work in a variety of ways to plan, design, and implement changes to the exterior environments all around us. As landscape architects, our work is often funded with the agenda of making, remaking, and in turn unmaking, dislocating, or destroying places. Is the idea of placemaking an arrogant or predatory activity by designers?

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The living earthwork art project John Street Pasture by artist,activist,and farmer Andrea Reynosa took place in Brooklyn in 2014.

Andrea Reynosa The Evergreen Brick Works,Toronto, is an old industrial site repurposed as an environmental and community hub.

Dennis Jarvis

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Children work on the OMI/Excelsior Living Library & Think Park in San Francisco,in a place-based greening project founded by Bonnie Ora Sherk.

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The Brant Club,a project in Guelph by Lucia Babina and Marjetica Potrc, ˘ was developed through a variety of community activities focusing on the available natural assets in the area, place-making,and food accessibility.

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Lucia Babina

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Before (08) and after (09) photographs of The Cook, the Farmer, His Wife and Their Neighbour,a project in Amsterdam by Marjetica Potrc ˘ and Wilde Westen,in which a community garden and community kitchen became a catalyst for transforming not only the public space but also the community itself.

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Marjetica Potrc ˘

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Boys mowing the lawn next to a San Francisco freeway,1976,at The Farm (1974-1987),co-founded by Bonnie Ora Sherk and Jack Wickert as a space for gardening,art,and community engagement.

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Bonnie Ora Sherk

LL: We are certainly products of capitalism, but not “merely.” Some of us have long defined ourselves by opposition to capitalism, which means we always have our eyes peeled for the myriad alternatives that have come up over the years, from “intentional communities” to individual and collective activism—local, and beyond. I’m under the illusion that as a lifelong freelance writer and activist on art, culture, and place, I’m not part of any industry. I tend to think that the best strategies in any field involve smallscale collective endeavours with community support that are not dependent on huge amounts of funding or bureaucratic red tape. Since growth is the North American religion, small and effective local groups often outgrow their original forms and purposes and are no longer subversive.

LL: Yes. Placemaking is not an entrepreneurial or even a “creative” enterprise. It isn’t achieved by experts parachuting in and advising those who live in and know the place. These actual placemakers may not be committed to changing their places, and may in fact already resent changes proposed by outsiders. Placemaking as a strategy involves a long-term commitment to place and people, and to hard and time-consuming work. Art or landscape architecture can be one piece of the project, but only if they are embedded in the place, rather than visiting.

One of my favourite posters: “Nothing About Us Without Us is For Us.”

PB: We need a better understanding of the oppressive and totalizing control of petrocapitalism. Erin Freeland Ballantyne, a political ecologist from the Northwest Territories, has written a brilliant Ph.D on that subject at

PB: The practice and profession of landscape architecture is in itself a colonial practice that emerged from the Victorian era during which the British, and, more specifically, the monarchy under Queen Victoria, had nearly a quarter of the land on the planet under its control.

To say that landscape architecture emerged out of industrialization or the City Beautiful movement is a lie. The book has yet to be 10

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alarming levels of global warming and climate change, extreme labour inequalities, and massive resource depletion, so it’s no wonder it needs to be called into question, challenged, and thoroughly crushed.

So-called technological progress—neoliberal progress—has led us nowhere but down.

What is particularly important to watch for are the rising multitude of blockades that are being erected in the face of infrastructural development and resource extraction. Those blockades, as expressions of the politics of refusal, are primarily being led by Indigenous peoples and other oppressed peoples. With more than 50 percent of Indigenous people living or working in cities, that territorial revenge is now being brought into cities, and it would do well for the non-Indigenous population to pay attention, inform themselves, engage, and support those efforts.

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Oxford, and everyone in the field needs to read it. In addition to engaging the politics of land and Indigenous sovereignties of territory, part of the decolonizing project of the profession also entails the decoupling of practice from the profession, and from the industry, to unlock political realities of the sites, properties, and lands they work on. Universities need to seriously address the utter lack and absence of Indigenous students and scholars that represent the communities of Black, Indigenous, and people of colour within the field, not only by means of so-called inclusion but by means of addressing pressing and urgent realities of these lands and territories.

Inherited and subjugated histories of design that only originate from Europe perpetuate the lies of design that cater to neoliberal elites and settler mentalities. A profession solely and exclusively reliant on the state (at whatever level) needs to question whom it works for, what ideologies it upholds, and whom it represents. To represent underrepresented nations, we need new narratives built on traditions that have been ignored and erased.

VJ: Perhaps on a similar but more positive tangent, can we analyze any successes as a society? What are some of the most powerful projects or thoughts you’ve come across recently?

LL: Here are some, but by no means all: Center for Land Use Interpretation (CLUI) and a vast amount of critical landscape photog-

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raphy (including Chris Jordan, Subhankar Banerjee, Terry Evans, Peter Goin), River Healers, Futurefarmers, Patricia Johanson, Andrea Reynosa, Beverly Naidus, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Mary Miss, Paula Castillo, Aviva Rahmani, Agnes Denes, Marjetica Potrc˘ with Marguerite Kahrl, Dierdre O’Mahony, Brandon Ballengee, Kim Stringfellow, Basia Irland, Evergreen Brick Works in Toronto, the exhibition projects of Amy Lipton and Jennifer Heath, conferences like the recent “Decolonizing Nature” and programs like Land Arts of the American West (both at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque), and on and on and on.

PB: We need to recognize the violent, extractive, and aggressive nature of the society you refer to, which is more truthfully, and more honestly, the colonial settler-state of today.

It may be an imperial success to see the city—the colonial metropolis—thrive, but that ongoing level of empire-building comes at the expense of territories beyond the space of city borders. It is the industrialized, extractive state—and the consumptive lifestyles it generates—that has created and caused

If part of the transformation of the built environment entails a transformation of its narrative, and if that new narrative needs to be imagined as Edward Said would propose, then the un-naming of colonial places and the removal of colonial monuments is a productive first start at changing the appearance of built environments intended to image the oppressive colonial settler-state by erasing Indigenous presence and marginalizing non-whites. That these un-named and reclaimed places often represent spaces bordering on waters, and intrinsic to water bodies, is not un-coincidental.

VJ: Landscape architecture often works to reveal a narrative, and to inform or uncover operations and histories that are not often at the forefront of society’s consciousness.

Art can operate similarly, with the one distinguishing difference being previous use, practicality, or a formal functionality.

PB: Well, that dichotomy and difference is one fabricated by the professional disciplines of design and the instructional crisis of the colonial university. We are constantly boxing and categorizing knowledge in order to control it, as opposed to cultivating linkages and disciplinary practices. Art is a practice in representation, translation, and transfiguration. There is so much to gain by collaborations and transdisciplinary work, but ultimately it requires the profession to be weaker, less limited to the confines of what is assumed to be within its “professional jurisdiction.” We need to protect communities against the violent and often

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oppressive nature of regulations and spatial policies made for the primarily white upper middle-class, and largely generated by Eurocentric planning ideologies that focus on spaces of consumption, leisure, and luxury.

Those principles don’t translate or transfer well to other communities that, in themselves, have strong spatial views, ideas, and ideals, and that are often in the middle, downstream, or upstream from the dangerous effects of resource extraction and industrial pollution.

Landscape architects need to take more time to listen, learn, translate, engage, and empower those community-based views through a multitude of media and means, to actively influence government agencies to change their policies, and let other people from the community lead the process of transformation over time. They are the ones accountable to their people. The generation of consultants emerging from the neoliberal and corporate era of the 1980s and 1990s needs to better understand their long-term place in project-making or building.

LL: Landscape architecture is not my field, though I’ve written about various eco-art projects. Frankly, landscape architecture has never been tremendously interesting to me, as so much of it seems primarily cosmetic. Of course, the same goes for some eco-art, but is there a difference in intention?

Landscape architecture incorporates history, narrative, restorative functions, and critical issues, so maybe it’s eco-art? Who cares about categorization?

I think I like landscape better than landscape architecture. I live in xeriscape land, where the largest recommended lawn is the size of a king-sized bed. I don’t mow my grass because I like the range grass better than a manicured space and don’t want to separate my yard from the more or less natural field/ overgrown former pastures that surround it.

VJ: In recent years, art has blurred boundaries, so that art can be functional. Landscape architecture has similarly blurred boundaries; some landscapes are aesthetic but not practical. Can you discuss the relevance for you of what each narrative may bring to the landscape and thoughts on directions for forward movement that are meaningful for increasing societal landscape consciousness for either field?

PB: The profession and the academy need to break out of the mindset that we need to push the colonial discipline of landscape architecture for its own sake. More importantly, we need to understand the deep political ecologies and geographies of land.

When we draw, we fight. And if you’re not fighting for a cause of the oppressed, then you need to rethink what you’re doing and why you’re doing it.

If you are not breaking the law, then you’re not doing anything new either, nor anything relevant. Most design laws are the inheritance of colonial settler rules and regulations—primarily from the French and the British, with Eurocentric ideologies of

over-design (through rezoning, variances, policing changes, new dimensions, subversive underdevelopment, de-engineering, or un-design). These laws and regulations are entrenched in the white bureaucratic space of the specifications of every single material, plant, and dimension that we use every day in practice. Inert surface materials prescribe the engineering of the ground and entrench principles of burying water systems below ground in order to drain the surface of any form of hydrological memory and context it previously retained. We have made wet the enemy of the dry. Nursery plants encode colonial values of Eurocentric plant material that divorce and displace the nature of forests, wetlands, and prairies in favour of the Victorian-era botany of single species and colonial aesthetics. We have made dynamic and indeterminate living systems enemies of the picturesque. Dimensions that employ and deploy in drawings extend the contractor-based, financed forms of fastpaced development that most often destroy the intergenerational value of incremental change, where numerical quantification and economic optimization take precedence over deep-seated spiritual histories, labour conditions, and larger territorial memories that lie at the core of climate-change adaptation.

We value short-term performance on paper over long-term improvements by the people.

Essentially, we design without knowing what we are erasing, who is doing the building, whose hands and whose territories are touched, using materials with historical, ecological, or even cultural provenance that we have very little knowledge about. Ironically, the only time landscape architects use the terms “indigenous” or “native” is when they speak of plants, not people. A grave and massive failure.

The system and the industry of design is broken. It needs to be unbuilt, dismantled, and demolished—i.e., un-designed and abandoned—in order for it to be remade.

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Chetwynd Timber Yard,British Columbia Jason Woodhead

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Floating lumber,B.C.

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Syncrude’s Mildred Lake plant in Athabasca Oil Sands,Alberta

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The Interior

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01 TEXT BY VICTORIA TAYLOR, OALA

The topography of cities can be a changing palette, and the latest among urban land experiments in Toronto is a 6.5-metre, three-sided form that has appeared on the downtown campus of the University of Toronto. Located on the east side of the newly relocated John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design, “Darwin’s Hill” is a provocative and important component of one of Toronto’s most anticipated building projects. This dramatic form is a poetic intervention that can be occupied by the public; a green barrier to a busy urban context; an experimental garden for the landscape faculty; a site fill depository; and a striking complement to the architectural changes at One Spadina Crescent led by NADAAA. The construction drawings for Darwin’s Hill provide a new script for a forgotten piece of land, and an invitation—to students, teachers, and the public—to engage in a critical contemporary landscape discourse: How will we design the urban landscapes of the future?

Guided by technical research, skilled trades and subcontractors, and a supportive client, the design team behind Darwin’s Hill, led

by Public Work, was motivated to creatively resolve project challenges and to push forward precedent-setting work for one of the top design and architecture faculties in North America. On a site the size of a city block, the opportunity to push new ideas in landscape has not been wasted.

“We wanted the berm to be a teaching moment,” says Robert Wright, OALA, University of Toronto Associate Professor at Daniels and the client’s representative on the design team. “We asked ourselves what experiments can we imagine here, and how can we involve the students?”

The design details evolved from there, with each drawing becoming a platform to describe the weaving and layering of the berm’s functional/infrastructural/aesthetic/ poetic/horticultural/conceptual/educational and public-realm improvement goals.

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Darwin’s Hill under construction at One Spadina Crescent,Toronto,on the east side of the newly relocated and renovated John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture,Landscape,and Design, University of Toronto

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Concept sketch for Darwin’s Hill

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Given the tight site staging and a commitment to retaining as much site soil as possible, work on the land moved in sync with the earthwork for the building renovations. Nine hundred cubic metres of soils excavated from the school’s new sunken north court were dumped directly into the berm’s structural wrapping—a layering of geogrid and folded galvanized steel mesh, holding in the site soils at 400mm increments, guiding and shaping the berm upward until reaching its 6.5m final height. To reach this maximum height within a 15m by 35m footprint, Public Work worked closely with MSE wall system fabricators Terrafix Geosynthetics and Aldershot Landscape Contractors to design and install a soil retention system to secure a dramatic 60-degree east slope. According to Ben Watt-Meyer, OALA, of Public Work, “The hill is meant to be an investigation and

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Site plan for Darwin’s Hill

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Cross-section rendering of Darwin’s Hill

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Under construction

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showcase of different slopes, soil stabilization techniques, and planting strategies.”

Although these types of steep slopes are more common along highway embankments than small urban spaces, the scale is part of the experiment to underline landscape’s potential as an activator in three dimensions. As you pass by, the berm’s form is unfamiliar and striking in this context but also comforting as it leads you around the site to enclose the school’s sunken courtyard, buffering sounds and providing a safety barrier to the constant traffic and streetcars that circulate the site.

The west slope of Darwin’s Hill calls attention to landscape’s important, and often forgotten, fourth dimension—time.

Labelled “a temporary experimental plantation,” the 50 percent slope is planted in

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The trees on Darwin’s Hill are planted in alphabetic order,by botanical name.

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Darwin Hill’s soil stabilization technique uses geo-fibre-reinforced soil—a mix of synthetic and natural materials—and is meant to mimic the way plant roots hold soil in place.

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Under construction

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Darwin’s Hill Design Team Landscape Architect: Public Work Building Architect: NADAAA 13

ascending rows of 2-metre-high trees as a living laboratory for study and pleasure.

Planted in alphabetical order by botanical name, with signage to come, each row showcases one of 18 deciduous, native tree species recommended by the City of Toronto for naturalization—a contribution to the urban canopy and a valuable resource and daily opportunity for students, local designers, and the public to witness seasonal changes and to study each tree’s unique morphology and growth rate.

With all of these new trees, the in-slope irrigation system is a critical detail in the construction package. Usually a simple detail benefiting from gravity to achieve deep root growth, the watering system on Darwin’s Hill required custom planning.

Each pop-up sprinkler head is uniquely calibrated based on the fall of water at its

location, with estimated soil-penetration times based on slope, site orientation, and planting palette. The system draws from a large cistern that collects runoff from the building’s roof and the majority of the hardscape and softscape areas on site.

In the same way that this berm’s namesake, Charles Darwin, pushed beyond the norms of 19th-century thinking, the design team used every cubic metre to push the land’s potential in both monumental architectural form and pedagogical opportunity.

BIO/ VICTORIA TAYLOR, OALA, DESIGNS SPACES INFORMED AND INSPIRED BY CONTEXT, ECOLOGY, SOCIAL ENGAGEMENT, AND HORTICULTURAL POSSIBILITIES. IN PRIVATE PRACTICE SINCE 2012, TAYLOR EXPANDED HER PUBLIC PRACTICE IN 2016 AS CO-FOUNDER OF ====\\DERAIL PLATFORM FOR ART + ARCHITECTURE, A CURATORIAL PROJECT TO ANIMATE SPACES ALONG URBAN LINEAR LANDSCAPES (SEE WWW.DERAILART.COM). TAYLOR IS THE FOUNDING CURATOR OF THE GLADSTONE HOTEL’S ANNUAL GROW OP: THE CULTURE OF LANDSCAPE EXHIBITION, A SESSIONAL INSTRUCTOR AND CRITIC AT THE JOHN H. DANIELS SCHOOL OF ARCHITECTURE, LANDSCAPE, AND DESIGN AT THE UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO AND AT THE UNIVERSITY OF WATERLOO SCHOOL OF ARCHITECTURE, AND A GROUND ADVISORY PANEL MEMBER, TAYLOR IS A FREQUENT CONTRIBUTOR TO GROUND.

Building Architect of Record: Adamson Associates Construction Team Construction Manager: Eastern Construction Landscape Contractor: Aldershot Landscape Contractors Reinforced Slope Engineering & Fabrication: Terrafix Geosynthetics Size: 15 metres by 35 metres by 6.5 metres in height Area: 415 square metres Volume of reused site soils: 900 cubic metres

Letter From…

Ontario’s North

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32

01

TEXT BY JOSEPH CLEMENT

I remember the back seat of my father’s car. Blue velour. It was one of those big Buicks, a coupe, two doors—each about a mile long. In the back seat, with the plush, navy fabric surrounding me like a cocoon, I stared out the window as kilometres of blurred greenery unfurled—a wall, soft and mossy, undulating up and down, in and out, around rock outcroppings, bisected by rivers, interrupted by lakes. Impenetrable to the eye, I always imagined a beautiful waterfall or a rocky creek with torrents of water, even in the driest months. For a young kid in love with nature, there was no lack of possibilities, no lack of fuel for daydreams on long car rides.

Back at home in winter, with a case of cabin fever, my dad and I would pack a bag with newspaper, a cast-iron frying pan, plates, and cutlery, and, of course, some bacon and eggs.

We would walk along the beach until we came across the mouth of a small creek. Crossing the never fully frozen ice was always a thrilling and terrifying adventure. Sometimes you went through, up to the knee, sometimes farther, but there was no time nor desire to complain. The creek was the beginning of our journey into the winter forest, in search of a place to build a fire and make our breakfast. We scoured the landscape for a sheltered nook, and dug under the snow, blindly searching for branches and kindling and any loose log that would make an ideal seat. We were able to eek out enough material for my dad and I to spend the morning cooking in the woods, pretending that we didn’t live in the middle of Toronto.

Letter From…

Ontario’s North

and old tractor sheds clinging to the ground, rows of old spruce windbreaks and driveways lined by declining sugar maples. It’s clear you are in a place of transition. As you move farther north, the parking lots give way to farmland. Bereft of vegetation, the acres of dirt are achingly bare. The simple architecture of farmhouses and outbuildings becomes a beacon of colour in an otherwise muted landscape. Red and yellow brick, white siding, red and green barns, the architecture stands in stark contrast to the surroundings. Not everything was beautiful. It was laid bare, it was honest, and it was present.

The farther north you move, the farmland gives way to forest as the patches of field are consumed by resurgent wilderness: beautiful cliffs and rolling topography punctuated by the blackness of hemlocks or the monochrome stands of birch, a beautifully subtle image made clear and present.

There were waterfalls, better than the ones I had imagined, and with them rivers and pools and ponds of blackness. Suddenly the highway was this vast and limitless means of exploration where the journey made the destination that much more meaningful.

The slowly revealing Canadian Shield, the changing mix of vegetation, and the signs of wild turkeys and deer grazing in the winter forest were all clues to the changing place I was moving through.

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IMAGE/ 02/

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Haliburton County Joseph Clement Haliburton School of Art + Design Joseph Clement

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Haliburton County in winter

IMAGE/

Joseph Clement

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The highway gives up its asphalt for snowcovered sideroads, winding deep into the forest. The light grows dim as the trees cast a shadow across the bright white landscape.

Moving forward, slowly snaking around and near rock outcroppings, you now realize that these giants are the very tip of huge upward thrusting segments of Canadian Shield, buried out of sight in the heights of summer greenery. The imposing and raw landscape inspires awe, yet somehow you feel secure, like it’s the right place to be. It’s comfortable, familiar, and welcoming. Somehow the winter forest has a way of making you feel protected and insulated, and you forget where you are. The vastness of the forest seems impossible in the cocooned nook you find and soon it becomes your entire world. It’s a place for your imagination to wander and to drift back as you recall the long days of summer and the hidden mysteries of the forest.

As I arrive at the old farmhouse on the edges of Algonquin Park, the snow begins to fall, heavy and constant. I have this sudden urge.

I drop my bags and rummage through the kitchen for a sturdy cast-iron pan, some newspaper, and a few eggs. I strap on a pair of snowshoes and head into the forest. For an afternoon, I feel like I’m a kid with my dad, seeing the winter forest for the first time.

BIO/ JOSEPH CLEMENT GRADUATED WITH A BACHELOR OF LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE FROM THE UNIVERSITY OF GUELPH AND WENT ON TO RECEIVE A MASTER OF FINE ARTS FROM OCAD UNIVERSITY. HE CONTINUES TO PRACTISE LANDSCAPE DESIGN AND IS A WRITER AND DIRECTOR FOR FILM.

TO VIEW ADDITIONAL CONTENT RELATED TO THIS GROUND ARTICLE, VISIT WWW.GROUNDMAG.CA.

A few years ago, I was asked to teach a course at the Haliburton School of Art + Design. It would take place in February and last for two weeks each winter. I was excited to escape the city for some time in the country. I was excited to see snow that wasn’t grey and to live in a place where snowfall was a part of daily life. I had distant memories of bacon and eggs frozen to my plate.

I had a feeling that winter in the country would be a comfortable place.

It was my first winter trip north in years and I was keenly interested. I watched as the suburban highway landscape began to succeed to farmland. At first there were the sad and orphaned farmhouses now surrounded by big box parking lots, their fate made clear by their context. Remnants of sugar shacks 03

Issues

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Relevance in the contemporary landscape TEXT BY MICHAEL MCCLELLAND, OAA, AND STEWART MCINTOSH, OALA

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A statue of Louis Riel,Manitoba’s Métis founding father,stands at the Manitoba Legislative grounds in Winnipeg.

IMAGE/

Samyaka.verma

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The North-West Rebellion Monument, unveiled in 1895 on the Queen’s Park grounds in Toronto,honours only those who fell on the battlefields fighting against Riel and does not acknowledge the Indigenous lives lost during the 1885 rebellion led by Louis Riel,a Métis who fought for Native settlement and farming rights.

IMAGE/ 03/

03

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Joseph Clement A modernist sculpture of Louis Riel was originally on the grounds of the Manitoba Legislature but was replaced by a more conventional and representational statue.

Dano

Issues

Monuments memorialize the past.

They say, “This is where we have been.”

As such, monuments play an important symbolic role in telling the story of a culture in history. They are used to celebrate and memorialize people, places, and events.

They lift up our heroes, who represent and personify societal values, and are intended to make us feel proud to be a part of our country, to evoke a sense of what Benedict Anderson calls “our imagined community.”

Monuments are also expressions of power, political or otherwise, and as such they reflect the dominant ideology of the day, and tend to marginalize those voices they dominate.

Monuments are literal embodiments of political structures. But when we look at and experience a monument in a public setting, is its meaning clear? Does it inspire, oppress, or evoke indifference? And what is the challenge to the landscape architect?

Every monument has its intended meaning, but these intentions are necessarily open to change and new readings. Monuments shift in their meaning as each generation views them with new eyes, new cultures, and new sets of values. Like literature or architecture, monuments are open to the interpretation and reinterpretation of their contemporary readers.

In his book The Content of the Form, historian Hayden White argued that historical writing represents the view of the victor in the competition between the tellers of different versions of stories of the past. John Berger says the same thing in Ways of Seeing. We can extend this logic in our consideration of monuments.

Monuments symbolize the dominant culture that tells the stories of victory, though often at the expense of those who are marginalized by those same stories. This is problematic when both those in power and those who are marginalized share the same postal codes.

For the siting of a monument, how and where it is placed in a landscape is as significant as the monument itself.

When monuments uphold a certain unpopular ideology, their removal can be just as important as their installation or construction. The recent events of monumentbashing and removal in both the U.S. and

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Canada are evidence that our societies are questioning the ideologies and values these monuments represent. In reference to the August 2017 debates around Confederate monuments in Charlottesville, Virginia, the Toronto Star quoted activist and organizer Shannon McDeez, who argued that “some monuments are better suited to museums than a public space… Public space is not the place for partisan art.”

Location is everything, and for landscape architects the challenge is to determine the appropriateness of the location and then to consider the sensitive placement and design in that location that reflects contemporary values as we understand them.

The monuments of Queen’s Park and University Avenue in Toronto, the Gore in Hamilton, and Parliament Hill Precinct in Ottawa are all highly prominent civic locations, and the location connotes respect.

A statue of former Prime Minister Stephen Harper in a park in his former riding in Calgary would have a completely different meaning than if it were found in Ottawa’s Parliament Hill Precinct.

Consider the example of monuments addressing Métis leader Louis Riel. The original Marcien Lemay and Etienne Gaboury monument, erected at the Manitoba Legislature in 1971, celebrated Riel, but as a modernist sculpture it was instantly controversial and was relocated unceremoniously to a less prominent location. Lemay agreed to the removal on condition that he sculpt the replacement monument, but it too was removed after much protest and replaced in 1996 by a much more conventional and representational sculpture by Miguel Joyal.

With each monument, the question was both about how to appropriately represent Riel and where that representation should be located.

At Queen’s Park, in Toronto, there is another monument to the 1885 North-West Rebellion. The young Walter Allward (who would later go on to design the Vimy Memorial in France) designed, at age 19, the Queen’s Park monument to pay tribute to the 43 Canadian soldiers who died fighting Riel. This monument has developed its own notoriety,

as it deals with a battle that took place at the height of the government’s attempts to control Indigenous communities and does not acknowledge the Indigenous lives lost in the battles or the trial and subsequent death of Riel. Rather than being relocated, the Allward monument has become re-appropriated and given different meaning by Métis and Indigenous groups. It has now served as a meeting place, and the anniversary of Riel’s death has been commemorated there with Indigenous ceremonies and events such as moose-stew suppers.

Another example of a monument used for celebrating with ceremony is the Spirit Garden in Thunder Bay, designed by First Nations architect Ryan Gorrie and the firm Brook McIlroy. It is situated in a prominent waterfront location with a direct connection to the land and natural environment.

The Western-minded landscape architect runs the risk of imposing their own ways of seeing and values when called upon to design monuments that memorialize non-dominant groups. As Anishinaabe scholar Deborah McGregor has written, “In an attempt to define and capture another culture’s knowledge…the more powerful society can, and does, project its own version of the world onto the less powerful.” As we seek to celebrate our history, we need to consider those less celebrated. We need to take a new look at our collective histories and the way we portray them. We need to write them anew, honouring all those whose accomplishments we can all be proud of.

We need to do this as a way of relating and expressing values without further oppressing marginalized groups.

The dialogue is healthy, as it is part of the growing pains on the path toward understanding and reconciliation. A cross-cultural perspective creates a broader lens through which to understand our diverse experiences of monuments in the landscape and our imagined community.

BIO/ MICHAEL MCCLELLAND, OAA, IS A FOUNDING PRINCIPAL OF ERA ARCHITECTS AND IS A MEMBER OF THE STEWARDSHIP BOARD OF THE CULTURAL LANDSCAPE FOUNDATION. STEWART MCINTOSH, OALA, IS A LANDSCAPE ARCHITECT WITH THE TORONTO DISTRICT SCHOOL BOARD AND AN ENVISION SUSTAINABILITY PROFESSIONAL (ENV SP).

Notes

Notes: A Miscellany of News and Events

01

in memoriam Alan E. Bowler The OALA is saddened to announce the passing of Alan Edward Bowler on August 19, 2017. Alan has been a full member of the OALA since November 1978. Alan graduated from the University of Guelph with a B.Sc. in agriculture, and he then completed his Master of Landscape Architecture at the University of Michigan in 1973.

Alan’s work as a landscape architect, at A.E. Bowler Associates, is visible throughout many gardens and green spaces, both residential and commercial, throughout the Greater Hamilton Area. He retired from full practice after nearly 40 years in the profession.

As is the OALA’s custom, a book will be added to the OALA library and a memorial tree will be planted at the Guelph Arboretum WallCustance Memorial Forest in Alan’s name.

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in memoriam

in memoriam

Donald Graham

Nicholas Van Vliet

The OALA is saddened to announce the passing of Donald Graham, who died peacefully at home on November 4, 2017 just shy of his 87th birthday. Donald has been a full member of the OALA since March 1970.

A long-time environmentalist, Don founded the firm D.W. Graham and Associates, Landscape Architects in Ottawa, and, for 30 years, planned and designed green spaces for urban and regional landscapes. Many of Don’s projects from his time at his firm and also at the National Capital Commission highlight his technical knowledge and can still be enjoyed today. Don was one of the first members of the OALA in 1970 and served as a volunteer in many areas, including chairing the Education Committee in the early 1980s. He was inducted to the CSLA College of Fellows in 1973 and was awarded OALA Emeritus member status in 2007. Don helped launch the Landscape Architecture Canada Foundation (LACF), and donations to LACF in his name will go towards creating a scholarship bursary. As is the OALA’s custom, a book will be added to the OALA library and a memorial tree will be planted at the Guelph Arboretum WallCustance Memorial Forest in Don’s name.

The OALA is saddened to announce the passing of Nicholas Van Vliet on August 29, 2017 at the age of 85. Nick has been a full member of the OALA since January 1973.

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

Nick was born in Den Haag, Netherlands, and travelled widely in Europe and Canada before immigrating to Canada in 1952. Nick earned a Bachelor of Science in Horticulture and a Masters in Environmental Science and taught at Ryerson University and George Brown College. He designed and supervised landscape architecture projects all over the world—from Saudi government projects to the Science Centre in Toronto; from shopping centres in downtown Brisbane to gardens in Gambia. He was so passionate about his work that he worked into his 70s. Nick took on many volunteer positions at the OALA, including a role on Council and as Chair of the Examining Board. He was inducted to the CSLA College of Fellows in 1980 and was awarded OALA Emeritus member status in 2001. After retirement, Nick continued to support the OALA and often attended social events.

As is the OALA’s custom, a book will be added to the OALA library and a memorial tree will be planted at the Guelph Arboretum Wall-Custance Memorial Forest in Nick’s name.

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Alan E. Bowler

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Courtesy of OALA

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Donald Graham

Mehran Ataee*

Sarry Klein*

IMAGE/

Jean Landry

Landon Black

Shannon Lee

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Nicholas Van Vliet

(Seven) Xiru Chen

Terence Radford

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Courtesy of OALA

Patricia Clarke*

Emily Sicilia

Shira Davis*

Dan Van Haastrecht

Todd Douglas

Greg Warren

Jonathan Epp

Corey Wigle*

Daniella Favero*

Asterisk (*) denotes Full Members without the use of professional seal.

Business Corner

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Section

Moving .30

038

Forward

2018 OALA CSLA Conference

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T1 9 6 8 TH

TORONTO April 5-7, 2018

2018

www.csla-aapc.ca/events/2018conf

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Artifact

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TEXT BY LORRAINE JOHNSON

The work of artist/ gardener Paul Chartrand 01-03/

Paul Chartrand’s living texts sprout words,literally.

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Paul Chartrand

“I think that gardening is a political act,” says Paul Chartrand, a visual artist who recently completed graduate studies at the University of Western Ontario and is now based in Dunnville, south of Hamilton on the Grand River.

For his series titled living texts, Chartrand partners with plants to create growing, changing words embedded in the landscape. “I’m playing with the idea of language changing over time,” he points out, “just like plants do.”

His recent project, part of the Main Squared festival in Toronto, used speckled pea seeds, planted in a fenced-off sunken courtyard between apartment towers, to sprout and form the words “Eat the concrete”—a sly reference to the productive possibilities of abandoned urban corners. (Pigeons and their disruptive ways managed to redistribute the seeds and “rewrite” the text.)

“A lot of people think that language is what sets humans apart from other creatures,” says Chartrand. In his living texts, language is embodied—botanically, politically--in a way that changes the world around us.

BIO/ LORRAINE JOHNSON IS THE EDITOR OF GROUND AND THE AUTHOR OF CITY FARMER: ADVENTURES IN URBAN FOOD GROWING.

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