Alumni, professors, and students of U of T’s Faculty of Architecture, Landscape & Design gathered last Saturday for a full day of seminars, speakers, and festivities to celebrate the Landscape Design program’s 40th anniversary.
The sessions ranged from topics such as “Landscape as Urbanism” to “Seeding the Region.” Michael Hough, a former U of T professor, defined regionalism in his talk as land “made up of local places taken in a context of a larger region.” Design and planning in urban cities must consider the green infrastructure and its waterways before building begins, he said, and added that urban design must be integrated with ecology. Hough pointed to the Don Valley River Brickworks Project as an example of this philosophy, because he said it is “revitalizing and protecting the local place with the mandates of improving the water quality of the mud creek. [We must] create wildlife and an aquatic habitat in a local place within an environmental regional context where larger regions impact the smaller area.”
“Design must integrate built form and nature,” Hough said. “Both must function to make sustainability work. The whole notion of integrating cities to natural parks and protected areas [must be explored] if the ecological integrity [is to] remain intact.” He said that current urban planning separates urban from natural areas, so that distance and time discourage urban residents from using and exploring distant parks and protected areas. “Disconnections are continuing issues,” said Hough, “where wild animals [such as] elk are fed by tourists, and natural parks are surrounded by conflicting land uses such as agriculture, highways and golf courses.” Hough encouraged urbanites to make the short trips to urban parks like the Leslie Spit Park in Toronto, which is home to “400 species of plants, 290 species of birds and where 60,000 people visit every year.”
“Nature is good business,” said Carolyn Woodland, director of the Toronto and Region Conservation Authority (TRCA), in her opening remarks. “The notion of city planning to landscape has science built into that understanding, with a design ethic based on urban ecology. It is the basis for building cities, [playing a huge role] in advising and planning in a complex political region that affects design language.”
Woodland noted that the nine watersheds across Toronto and the Oak Ridge Moraine serve as the water source for a region that is home to 37 per cent of Ontario’s population. Water conservation is still critical to the TRCA, Woodland said, but the organization has expanded its research into areas such as how nature can be integrated into urban environments, protection of biodiversity, the health of rivers and shorelines, and sustainable communities.
“How much nature is enough?,” asked Woodland at the end of her talk. “How much integration is really enough?” Urban design, she concluded, must consider the environment in the planning process. “Restoration development is wise management,” she concluded.
