Ground 07 – Fall 2009 – Innovation

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Features Restoration Innovation Round Table Advances in Education

Publication # 40026106

Fall 2009 Issue 07

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Letters to the Editor

President’s Message

Regarding the “Irrigation Innovation” article [Technical Corner, Ground 06]: As a professional irrigation consultant and business owner, I am always encouraged when I see our trade receive media attention. It is refreshing that this article was featured in your publication.

There’s an important distinction between invention (the creation of an idea for a new product or process) and innovation (the attempt to put that product or process into practice). Landscape architects are innovators. Landscape architects are constantly researching and evaluating new technologies and adapting these into our projects to create better solutions. It’s a crucial role, and I’m proud that this issue of Ground showcases some of the wonderful and innovative work our profession delivers.

Conservation products and design initiatives are only as effective as the real-world installation and the owner’s subsequent ongoing regular maintenance. Installations must be regulated to realize the conservation initiatives of the irrigation designer’s intent, otherwise there is nothing saved or gained. There has to be a concerted effort by everyone involved in an irrigation project to realize any savings.

TONY SERWATUK, CID, CIC, CLIA PRINCIPAL, HYDROSENSE IRRIGATION DESIGN & CONSULTING INC.

Errata In the Notes section of Ground 06, the Canada Blooms Environmental Award credited to Robert Boltman of b sq landscape design studio for the design of “Outside the Box” should have been credited to Alex Bartlett and Robert Boltman of b sq design studio inc. for the design of “10 x 20.”

In the “Catalyst Map: WATERFRONToronto Design Competitions & RFP’s,” published in Ground 06, the design credit for Sherbourne Park should not have included Koetter Kim and Associates. The design credit should have included only the firms Phillips Farevaag Smallenberg and The Planning Partnership. As well, the design credit for Sugar Beach should have included The Planning Partnership. For further clarifications and additional details regarding the projects included on the “Catalyst Map,” please visit the Ground section of the OALA website (www.oala.ca).

As I write this message, the memory of the Canadian Society of Landscape Architects (CSLA) 75th Anniversary Congress held in Toronto is fresh in my mind. The Ontario Association of Landscape Architects had the honour of being the principal organizer and host of the congress. By many accounts, it was one of the best.

My sincere thanks go to Jim Melvin and Jim Vafiades, co-chairs of the CSLA 2009 Congress Committee, and to all of the committee members, volunteers, and staff who created a memorable event.

You’ve done us all proud.

I enjoyed meeting many landscape architects and industry representatives from across the nation and from the USA. The exchange of information was priceless. I also attended the Presidents’ Roundtable on your behalf and committed to help strengthen our ties and communications with the CSLA and other component associations.

In my summer e-mail communiqué to OALA members, I introduced Sarah Bennett as the new OALA Administrator. On behalf of the membership, I welcome Sarah to the OALA. Her experience and skills will serve the association well and she will provide valuable guidance to us as we pursue new initiatives. One of these initiatives will begin this fall: to undertake a process to update the OALA strategic plan. The membership will be notified about how they can participate in this plan.

It has been six years since the current plan was approved. Most of the goals and action items have been completed. We are now reaping the benefits of years of hard work. The revitalization of the OALA and growth in membership set the stage for us to chart our future directions. It’s a great time to be a landscape architect.

LAWRENCE STASIUK, OALA PRESIDENT PRESIDENT@OALA.CA

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The versatile water feature in Guelph's Civic Square can be drained to accommodate events in summer and frozen to be used as a skating rink in winter.

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Janet Rosenberg & Associates

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A winter rendering illustrates the transition between the civic complex, streetscape, and commercial realm.

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Janet Rosenberg & Associates

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The production rows at FoodCycles' urban farm in Parc Downsview Park comprise an acre of vegetables.

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Lorraine Johsnon

Up Front: Information on the Ground

CITIES

guelph’s new “front yard”

Landscape architectural theorist Elizabeth Meyer recently wrote that “sustainable landscape design must do more than function or perform ecologically; it must perform socially and culturally…Nature is not out there, but in here, interwoven into the human urban condition.” The City of Guelph has fully embraced this concept as it redesigns its urban core, with the new civic square at its hub.

The city is revitalizing the historic Market Place in downtown Guelph, which involves the construction of a new City Hall and Civic Square and the reconstruction of two adjacent streetscapes along Carden and Wilson streets. The emphasis rests on creating strong functional connections linking the public with central spaces, particularly the civic square, which is phased for completion by 2011.

The aim is for the civic square to be “livable and accessible,” says Ian Panabaker, Urban Design Program Manager at the City of Guelph. Among a long list of objectives, the civic square will be programmable, accommodate large crowds and market stalls, and act as a commercial hub, thereby enhancing retail activity on Carden and Wilson streets. In fact, these two streets will undergo reconstruction to

effectively enlarge the civic square and create a more dynamic public space by incorporating design elements such as wider streets, flush curbs, bollards, angled parking, and Silva cell technology for healthy street trees.

The civic square itself will essentially be a stage, a medium to facilitate human interaction and enhance cultural activity year round. Celebrations, festivals, and concerts that were once held at St. George’s Square will be programmed at the new site, where connections to the surrounding streetscapes will allow the crowds to spill out onto Wilson and Carden streets, as the number of users dictates. Civic Square will also boast features to attract users and promote livability, such as a central water feature/skating rink, moveable seating opportunities, public art, historic monuments, vehicular and pedestrian access, parking, contrasting paving, and both turf and hardscaping for a variety of activities.

Janet Rosenberg & Associates is completing the detailed design drawings for the civic square, which the firm describes as the “front yard of the city.” The central design feature will be the large reflecting pool, which is engineered with water jets and has the capacity to be drained to accommodate large crowds, or frozen for ice skating in winter. Vegetation in the

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square consists of several species of native trees, as well as oval mounds planted with perennials and groundcovers. Benches and “loose furniture” contribute to a livable public space, providing opportunities for picnic lunches and meeting places, and truly epitomizing the “front yard” atmosphere.

City Hall is expected to achieve a LEED silver certification, and the civic square will potentially contribute its own credits by way of stormwater retention, rainwater harvesting, energy efficient lighting, and the use of local materials. Native plant material will enhance the ecological sensitivity of the site, and fulfill an aim to attract more pollinators within the urban core.

Emphasis on environmental, cultural, and social sustainability also extends beyond the civic campus. The short-term strategic plan for the Market Place also involves creating a multi-modal transit hub for Via Rail, Go Transit, and city buses; and addressing the barrier effect, created by the railway across Wyndham Street South.

All of this is in an effort to draw people in and maintain uncomplicated access to the urban core, something that has evaded downtown Guelph in past years.

This redevelopment is “exciting, and unique in small Ontario cities,” says Ian Panabaker, because of simultaneous execution of multiple phases, and the relatively short schedule for completion of the redesigned Market Place, which is slated for the end of 2012. Janet Rosenberg, OALA, echoes Panabaker’s enthusiasm, describing the civic square as “one project out of many that will change the face of the downtown core.”

TEXT BY ALEXANDRA HOSSFELD, ASSOCIATE MEMBER, OALA, WHO CURRENTLY LIVES IN LONDON, ONTARIO.

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URBAN AGRICULTURE

waste to resource

Conventional North American urban development, landscaping, and waste management have tended to systematically remove organic material from urban sites. Soil is excavated, relocated, or compacted through the multiple processes of city building, reducing the soil’s capacity to perform its functions. How can shifts in organic material cycling support rather than deplete urban soil systems?

Two years ago, a group of urban agronomists, activists, and educators, concerned with the direction of organics recycling in Toronto, formed FoodCycles, identifying the need for quality compost that community gardeners could use to grow affordable, healthy food in urban contexts. FoodCycles’ Rebekka Hutton recounts, “The City has always supported backyard composting, which is great. However, the introduction of the Green Bin program refocused resources to promotion of that program, and some people gave up on backyard composting because they were encouraged by how easy it was to send organic material away.

Suddenly all that amazing organic matter is leaving the area in trucks! While it’s a great innovation to have a municipal-scale program for organics, at FoodCycles we’re interested in growing healthy soil at the community level to put the nutrients right back where they came from.”

Toronto’s Green Bin program, initiated in 2002, currently collects organic waste from approximately 510,000 single-family resi-

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dential households within the Greater Toronto Area, supporting the City’s plan to divert 70 percent of municipal waste by 2010. Through this diversion, the program’s aim is to not only reduce truck trips to Carleton Farms Landfill Site in Sumpter, Michigan, where the city’s municipal solid waste is dumped, but also to provide compost that can be used in backyard and community gardens. Both the quantity of waste actually diverted and the quality of compost generated were put into question by a July 2009 Toronto Star investigation. The report found that thousands of tons of collected organic materials have been stockpiled or landfilled before reaching composting facilities. Juggling large amounts of municipal waste between various composting facilities has led to greater transport distances; for several years, nearly 1,000 truckloads have been shipped to facilities in Quebec per year. The inclusion of plastic bags, diapers, and pet feces in the Green Bin program also presents challenges in terms of processing and final compost quality. According to the Toronto Star, recent tests on finished compost from Orgaworld, the city’s main processor, revealed dangerously high levels of sodium, rendering the compost unacceptable for use in gardens.

Rather than removing organic material from the sites where it is produced and introducing contaminants that compromise its quality, FoodCycles proposes mid-scale composting facilities that would capture locally produced organic carbon and effectively cultivate high-quality compost, which would be available to community gardeners and food producers, all within city limits. The

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group’s founding members represent a broad array of food justice and urban farming experience and expertise: Ian Ayley, a food animator from FoodShare; Susan Butler, volunteer facilitator from FoodShare; Ashlee Cooper, fledgling organic farmer; Sunday Harrison, director of Green Thumbs, Growing Kids; Rebekka Hutton, community development program manager for Evergreen; Sunny Lam, communications and management consultant; Mike Nevin, composting expert at FoodShare; and David Wild, medical writer turned social entrepreneur.

FoodCycles answered a call of interest to participate in the development of Parc Downsview Park’s (PDP) Urban Agriculture Pilot Project. The pilot project is a precursor to PDP’s future “cultivation campus” where 20 acres of the park are slated to be planted with a range of gardens, including those producing food. The first phase of FoodCycles’ PDP project, which got underway in the spring of 2009, includes an intensive vermicomposting and micro-greens production greenhouse, as well as a oneacre produce and compost demonstration farm. Future plans include educational workshops, community farming, and a produce stand.

The greenhouse is laid out to facilitate the conversion of food scraps into growing medium. Modeled after a successful composting and urban agriculture enterprise in

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Milwaukee, Growing Power, selected vegetable wastes from an onsite farmers market are introduced into wooden bins containing thousands of composting worms.

Bins are covered with burlap and kept moist to provide a dark, wet environment. The worms work their way through the food, producing a rich batch of worm castings or vemicompost. Finished worm castings are sifted using a bicycle-powered, converted clothes dryer, or hand sieved to make a consistent and fine-grained material. Worm castings are an excellent soil amendment, making nutrients available to plants, increasing water-holding capacity, and improving soil structure. Sprouts, microgreens, and salad greens are grown in a mixture of vermicompost, soaked coir, and peat moss in trays on top of the worm bins and in a vertical tube ladder to maximize space and solar access.

static windrow composting facility, where organic material from participating markets and businesses would be laid out in six-foot-high trapezoid piles. The piles would be turned periodically to maintain high temperatures and maximize aerobic decomposition. This material could then be fed into the vermicompost operation.

While significantly smaller than conventional commercial windrow facilities, the FoodCycles project is subject to Ministry of Environment regulations written for much larger, for-profit operations. The group cites the fact that similar scaled projects haven’t yet been tried in Toronto, as well as “public fear of compost,” as significant challenges to the project—challenges that FoodCycles hopes to overcome through the pilot project’s emphasis on demonstration and hands-on education.

The Toronto pilot site is located along a busy stretch of Keele Street at Sheppard Avenue.

Rather than being hidden behind the greenhouses, the crops and compost demonstration areas are laid out to draw visitors right through the fields. A planned walking loop of wood-chip paths will allow visitors to pass through the fields and stop at a series of areas highlighting various composting techniques. Crops such as red stem kale, patty pan squash, and epazote are planted in rows oriented to true north, 16 degrees skewed from the city grid.

If Bruce Mau Design’s proposal for Parc Downsview Park, Tree City, rethought the relationship between the park and the city’s urban forest, FoodCycles rethinks the relationship between the park and how food is produced, consumed, and recycled. FoodCycles’ project suggests that the “waste” products generated by the city’s food consumption could provide the very material that could begin to address the city’s soil problems, feeding back into healthy and local food production. It is a waste stream that sees its own conversion into a resource.

As the crucial next phase of the project, FoodCycles hopes to establish a mid-size

For more information on this project, visit http://foodcycles.org.

TEXT BY JANE HUTTON, OALA, A LANDSCAPE ARCHITECT PRACTISING AND TEACHING IN TORONTO.

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Axonometric drawing of the FoodCycles worm bin/planter

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Jane Hutton

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and demonstrated by Michael Hough will have assumed an important place among changing world-views.”

INNOVATORS

honouring michael hough

Michael Hough’s distinguished career has spanned more than fifty years. During this time, he has provided leadership in articulating an ecological view of environmental design and planning that emphasizes a connection between nature and society as a functioning whole. As Grady Clay wrote in the foreword to Hough’s book Cities and Natural Process (1995), “When the history of the decades between the 1960s and 1990s comes to be written, the attitudes expressed, and the solutions proposed

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The Round Pond and fountains at Ontario Place, 1984

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Michael Hough

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Design sketch of Ontario Place's Round Pond, drawn by Michael Hough in November, 1969

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Michael Hough

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Entrance to Don Valley Brickworks Park

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Arifa Hai

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Michael Hough, at the Don Valley Brickworks Park, 2009

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Arifa Hai

related to his signature themes: place, regional identity, and connecting nature to the city. He explains “place” as a combination of ecology and culture (1990, 1995).

He insists that the identities of landscapes are (and thus can only be maintained through) a concert of natural processes, cultural practices, and sustainability of a particular region (1990). His effort to connect nature to the city is not due to his aesthetic preferences but rather to a desire to create an enriched urban environment (1991). Referring to his views of natural process, cities, and design, Hough explains, “My purpose is to find new and constructive ways of looking at the physical environment of cities” (1995). One of the things that distinguishes his work and

Hough’s integrative approach has been a key to reshaping, conserving, and enhancing many significant landscapes in Canada and abroad. He has been involved in largescale landscape planning, forest management, and waterfront developments as well as courtyards and green roofs.

Much of Hough’s research and practice have focused on southern Ontario, and a number of very special places have been shaped by his brilliant ideas. Toronto’s landmark Ontario Place, Toronto’s Courthouse Mall, University of Toronto’s courtyards, Philosopher’s Walk, Casa Loma gardens, Don Valley Brickworks Park, and Lakeshore refinery in Mississauga are a number of examples. Each of these places is testament to Hough’s unique philosophies. Infused by an environmental view, his ideas encompass different urban, cultural, and ecological issues and also the educational and heritage aspects of these landscapes. His most significant design philosophy evolves from a concept of working with nature: “Set the framework, do as little as possible and let nature do the rest” (1990).

Michael Hough’s worldwide speaking engagements have diverse audiences that include practitioners, academics, students, and activists. His speeches address planning, design, ecology, sustainability, art, and environmental values and are

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makes his approach unique is the fact that he draws his design inspirations largely from abandoned places—places people have neglected or forgotten to go to and which, consequently, have evolved into habitats for diverse wildlife (1997). All of his innovative and analytical ideas are tied to two major themes: “nature as infrastructure” and “making processes visible that sustain life” (1995).

Over the years, Hough’s work has been honoured with many awards: the Canadian Institute of Planners for his planning excellence; American Society of Landscape Architects for his books.

The U.S. branch of the Landscape Ecology Association honoured him with the title Distinguished Landscape Practitioner.

The City of Toronto has presented him with architecture and urban design awards.

He is the only landscape architect who has been recognized for his contribution to landscape conservation: through the Lt. Governor of Ontario conservation award in 1993 and the Pioneer award in 2007. He has also received a Pinnacle Award from the Ontario Association of Landscape Architects, and a teaching award and a lifetime achievement award from the Canadian Society of Landscape Architects.

Toronto’s former mayor David Crombie once said, “Over the past few years, I’ve had the opportunity to work with Michael Hough and have come to know at least three things about him. He loves cities, he loves nature and he insists on a link between the two. He will tell you, every day if you ask him, that the regeneration

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of one is the salvation of the other.

He loves ideas and his ideas always surprise you. They startle you at the beginning, because they’re new, but after a while they become inevitable. He is, I think, a gentle revolutionary.”

When I asked Hough to reflect on his career, he responded in this way: “I visit my projects often to see what is happening there and how people respond to these places. I’ve learned to understand the environment through my observations and have recorded these through sketches and paintings. I did these during my student life and much later during my sabbatical year, and have written about my findings in my books. I still paint and sketch what I find interesting and write down whatever occupies my mind. About reflection on my work, ask me later.” I asked this “modern day pioneer” what his next book is going to be about. He responded, “I’ll know when I've finished it.”

See the Ground section of the OALA website (www.oala.ca) for a full list of citations and credits for this article.

TEXT BY ARIFA HAI, WHO COMPLETED HER MASTER OF LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE DEGREE AT THE UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO IN 2008, WITH MICHAEL HOUGH AS HER THESIS SUPERVISOR.

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At Bedford Park Public School in Toronto, a woodland courtyard replaced an asphalt parking lot.

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Arifa Hai

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Toronto's Courthouse Mall is a heritage landmark.

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Michael Hough

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Carolinian forest in the Earth Sciences courtyard at the University of Toronto

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Michael Hough

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Alternatives to a hierarchical office structure, such as this "circular" organization, may involve more employees in decision making.

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Clara Kwon

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The company is employee-owned.

Each person sets his or her own salary with the consensus of his or her peers.

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BUSINESS

innovative practices

OOC Landscape Architects operates unlike any other design office. Six years ago, fresh out of landscape architecture school, I was hired after a two-day-long interview at which I met all twenty of the firm’s landscape architects and interns.

I started in OOC’s “Lost in Space” program where new Associates are free to roam and explore amongst projects and staff while developing trust with Coordinators, Partners, and Counselors.

The office organization can be visualized like the rings of a tree. Counselors (equivalent to Vice-Presidents) form the core; they counsel, advise, and steer the course of the company through policies. Partners are the next ring, and they oversee projects. Coordinators manage smaller portions within each project and work with the Associates in production.

OOC, though too small to be bureaucratic, works towards dismantling the typical chain of command of leader and follower through the “circular” organization of the company. Questions and debate are encouraged and valued during design and planning sessions as the success of each project does not rest solely on the Partner’s head but on Coordinators and Associates as well. Each new person is trained to become financially literate, and is encouraged to view the firm’s financial reports and to consider the business impact of each task and decision.

New project teams develop organically at OOC. Everyone is on the lookout for potential projects. Last week I found an interesting commercial development RFP which would involve innovative stormwater management. I circulated the RFP to the whole office and proposed a meeting for the following day. As a Coordinator, I was fortunate that a Partner showed up as well as a few Associates. As Partner S. and I began to discuss how this might impact time for other projects, two of the Associates left the meeting to get back to work. Counselor P. had just returned from lunch and popped his head in to see what we were discussing. He was interested and thought teaming up with ARTkitekts—with their creative and whimsical bent—would lead to a beautifully integrated architectural and landscape architectural design.

After the meeting I sent an e-mail to everyone outlining the prospects of this project, trying to capture the interest of those with stormwater management experience and those passionate about art and design.

Partner H. came to my desk to express her hesitation on this RFP; she thought that it was not worth the time and that we’d have to offer a low fee to get it. Apparently the project’s developer has had a longstanding relationship with YYM Design, and will likely hand the job to them.

Partner H. asked if I would be interested in working on the construction phase of her campus project as the team was behind schedule. She thought that working on this lucrative project might contribute to a larger bonus. I told her I was trying to get a stormwater management project in my portfolio and that I had already managed a campus project. I suggested she talk to Coordinator J., who has a reputation for excelling under pressure. Partner H., however, valued my experience in campus projects and promised that she and the project team would endorse a salary increase for me at the next review.

I won’t tell you the outcome of that episode. OOC does not exist.

While OOC is an imaginary office, corporate democracy and open-book management principles described above are the source of success for innovative companies such as Semco in Brazil, Gore-Tex in Delaware, and ReGen Technologies in Missouri. These companies employ thousands, and operate in a wide range of industries such as manufacturing, engineering, industrial design, and real estate. Any company, design offices included, could operate successfully if it handed greater control and leadership to its employees and trusted that if all employees were trained to read and interpret the financial data and have a stake in the company, they would work more efficiently, work together to overcome financial challenges, and work towards the success of the greater organization.

Burnout, resentment, or lack of trust often settle into many design studios. The myth of visionary and inspired design becomes tempered with the “real” work of review and revisions, team coordination, and deadlines.

Perhaps greater passion, trust, and cooperation could develop in design studios in a participative management environment.

For more information, see Charles Handy’s The Elephant and the Flea: Looking Backwards to the Future (2001); Kevin Kelly’s Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems, and the Economic World (1994); Ricardo Semler’s Maverick: The Success Story Behind the World’s Most Unusual Workplace (1993); and Jack Stack and Bo Burlingham’s A Stake in the Outcome.

TEXT BY CLARA KWON, ASSOCIATE MEMBER, OALA, WHOSE GUELPH BLA HAS TAKEN HER TO TORONTO, NEW YORK, AND THE SIX NATIONS RESERVE.

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Restoration Innovation An interview with Mary Gartshore PTEROPHYLLA NURSERY IS ON A PAVED COUNTRY ROAD CLOSE TO THE NORTH SHORE OF LAKE ERIE, NEAR WALSINGHAM. ON A HOT AFTERNOON IN JUNE, JOCELYN HIRTES, ASSOCIATE MEMBER, OALA, AND NETAMI STUART, OALA, WENT TO VISIT MARY GARTSHORE (WHO, WITH HER PARTNER, PETER CARSON, FOUNDED PTEROPHYLLA) TO SEE SOME OF THE INNOVATIVE WAYS THAT THEY COLLECT AND GERMINATE SEED, GROW PLANTS, AND RESTORE LANDSCAPES.

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MARY GARTSHORE HAS BEEN RESTORING AND CREATING NATIVE HABITAT IN ONTARIO FOR SEVENTEEN YEARS. HER PLANTING, SEEDING, AND LANDSCAPE RESTORATION TECHNIQUES ARE FAR FROM THE HIGH-NUTRIENT, HIGH-WATER, RESOURCE-INTENSIVE METHODS FAMILIAR TO MOST LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTS. TO CREATE NATIVE HABITAT, GARTSHORE AND HER COLLEAGUES HAVE EXPERIMENTED WITH PROPAGATION AND GERMINATION TECHNIQUES, AND SITE PREPARATION TECHNOLOGIES, AND HAVE EVEN MODIFIED FARM EQUIPMENT TO HELP WINNOW AND SEED. THESE APPROACHES HAVE TAKEN A LIFETIME TO LEARN THROUGH TRIAL AND ERROR, AND REQUIRE A PROFOUND UNDERSTANDING OF THE INTERRELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN FLORA, FAUNA, AND SOIL DYNAMICS.

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Seedling production at Pterophylla Nursery

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Lake Erie Farms restoration, 2008

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Pterophylla greenhouse

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Row crops of stock plants for seed production

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Netami Stuart (NS): Could you tell us, first of all, what it is that you do here at Pterophylla?

Mary Gartshore (MG): One of the things we do for a living is grow native plants. We grow seeds, smaller potted trees, shrubs, wildflowers, and plant plugs, which is probably one of our biggest markets. We take some of our plant plugs—mostly grown from locally collected seeds—and grow those plugs out for seed production. In addition, I do some contract work, and some of that contract work takes me, for instance, to Cameroon or Nigeria. Last time I was in Nigeria was in 2004, looking for rare birds and rare amphibians in a national park.

NS: You’re also an ornithologist?

MG: Biologist. Well, actually, I’m a zoologist. Plants were not my forte in university. Botany was a triumph over boredom and my incapacity to learn the plant names [Mary laughs], but that’s changed. Along with our plant products, we give advice, and a lot 01

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of that advice, unfortunately, is free, because it’s in bits and pieces to help people along the way.

MG: Yes. JH: Could you explain why that particular project, the Lake Erie project, was innovative in other ways?

NS: So it’s advice about how to successfully establish the kind of plant communities that your plants belong in? But your advice is not always free, right?

MG: We did a dense sowing of large tree seeds—acorns and hickories and hazels and American plum— and we used carousel plug planters.

Direct sowing of oaks, at least, has been done in various parts of the world, and it’s actually starting to be the preferred method in Europe.

Probably growing hickory and oak trees in a nursery is just a slow torturing death for them because they need to put down a huge taproot for resource storage as juveniles—they don’t need this when they’re older, though. So not only is it cost effective, but we can collect tons of oaks and hickory nuts, even from roadsides. There are high-quality trees on roadsides, and it’s not a big deal to collect the nuts. The big deal is trying to grow them and handle them and dig them and manage them. So if you just manage the seed for six months or a year, and seed it through a seeder, it’s a lot easier. With the carousel plug planters, we went to the local welding shop and had the shoe of the planter modified to take the nuts because what was happening was that the nuts were flying out from under the planter and rolling across the field. So we disabled the kicker and just broadened the shoe so that the nuts would drop straight down and be covered.

MG: When we’re doing consulting for a particular project, it isn’t.

And if we do an installation, obviously it’s part of the package. So on Lake Erie Farms [just down the road from Pterophylla], we did an installation for the Nature Conservancy of Canada. It was a hundred-species mix, all seeded from seeds we collected. Now, we’re not the first people to do a large all-species mix. It’s been done in Canada before, in tall-grass prairie restoration in Saskatchewan.

Jocelyn Hirtes (JH): Is that one of the innovations, though?

One of the things that hasn’t been done much in Ontario?

NS: As a landscape architect, one can only do that kind of thing when you’re trying to restore a relatively large landscape.

MG: Well, you can do it on a small scale. You plant lots of nuts, and then plant trees over them—the trees are your “cover” for the fact that you’re doing restoration. The trees are for show. If those trees die and the nuts grow, you still have something. So it’s a results-based process.

NS: Small city parks really work well for naturalization and for prairie landscapes, but I wonder what other applications that kind of direct seeding of large trees could work in?

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MG: It’s economically feasible on any scale, but on a larger scale, when you're faced with 53 hectares of restoration space, it's not economically feasible to do it any other way. Some parts of the site at Lake Erie Farms are controls where nothing is planted. These unseeded control areas are weedy! As it turns out another innovation is that the seeding of native plants prevents growth of exotic weeds. The trees have got their normal landscape companion species already there, and they’re not being impacted by exotic weeds. On a large scale you couldn’t do it any other way and still get the diversity.

JH: Do you find differences between restoration sites, or between areas within the same site?

MG: We learned a little trick at the Lake Erie Farms site, and that’s that a commercial native prairie seeder—a Truax Wildflower Seeder—is great, but it only works well with a large amount of seed. We were dealing with a small amount of seed, so we needed to thin it. We thinned it with birdseed—millet—and we fall sowed it and the millet

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JH: I was having a conversation with another landscape architect the other day about how difficult it is to just draw a plan that has everything on it, and plant it and leave it, and that’s it. You always need to go back and tweak it to actually make it work, but we don’t often get that opportunity.

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of course was destroyed over winter, so luckily we didn’t get any germination of the millet. We were able to thinly spread a small amount of seed. We had 53 or so hectares of brown-eyed Susan—wall to wall brown-eyed Susan—but that was using only four kilograms of seed. We’ve had people call us and say, “We’ve got 6,000 square metres and we need 35 kilograms of Aster pilosus…” You could seed North America with 35 kilograms of Aster pilosus! So it’s important to get the scale right—the scale of the amount of seed versus the land area.

NS: It seems to me that the traditional way landscaping is done in southern Ontario is very agricultural, with high-nutrient soil, artificial pest control, and lots of irrigation.

MG: It’s a travesty.

NS: But a lot of people don’t know how to do it any other way. It’s also very easy for landscape architects to do contract administration for it, because we all know that if there are supposed to be fifty trees in the landscape, you can go to the site, and you can count the trees, and if there are fifty, then you check it, and the contractor gets his $400 or $500 a tree, and off he goes, and if it dies in two years he’ll put in another.

MG: Actually, we have tried to avoid warranty on some projects because we needed to be freed up a bit to do the right thing.

We said, “look, don’t worry, if you’re not happy with it, we’ll just go back.”

JH: You mean that you would go back and supply new plant material or reseed at no cost to make it work?

MG: Yes, because it’s a results-based approach. The concept is that you’ve got five years to complete a project, and maybe you’re doing this part one year, that part another year, and a third part in a third year. Well, if you get many projects partially underway in the first year, you’ve got the time and the resources to go back and say, well let’s get the crew in, we’ve got three bags of bur oak—this looks like a good bur oak site—let’s plant the bur oak nuts. So you just keep doing that, and you keep going back. We tweak it until we get it right. People are horrified at this sort of attitude at first, but two years later they’re saying okay, your tweaking worked. It’s called adaptive management and the approach allows you to do something different if a site is difficult.

MG: It’s the history of how that’s been handled by contractors. All the agencies say you have to put topsoil down, but it’s loaded with chemicals, Eurasian exotics, nutrients, and whatever else…You’d be better just to blow on sterile compost, and put the seed in yourself. And, by the way, tell the guy with the soil blower that he better make sure that the pipe’s as clean as can be, because the first stuff that comes out is what went on the last site and you don’t want that. At any rate, we’ve used that technique on restoration sites. But blown-on compost is expensive, and a lot of people don’t want to do that. They’re happy with tackifier and just seeding over it with this awful, quick green-up mix, which is loaded with white sweet clover.

JH: Why is white clover so bad?

MG: It’s an exotic that impacts heavily on the native planting.

The standard mix is just quick and green. The contractor gets paid because that green square or test plot comes up.

JH: It doesn’t matter what’s in it, it’s just that the ground is covered with something.

MG: White sweet clover also causes erosion. The first year it’s nice and green and small. The next year they become these big weeds that shade out all the vegetation below and kill it, and then you get rills starting below them that deepen through the whole area. So big and green but worse doesn’t work.

NS: It’s one of the hardest things to figure out how to get quality ecological restoration and quality seeding done if you’re a landscape architect.

MG: You need quality installation people who know a lot. Right now I’m in the process of scaling up. A group of us are planning to start an ecological services firm, like Applied Ecological Services in the States (Steven Apfelbaum’s company), where we do everything: cradle to grave restoration, so you’re actually doing monitoring, site-based management, results-based work.

NS: As a landscape architect, I’m interested in understanding what that means in terms of my profession. Let’s say I was, for example, designing a prairie meadow, could your company be hired as a consultant and install it?

MG: Yes, we would probably be offering those services.

JH: Another problem for landscape architects is: how do you know you’re getting restoration-quality material?

MG: You don’t. But if it’s source-identified seed, and biologists have collected it, and it’s been collected from good old trees in high-quality areas, then it would be restoration-quality.

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ment. Obviously you go into it with some knowledge and a certain idea of what you want to see in the end, but it sounds like many times there are novel things that come out of it that you didn’t expect, but that are good, and that you can learn from and apply to the next project.

NS: But as a landscape architect, if I want locally appropriate seed source plants, what do I specify and how do I check it?

MG: You specify source-identified plants.

NS: Okay, so I put that in the spec. But how do I check and make sure that’s actually happening?

NS: I wonder what you would want in terms of how the profession of landscape architecture could change and react to some of these thoughts and methods and techniques? What do you think would be one of the most important changes that we could make, as landscape architects?

MG: Well, you would want to go to a respectable grower, but most native plant growers don’t grow big tree stock, because they don’t want to have to use a tree spade, and ball and burlap, and all of that. I guess if enough got spec’d, it would be worth their while to grow it, but right now it’s far too easy to grow the stuff from who knows where and ship it. So if every landscape architect who was doing a naturalization project said they wanted source-identified seed, guess what—the industry would do it. But right now you’re probably not going to make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear…

MG: Learn the flora and probably the fauna. And start finding good targets.

NS: We’re often not on site enough. That’s just the way the profession is. Could you talk about the opportunities for some of these restoration techniques to be applied to city parks, for example?

JH: Could you talk about the restoration techniques that you are passing on to other people, that they in turn distribute, and which helps in their use becoming more widespread?

MG: We tend to have traditional lawns. It’s not good for the city environment to blow mixed gas fumes all over the place, nor is it good to spend that kind of energy. And the poor guy mowing grass, going in diminishing circles—perhaps that isn’t the greatest job. So why don’t we go to the native landscape and select some species that are miniature and don’t need a lot of care and can be mowed twice a year. For example, pussytoes (Antennaria neglecta) is amazingly tolerant of lawnmowers in cemeteries in rural southern Ontario. I could probably go to the Baptist cemetery in Vittoria and lay my hands on twenty species that could be used for lawns in southern and northern Ontario, species like little bluestem, pussytoes, poor robin’s plantain. Some of them would also work on green roofs, depending on the conditions—and green roofs have pretty harsh conditions. But nobody’s done the research, and nobody’s paid for that research yet. We’ve got an opportunity to scale up, so hopefully we could actually do demonstrations.

MG: There’s so much stewardship need. Every time you have a provincial park, or the Nature Conservancy or a land trust acquiring land, they need the exotics controlled, they need the pine plantations thinned or taken out, and they need some areas reseeded. I think it’s time that the idea of land stewardship is moved into more of a business model instead of always being volunteers.

NS: How do you make a business out of land stewardship?

Who pays for that?

MG: There’s a species at risk fund, a habitat stewardship fund, there’s an invasive aliens fund. Anyone can apply for those funds.

Maybe they get $30,000 or $100,000 for a big project, and they apply for approval and they hire a stewardship company. It works in the States.

NS: In your business model for ecological restoration services, what would be the place of a landscape architect?

In Lake Erie Farms, we were really lucky with a York University student looking at the bees there. A very rare bee occurred the first year of the restoration, and it’s still there. When that area went into restoration the bee was everywhere. It had last been seen ten years ago in Georgia, and it was presumed possibly extinct.

MG: Probably their place would be to work with the client.

Now if the client is the Nature Conservancy, and they want tall-grass prairie, then you know what to do. You go and look at the nearest preserved tall-grass prairie, make a checklist, keep looking at it, figure out what grows, how much seed, whether the seed is viable—all those things—and you design it.

JH: So basically you’re saying that it’s always an ongoing experi-

BIO/ JOCELYN HIRTES IS AN ASSOCIATE MEMBER OF THE OALA AND A CERTIFIED ARBORIST WITH URBAN FOREST ASSOCIATES INC. IN TORONTO. BIO/ NETAMI STUART, OALA, IS A LANDSCAPE ARCHITECT FOR THE CITY OF TORONTO’S PARKS, FORESTRY AND RECREATION DIVISION.

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Brown-eyed Susan seedheads

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Netami Stuart

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Truax Seeder

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Mary Gartshore

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Advances in Education Are the universities preparing graduates for a world based on innovation?

MODERATED BY VICTORIA LISTER CARLEY, OALA BIOS/ VICTORIA LISTER CARLEY, OALA, IS A MEMBER OF THE GROUND EDITORIAL BOARD. FOLLOWING ART SCHOOL SHE ENTERED THE DEPARTMENT OF LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE AT THE UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO. FOR HER BLA THESIS PROJECT SHE MODELED HIGHWAY PLANTING TO EXPRESS THE LAND USE PATTERNS—HISTORICAL, CULTURAL, AND ECONOMIC—OF THE LANDSCAPES ADJACENT TO THE HIGHWAY. SHE ESTABLISHED HER OWN PRACTICE IN 1983, SPECIALIZING IN RESIDENTIAL DESIGN. KAREN LANDMAN, PHD, MCIP, RPP, IS AN ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE AT THE SCHOOL OF ENVIRONMENTAL DESIGN & RURAL DEVELOPMENT, UNIVERSITY OF GUELPH. HER ACADEMIC BACKGROUND IS IN HORTICULTURE, LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE, RURAL PLANNING AND DEVELOPMENT, AND GEOGRAPHY. SHE TEACHES DESIGN STUDIO, PLANTING DESIGN, PLANTS IN THE LANDSCAPE, AND INTEGRATIVE ENVIRONMENTAL PLANNING. LANDMAN'S CURRENT RESEARCH IS ON POLLINATION HABITAT, URBAN AGRICULTURE, AND LOCAL FOOD SYSTEMS. BRUCE MARTIN, P ENG, MLA, ASSOCIATE MEMBER, OALA, WORKED AS A MECHANICAL ENGINEER FOR EIGHT YEARS, THEN RETURNED TO SCHOOL AND RECEIVED A MASTER OF LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE DEGREE FROM THE UNIVERSITY OF GUELPH IN 2009. HIS GRADUATE THESIS TESTED THE DYNAMIC STORMWATER PERFORMANCE OF GREEN ROOFS IN AN EFFORT TO BETTER UNDERSTAND THEIR CONTRIBUTION TO REDUCING IMPERVIOUS COVER IN URBAN ENVIRONMENTS. MARTIN IS INTERESTED IN DESIGN SOLUTIONS THAT INTEGRATE HUMAN AND NATURAL SYSTEMS IN INNOVATIVE, EFFICIENT, SENSITIVE, AND SUSTAINABLE WAYS. PETE NORTH, OALA, IS AN ASSISTANT PROFESSOR IN THE LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE PROGRAM AT THE UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO. HE TEACHES GRADUATE DESIGN STUDIO, SITE TECHNOLOGIES, AND BROWNFIELD RECLAMATION COURSES. HE RECEIVED A BACHELOR OF LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE FROM THE UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO IN 1997 AND A MASTERS IN LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE DEGREE FROM HARVARD’S GRADUATE SCHOOL OF DESIGN IN 2001. HE IS A PARTNER WITH ALISSA NORTH IN NORTH DESIGN OFFICE, WHICH HAS RECEIVED RECOGNITION FOR ENTRIES IN SEVERAL INTERNATIONAL DESIGN COMPETITIONS, AND HAS WORKED ON MANY AWARD-WINNING PROJECTS THROUGHOUT CANADA AND THE UNITED STATES. ELISE SHELLEY, M ARCH, MLA, OALA, IS AN ASSISTANT PROFESSOR AT THE UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO, WHERE SHE TEACHES STUDIO DESIGN, SITE TECHNOLOGY, AND PLANTING DESIGN COURSES IN BOTH THE ARCHITECTURE AND LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE PROGRAMS. AS A PRACTITIONER IN ARCHITECTURE AND LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE IN TORONTO, SHELLEY’S WORK AND RESEARCH FOCUS ON THE INTEGRATION OF INNOVATIVE TECHNOLOGIES AND MATERIALS IN REALIZED URBAN PUBLIC SPACE PROJECTS. SHE RECEIVED A BACHELOR OF SCIENCE IN ARCHITECTURE WITH A MINOR IN URBAN PLANNING FROM THE UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA IN 1994, AND A MASTERS OF ARCHITECTURE AND MASTERS OF LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE FROM THE UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA IN 1997.

JANE WOLFF IS DIRECTOR OF THE LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE PROGRAM AND ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR AT THE UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO’S JOHN H. DANIELS FACULTY OF ARCHITECTURE, LANDSCAPE, AND DESIGN. AFTER STUDYING DOCUMENTARY FILMMAKING AND LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE AT HARVARD, SHE WORKED IN LANDSCAPE AND URBAN DESIGN PRACTICE IN THE SAN FRANCISCO BAY AREA. SHE HAS TAUGHT AT A NUMBER OF UNIVERSITIES IN THE U.S. AND, IN 2006, SERVED AS THE BEATRIX FARRAND DISTINGUISHED VISITING PROFESSOR AT THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY. SHE IS THE AUTHOR OF DELTA PRIMER, A BOOK AND DECK OF CARDS ABOUT THE CONTESTED LANDSCAPES OF THE CALIFORNIA DELTA. IN THE YEARS SINCE HURRICANE KATRINA, SHE HAS WORKED WITH SEVERAL NEW ORLEANS ORGANIZATIONS TO DEVELOP STRATEGIES FOR LANDSCAPE REHABILITATION.

Round Table

Victoria Lister Carley (VLC): Some universities use innovation as part of their branding. I’d like to discuss research that has produced innovative results, innovative research methods, and innovative teaching methods or curriculum.

Bruce Martin (BM): We should have academics drive innovation far more. Every thesis is set up to teach a student how to do research, but it could be set up to make it more directed and able to contribute more to the profession. If there were more professional interactions between academics and design firms, people could say, these are the kinds of problems we come across, we need someone to do some studies for us and to provide some more information.

Karen Landman (KL): The only philosophical problem I have with that is that if we help students develop to contribute to the profession as it is today, then where is the real future for the good of the profession?

What’s amazing is when we see students puzzling out what the future of the profession might be. For example, we have a student who is interested in urban agriculture and she’s linked to a professor who is doing Mars research, looking at growth chambers they’re going to ship to Mars to grow food in. So they have to understand everything that goes on in that chamber.

When a leaf yellows and drops, what happens with the ethylene gas in that system?

It’s quite amazing. Meanwhile, we’re saying, what about here on earth? Can we be innovative and grow food in an urban environment? It’s all about trying to find a balance: training the students for the profession, but also fostering an environment in which they can get really creative about what they want to do.

Pete North (PN): I strongly feel that the more successful projects are focused—

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they’re the ones aligned with professors who have a thesis—because they actually involve true research and there is a strong relationship between the advisor and student.

VLC: Do you think that because you can enter the MLA program from any discipline that it affects the kind of work being done and whether people focus their thesis on design or research?

PN: I think background plays a huge role.

We have students in the masters program who have everything from German studies to computer science to history to English, and they have certain expectations about what a thesis is. I think that plays a huge role in how they direct themselves in their final year, and what their goal is. And there are people from art backgrounds who are looking for a design base.

Landscape architecture is a profession that can accept these different perspectives, I think.

VLC: Is there any correlation between where people come from and whether they’re more likely to go with the research?

PN: Speaking from personal experience, my thesis student last year had a sciencebased masters degree in biology. So a thesis in design was something that had to be brought in to that. It was an interesting challenge. I think that the science-based students with really definitive ways of thinking about things tend to be focused on trying to research certain topics and reach the end goal of answering a question.

VLC: So there are the scientific and the more artistic…

KL: And you can have people crossing over, too. I had a student who had a plant science background and she ended up doing her masters on residential intensification of downtown Guelph based on the European city model. She was assigned to

me because I have a plant background but I’m also a planner. And she did an excellent job and I was really impressed with the work she did—she sort of did two thesis projects. It’s interesting, because the profession is so broad, it can open up their eyes to the possibilities—to things they had never thought of.

VLC: Do all of the thesis projects lead to design?

KL: Not all of them. Students always have to talk about how their findings relate to design, but not every thesis has an actual design drawing. Our students will talk about a research thesis and a design thesis, and to me they’re the same—any design requires research.

VLC: I’m assuming that some of the research being done in landscape architecture has relatively little applicability to the world, and some has more applicability. Does more of the innovation occur in the very practical, applicable research?

Jane Wolff (JW): Elise and I just finished teaching a studio that dealt with the development of water management strategies for the city of New Orleans. The studio came out of a non-profit initiative started by an architect and planner in New Orleans who was distressed by the lack of discussion about water planning in the city. He singlehandedly started an effort to bring together Dutch water experts and policy people in Louisiana. They could only come together for a weekend or two, so their proposals weren’t developed in detail. The studio was an applied research project about the implications of their initial ideas for hydrological performance, urban form, landscape structure, and infrastructure.

Elise Shelley (ES): The students were able to take their research, ground it in a real place, and talk about how it would be experienced. People who live in New

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Orleans don’t necessarily understand the implications for their city, their neighbourhoods, or their own front yards, so the students worked to make that clear.

VLC: But that’s a strong international academic model, rather than the private practice model. The academic model has to do with sharing.

JW: Another issue: base information for the city was so limited that our students and their colleagues in a parallel studio at Washington University had to spend a month putting together basic site documents. That’s another, more conventional definition of research: to make a proposal, you have to understand the hydrological regime, how the pumps work, where the water is going, and what quantities of water flow through the system. You have to understand the status quo before you can start thinking of alternatives.

PN: These studios are perfect examples of applied research. An approach that seems to work well and that we tend to use at the University of Toronto, is that we cycle through sites, and we do not stay with one site for too long, so there is the idea of gathering information and of continued research. We are interested in using sites for our design studios that have current relevance and are able to contribute to the community and produce materials and share ideas for use beyond the school.

ES: One intention in teaching this studio is that it is the first studio of a series where each builds on the other. One item that emerged from the final review is the fact that assumptions about the water table were not accurate. So before any of this work can go forward additional research has to be done so that the proposals can be viable and go beyond the studio context.

VLC: Is there a database that comes from that, or is it only from working in studio with the partners? Is it an accessible database in the way a library is, or is it kept in the studio?

VLC: Are you interacting with other departments within the university on this?

ES: At this point, within the University of Toronto, it hasn’t engaged other departments. But one of the things we did to make it be more of a collaborative discussion was to create a partnership with an architectural elective studio from Washington University. This is one of the ways that we define innovation—we had great conversations back and forth with the students and the other instructor throughout the term. We met down in New Orleans for a week, and the students met and worked together. Once you get into practice, you are not working independently so the idea of learning how to work with others and sharing information, not only from your own disciplines but from cross-disciplines, is very important.

PN: From my experience, it’s more of a relationship you develop with a community and with interested parties and stakeholders outside of the university. Often it leads to a much richer experience for the students, and for the site as well.

JW: There’s no reason that this work couldn’t be publicly accessible—we’ve been talking about strategies for dissemination. Our first undertaking is to establish a web presence and then we’ll aim for print publication.

VLC: There is a lot of research being done, but there isn’t a model to send it out.

PN: It’s almost project-specific in a way, and maybe it doesn’t have to be, but it seems to date that’s been the case.

Another project that comes to mind is the Parkdale Studio, a studio that’s tapping into the Parkdale community in Toronto, and using their facilities and using their common area to display work and really get in touch with people.

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JW: It’s a huge problem—so much good work gets done and then gets lost. And it’s not just design research. I’ve taught courses where students produced thorough drawings about historic landscapes and urban conditions that hadn’t been well documented, and then spent a lot of time making the material searchable. In professional graduate programs, work gets lost because there’s nothing like a dissertation.

Going forward, we need to establish a strategy for collating and disseminating work done in our programs.

ES: One of the things we’re doing in the department of architecture is that thesis students are actually required to produce a document now. Before, you were required to burn a CD, and there was a scary box in the library with CDs that were all corrupt and unreadable. We’re trying to institute a more formal document that is available as a useful resource. I don’t think the landscape department has necessarily formalized this to the same extent, other than individual advisors asking for support materials from their advisees.

PN: Making sure it’s accessible to people outside of the school as well….

ES: But also to future thesis students who need it to go forward. You frequently hear: “Two years ago, somebody did this exact thesis topic—you should go see their research and build on it.”

BM: At the University of Guelph, they’re now looking at a trial type of submission that’s available, and now some of the theses are being published online and they’re searchable.

KL: And it’s a huge asset. We also have paper copies, a little library of MLA thesis work, and it’s such an asset. The students always think, oh, this is going to gather dust somewhere, and I assure them, it doesn’t sit still long enough to gather dust because other students use it.

Round Table

VLC: Going back to the professors doing research, what sort of work are people doing?

KL: My research right now is on urban agriculture and local food systems, and that seem to be a hot topic for students coming in, in different ways. We have students who are interested in developing countries, food security, food production; others who are interested in urban agriculture in a North American environment.

There is a student who did a permaculture land-use plan for the city of Guelph, and she’s presenting it to city staff, and one of the councillors wants to sit in on it because Guelph is going to include food issues in the strategic plan for the city. So I think that’s one area that seems to be a hot topic with the students, and I seem to attract them across the campus, not just the landscape architecture students but others, too. I did a local food system analysis of Guelph and Wellington county, and we held a series of workshops to identify barriers and opportunities. At one workshop we had an elderly Italian man who was a chef, someone else who was involved with the Slow Food movement, an old-order Mennonite producer, public health people, restaurateurs, and everyone was talking together about the food system within the Guelph/Wellington landscape. That evolved into everyone agreeing that what was needed was a local food coordinator, so our report was the foundation for a woman who’s applying for funding from the Ministry of Agriculture to become the local food coordinator. So now she’s become a research guinea pig for us, too, for us to follow her, to see what a local food coordinator does. What are the barriers and the missed opportunities that she’s finding? We’re really hopeful that this might become the model for all municipalities in Ontario. And I have another student who has applied for funding from the Ontario Centre for Energy and Environment Technology, to do urban agriculture, to actually model an urban agriculture farm, and to have various pro-

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fessors on campus use it as a research facility, to look at the economic side of it, the ecological side of it, the social side of it, and to see if it does all the things that people believe it can do.

VLC: So that’s affecting several departments, that urban farm model.... Does it seem natural within the university setting that this would be led by landscape architecture?

KL: I guess because landscape architects have been at Guelph for forty years now, the professors across campus tend to know what we do now. But one project I’m involved in is a gold mine site in Brazil (landscape architecture students at Guelph are involved in internships, exchanges, and research internationally), and I was invited to come onto the team from an urban agriculture perspective, and design perspective, and vegetative community perspective. And the new guy on the team said, Karen, what are you doing here? What do aesthetics have to do with this? I said, well, it’s not about aesthetics, it’s about functional landscape, and all these other things that landscape architects bring to it—that “generalist” background that we bring to something and understanding that it involves so much and we can’t possibly know it all, so who do you bring in to fill in the gaps.

VLC: Going back to the teaching model, that sort of research, does that come into the studio courses directly?

KL: Yes, for example, with the first-year MLA students last fall, the very first thing I did—which scared them very much—was throw them into a design charette for the rooftop of The Big Carrot in Toronto, and not just an extensive roof but a food-producing community garden. And then the same group of students designed a new student farm that’s being started on campus. And I’m convinced that first and foremost, people want it to be beautiful, so the aesthetic side, it’s what we bring to it. How

do you bring beauty into an urban agriculture site so that people value it beyond its food production, and value it as part of the cultural landscape that’s really important aesthetically as well as functionally. And then I had my undergrads also involved in that, and I pulled in some engineering students for a rainwater harvesting project for that, and organic agriculture students for looking at what crops could be grown.

So it extends beyond the landscape architecture students as well.

VLC: Do you think there will be a direct application from this research that’s being done at the universities, work such as the New Orleans project and the urban agriculture work?

JW: It depends. For example, Charles Waldheim’s work addresses the theoretical agenda of landscape architecture. And my work has to do with the historical evolution of landscapes and their political implications. Those undertakings don’t have practical application in the same way that the development of technology does, but they do have application in an academic context, or a political context, or an activist context.

VLC: The idea that landscape architecture is a political discipline—that in itself is an idea that’s bigger than many people would grasp.

KL: We have someone at Guelph who does research on conflict landscapes, and he’s been in Palestine and just came back from Lebanon. So yes, most people would be surprised to find that political dimension—it’s not what comes to mind when the average person thinks of landscape architecture.

ES: The idea that in landscape everything is interconnected—in various systems and at multiple levels—is embedded in a lot of current research, and it’s certainly becoming more present in discourse within the field, but it’s not necessarily what people

Round Table

think of when they think of landscape architecture.

PN: Landscape infrastructure, landscape urbanism, and ecological urbanism are key realms of research in landscape architecture at the University of Toronto.

ES: The three of us, Jane, Pete, and myself, sat on a committee to talk about the ecology at U of T this year, and it was interesting because very quickly it was determined that every single course talks about ecology. And it took a committee to determine this…

JW: We need to help broad audiences to understand that landscape architecture is cultural production, with implications that are economic, political, technological, ecological, and social. Think about the role that our assumptions about property play in the development of landscapes; it’s fundamental to our land use practices. I wonder if the discipline will find a new public because of environmental catastrophe— so many people are talking about ecology and resource management. It’ll be interesting to see how that big public discussion starts to crack the discipline open.

VLC: As the most recent graduate amongst us, Bruce, do you think these things were being translated into how you learned, or that there were ways that the sense of the global context was coming down into the studio?

BM: All the projects I was involved with in the studios were local initiatives. My background is in engineering. So I’ve always had this confusion with landscape architecture: what are landscape architects trying to accomplish? It’s just such a broad discipline right now, should it have subsets to it? Should it have areas that are concentrating on more focused topics to help guide the profession? Are we the overseers, the project managers who try to come up with solutions that are very innovative because of the number of perspec-

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tives that are brought to the table, because of our backgrounds? Or are we too general, and not focused enough to provide very specific innovations?

VLC: That brings to the floor the issue of whether we crash from having these really big images of the world, and then you hit graduation and you’re forced to work at a very specific job, doing a very specific task.

JW: But you can track all of this from the scale of a backyard to the scale of a region. The challenge is to train thoughtful practitioners who see that no question has an automatic answer.

ES: In the core years of a student’s education, it is critical to ensure an understanding of the fundamentals and basics of the discipline. Students need to learn the tools and concepts necessary to enter into the discussion, and once that base level is established, then hopefully the introduction of innovative techniques can allow them to contribute to the discussion in a more meaningful way.

VLC: In terms of how people are teaching now, do you think that studio teaching styles have changed in recent years?

JW: I think the agendas of the discipline are changing. Fifteen years ago people talked about formal issues; now they’re talking about infrastructure. The methods aren’t so different, but the topics have evolved.

PN: But also in terms of representation, graphically. Having incredible access to new computer software—allowing students to go places they weren’t able to go ten years ago means that in a very short period of time, students make enormous advancements because of the resources they have. The computer and computeraided design programs have had a huge impact on design, representation, and learning in the last decade.

KL: Problem-based learning was the way landscape architecture was taught to me.

We’re still doing that: here’s the problem, here’s the situation, now let’s figure out how to solve this. This is the model for design studios the world over, I think. And it’s still a solid way to teach, because it raises the issue of what don’t I know and how do I find out? Those are skills that when our students leave, they take with them and can apply to anything. I think the teaching of landscape architecture is a huge challenge because it embodies so much, but it’s still the same model that I learned, and I think it’s incredibly effective.

ES: To me the biggest transformation since I was in school is the computer—and the fact that it’s so easy for things to look finished when they’re not. I personally didn’t learn how to work in the computer first, and I don’t know how to sketch in the computer. Maybe my expectation that a student should know how to draw independent of the computer is going to have to change, because it’s not something that students are required to do any more. I don’t think that it necessarily changes the methods of instruction or what’s produced, but I think it changes how we think about the process.

JW: I don’t know if I agree with this. Did typing change literature? No! It makes some things faster or easier; it has its own economies and inefficiencies. I’m not nostalgic for long-hand.

ES: The computer has its own efficiencies and inefficiencies, but the basic problems of learning to articulate ideas through drawing are still the same.

PN: But you have access to more information.

JW: We couldn’t have done the studio in New Orleans ten years ago, because we wouldn’t have had access to the information.

Round Table

JW: More information is available, but that’s true of every aspect of our lives, not just unique to design.

ES: Students have a different way of researching now. They use Google or Wikipedia and don’t necessarily automatically cite things and check their sources or have the bibliography you would have expected in years past. But they do have so much more information available.

KL: I see it with students trying to come to grips with the fact that not everything is known. It’s really shocking to them when they say, I need this information, and I say, I don’t think anyone has ever done this research. They figure that if they Google it, the answer will come back.

VLC: A lot of what you’ve been saying has to do with how you find information and how you work with the information, so really these design studios are much more information based. It goes back to the idea that “the land tells you what you want to do.” But how you find out what the land is telling you is a new way of learning.

KL: When I was a BLA student, one of the profs encouraged us to camp on the site.

And I just thought, there are a lot of clients who don’t want you camping on the site, even if I wanted to. What he was telling us was that you really need to be on the site for more than just an hour; you need to be there throughout the year, you need to understand the natural systems and so on. I think students now have less of that.

I find that there’s a disconnection now with natural systems much more than when I was a student. We have a really difficult time getting the students to touch the soil.

It’s “dirty” and they don’t want to touch it.

Which I find amazing; I loved soil science as a student. Actually going out and meeting an oak tree, and looking at it, and being aware of it as a living entity, instead of Googling it and saying, oh, there’s a picture of an oak tree, now I know what an oak tree is. I think that a fundamental part

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of being a landscape architect is really understanding the site, the natural systems, and why an oak tree is different from a Norway Maple. This is a bigger challenge now than when I was a student.

VLC: So that’s going to require some level of change in how the discussions are approached because of the cultural differences in the students themselves.

KL: It requires getting them outside as much as possible, because they’re growing up in front of a computer for the most part. So actually getting them outside and just standing on the site and taking in the wind and the sun, and understanding where north is and why you should know where north is. All of that is a bigger challenge now. We drag them outside all the time; we have the arboretum, which is such an advantage to us. Walking around, trying to understand natural systems, is a really important part of the work we do with the students. They get grumpy about it: we’re going to the arboretum again?

Well it’s January, and it’s really cold, and it’s winter now, and it’s different.

VLC: If there was one thing you could really change with the approach to teaching, if you could do it your way, what are the big things that you feel would take it forward, with innovation? With teaching methods or just teaching tools.

PN: I’d say research plots, where you go and witness change over time, first-hand rather than through other means. To actually have a place where students can contribute to developing, building, and monitoring through the years. For example, I’m thinking of phytoremediation with brownfield sites, and having a connection to a natural site that you could actually monitor and provide input over an extended period of time. I think that could be very valuable.

VLC: That’s an interesting one, because it’s very old-fashioned.

KL: Waterloo has sites down on the Toronto Portlands, involving phytoremediation, and they’re monitoring it over time. It’s old-fashioned, but there are new technologies and new ideas.

VLC: The old-fashioned aspect being that you actually see it on the ground and you see it in real time and real life. So it still comes back to that…

KL: If I had lots of money, we would be out of the studio and into communities a lot more than we are. We have a community outreach centre at Guelph, and we’re known for that in southern Ontario, but I’d love to do more of that.

ES: I think it’s very important for students to understand the connections between the theory they’re being taught and its application. I think often there is very different instruction from professor to professor, and I think students sometimes see this as a disadvantage. But I think it’s actually the advantage of the program—the fact that they are exposed to so many ideas of working, so many areas of interest, and different lines of research. Really, I think that’s what school is all about.

MANY THANKS TO LISA MACDONALD, ASSOCIATE MEMBER, OALA, FOR TRANSCRIBING THIS ROUND TABLE DISCUSSION.

Shaping Change

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Shaping Change An interview with Greg Allen GREG ALLEN, P ENG, HAS BEEN WORKING ON GROUNDBREAKING SUSTAINABILITY PROJECTS FOR MORE THAN THIRTY YEARS. HE IS CURRENTLY A SUSTAINABLE STRATEGIST WITH HOK IN TORONTO. HE SPOKE WITH REAL EGUCHI, OALA, IN JUNE 2009; THE INTERVIEW TOOK PLACE IN ALLEN’S LIVING ROOM, OVERLOOKING HIS BACKYARD HABITAT IN EAST YORK.

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Shaping Change

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Real Eguchi (RE): I worked for you back in the early 1980s. I remember you as a great innovator but on the fringe. What is the general chronology of your inventive work before, during, and since that time?

Greg Allen (GA): I’ve worked as an engineer focusing on sustainability in various businesses. I designed many low-energy houses in the early 1980s, and before that I worked for solar equipment manufacturers. In the 80s we developed the Air Changer, which was the first commercially produced HRV for houses. An HRV is a Heat Recovery Ventilator and I created that term. Emulators of the Air Changer came along quickly after we developed it. At the time, we were on the fringe.

I was a partner in Allen-Drerup-White for seven years and we brought innovation to the Canadian home building industry. We created standards and manuals for the R2000 program, we assisted with the drafting of new standards for the Ontario Building Code and the National Building Code, we created blower door testing, we were instrumental in the development of Howland House [an energy-efficient demonstration project], and we designed many super-energy retrofits. These are some examples of our innovative initiatives.

I decided to work in the commercial building sector, and we created a niche in environmental consultancy, a term that means anything and nothing, especially these days.

RE: So you experimented with your ideas and honed your skills at an intimate scale, and then you decided to explore potential leading-edge, societal/environmental contributions at a larger scale, is that correct?

GA: Yes. I envisioned environmental consultancy as a descriptor of innovation. It is breaking the status quo. We’re up the creek as a civilization, as a planet, and as a species. What our industry does in their everyday practice is what created this mess…and I mean the design professions especially. Historically, we have been automatons that are regulated and self-regulating in terms of infectious repititis.

RE: Can you describe a few projects you have contributed to, that you believe are successful and that landscape architects might find interesting and groundbreaking?

GA: Boyne River Ecology Centre in Shelburne was an iconic project [opened in 1993]. It was a state-of-the-art green school with Living Machine wastewater treatment, green roof, and zero-carbon energy supply. It was on the cover of U.S. and Canadian magazines; it was seminal in green and living building design and LEED. I didn’t create green roofs, natural ventilation, earth berming, and the likes, but this project helped legitimize these technologies and approaches in circles that hitherto had seen them as marginal, Luddite, and belonging to the hippie era.

Another project is the Toronto Renewable Energy Co-operative Wind Turbine at Exhibition Place in Toronto. I was honoured with the OALA Award for Service to the Environment in 2004 for this project. It took seven years of challenges to bring the project to fruition from the time the North Toronto Green Community approached us with the idea. I knew the approvals process would be very challenging but I didn’t realize it would be as difficult as it was. The site is perfect. It is felicitous that it is dead centre on an axis with the Prince’s Gates and the Dufferin Arch and right at the visual intersection of the two. That was totally by chance.

RE: What is your role at HOK now and what is the general thrust of your advice to the firm that landscape architects who want to pursue creative work could gain insight from?

GA: I advise on matters related to sustainability. I advise on what is good for the firm and good for the environment. If we are guided by the notion that the only thing that matters is the bottom line, which is what most firms are guided by, then we can’t be part of the solution. At HOK, we are pushing the sustainability envelope on projects and having some very interesting conversations with our clients along the way.

I could be called a provocateur. Some think I’m a pain in the ass, but I’d like to suggest I am a grain of sand in the oyster… and hopefully we produce a pearl. [Greg chuckles] 01/

A compact food garden graces the deck at Greg Allen's home.

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Real Eguchi

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Greg Allen in his East York backyard

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Real Eguchi

Shaping Change

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RE: Most practitioners in the design professions now include in their marketing strategies their apparent “long-term” interest in sustainability. What do you think about that?

GA: We are way far away from the cultural shift and the shift in our creative communities and in our industry to fully grasp what we are looking at in terms of sustainability, which requires a serious paradigm shift. We will have to change how we see each other and how we relate to the world. We will need to figure out how to manage the whole affair, how to learn to steward what we are doing here, how are we going to be sensitized so that we are coherent with the infinitely greater wisdom of the planet.

RE: Do we have that capability?

GA: We are an adaptive creature. It is our collective capacities to act as one mind that enables us to do the remarkable. This next challenge is much bigger than how to manipulate matter and energy. It is about how to reconfigure our bodies and brains to fit the ecosystem, and it is exciting, a bold new mission. That’s the problem and wonder with the paradigm shift. We can’t fully define it. It is only in the process of its change that we sense that it is coming, that it is in the making.

RE: Is this a technological fix?

GA: It cannot be denied that it is a force that we have come to own, but in and of itself it is clearly insufficient. So the answer is no, but we will hopefully be emerging through technology into a new mission for ourselves. I am interested in connecting what we do, the decisions we make on the ground every day, with a better framework, instead of just twiddling the knobs to make adjustments to the rate of our decline. We need to discover what it would actually take to be regenerative health givers rather than destroyers of the planet. The context needs to shift for us so that we think differently about what we are doing in our manipulation of the built environment.

RE: Can we speak about connecting these thoughts to design and planning? Do you have a preferred vision for how city form and landscape should evolve?

GA: I envision the encroachment of agriculture back into the suburbs of the Greater Toronto Area so what are currently the “hinterlands” of the city emerge as clusters of villages again. We’ve grown like slime mould in a forest that travels along as a blob and spreads out everywhere and disperses itself. Once it exhausts its food supply it then starts to pull back into itself, to move onto the next place which is sort of what civilization is. I envision it coalescing around the old towns. Newmarket, Markham, Stouffville, and Uxbridge could form the nuclei and again be rural centres. This will penetrate right into the City of Toronto and urban agriculture will be on rooftops or in open spaces where development is no longer useful.

I imagine contiguous greenswards where backyards become greenways connected through to the valley systems. We could create overpasses where there are major thoroughfares for connectivity. The Crombie Commission legitimized the notion of connectivity and the importance of corridors. Regional conservation authorities have that responsibility although we have not done a good job.

There are different scales at which our relationship with the living world could be expressed in the city even at high densities. I don’t think we have to de-populate the city in order to have proximity to natural systems. We need to find the proper balance, and landscape architects can help find that balance.

RE: That’s a great lead into the next question. What role should or could the design professions play, and especially landscape architects, as visionaries who work in the material world?

GA: Landscape architects have always been the design profession that is most sensitive to nature and, consequently, the most forward thinking with respect to an ecological paradigm shift.

Landscape architects are taking stormwater management out of the hands of civil engineers or at least are being called upon to work intimately with the engineers. Bioswales are moving toward emulating natural hydrology. Rain gardens are like ecosystems where ephemerals come and go.

We have not included the many elements of the landscape that are commonplace in forests, wetlands, and other natural ecosystems. These are complex places and our monolithic landscapes have destroyed the natural complexity. Landscape architects are leading the way toward our reintegration with nature, in opening our eyes to the richness in worlds not disturbed or manipulated by humans, in understanding the enormous complexity that we have around us that can be emulated in our cities.

Shaping Change

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RE: Most landscape architects also focus on how the landscape addresses our physical, emotional, and spiritual needs. Where does spirituality fit within your thoughts related to creative design?

GA: I understand spirituality to be the core of existence. The manifest world is an outward expression of the spiritual precedent. It is that which brings into being. When what is evident around us is dissonant with us, we need to go back to our spiritual core. We need a deep conversation with ourselves at a deep level. It’s not just changing a habit; it is changing who we are.

Those internal conversations and the conversation that you and I are having right now, are not happening in an isolated manner.

RE: I agree that most people are concerned, but our actions seem to be limited.

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RE: As landscape architects, we try to balance social, ecological, technical, aesthetic, and numerous other parameters in our designs. What is the role of beauty within your vision of this paradigm shift?

GA: Beauty is elusive because it is connected to meaning and meaning is connected to paradigm which is connected to culture.

I think we need to educate people about why we need to do certain things to improve the environment. Then there would be a conversation about where their sensitivities are at and what matters to them. Those conversations would lead to what people think is beautiful.

We discussed the wind turbine project. Ecologically based landscapes have to include how things work and unless we are prepared to forgo electricity, for example, we need to find place and appropriateness for our interventions in the landscape that allow there to be aesthetics attached to it. A lot of people find the wind turbine to be beautiful in the city landscape.

RE: Many landscape architects want to create landscapes that are uniquely beautiful, but do functionality, utility, and sustainability have to come first?

GA: That’s what I hope landscape architects will do and, no, I don’t think utility has to come first; however, I wouldn’t separate them. I don’t think of functionality as being devoid of beauty or beauty being devoid of functionality. They are interwoven, and the full expression of meaning and understanding and connectivity is really when we design with elegance and multidimensional value.

GA: This is because we are all in group therapy and we have not come to terms with it. We need to accept that the world is being destroyed and that we are the central part of the problem. We are coming to an awareness that we have to do bigger things and be influencers. We can‘t just mend and tend to our own backyards.

We must participate. There is a receptivity that did not exist thirty years ago. This is no longer at the fringe.

The paradigm shift I am talking about resonates first with landscape architects who have to be the tail that wags the dog who is the city planners along with others.

So the time has come for landscape architects to take action and speak up. Yup, we have been waiting for you!

BIO/ REAL EGUCHI, OALA, PRINCIPAL OF EGUCHI ASSOCIATES LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTS, WORKED FOR GREG ALLEN AS AN ARCHITECTURAL TECHNOLOGIST IN THE 1980S.

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Greg Allen

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Real Eguchi

Building Healthier Communities

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Building Healthier Communities Engaging the public in discussions about health and active transportation

TEXT BY PAUL YOUNG, OALA

A number of public sector health organizations are spearheading efforts to support walking and biking—or “active transportation” (A.T.)—in Ontario. Typically funded through municipal public health departments or the Ontario Ministry of Health Promotion, they are looking at ways to prevent illness.

Health researchers are now examining the links between our built environment and the overall decline in physical activity. They have discovered that the biggest obstacle is often design policies that put cars first and actually create car dependence.

Health promoters are helping to develop locally generated action plans to re-shape our built environment and curb sprawl. They recognize that there is a lack of understanding about how built form affects health and there is a lack of political will to change policies that shape our communities.

Landscape architecture and health Landscape architecture has roots in planning and public health.

Public parks, great streets, and civic squares all promote health.

Today, however, a journey through the suburbs of southern Ontario reveals some big challenges. Unwalkable, unbikable urban sprawl continues to consume valuable resources while fuelling climate change. Much of the landscape architect’s work, unfortunately, is often limited to a specific site within the larger context of sprawl.

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Bracebridge, before and after, showing what pedestrian and cycling infrastructure improvements might look like.

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Simcoe Muskoka District Health Unit, Paul Young—Public Space Workshop

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Port Severn, before and after, showing the impact of design improvements on pedestrian experience.

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Simcoe Muskoka District Health Unit, Paul Young—Public Space Workshop

The challenges arise when a beautifully designed streetscape is undermined by four lanes of one-way traffic speeding through a downtown. Retail won’t locate there and people won’t walk there.

There are big box stores with unused patios, benches, and bike racks, and district parks with large parking lots. Few people can bike or walk to these regional facilities—islands of pedestrian space set in a sea of sprawl.

Building Healthier Communities

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Inspiration and signs of hope There is growing awareness that our built environment is especially hostile towards children, seniors, and those without a car.

National surveys tell us that people want to walk and bike more— for recreation and for everyday needs like commuting or shopping. But there is nothing to walk or bike on, infrastructure is missing, and distances to desirable spots are huge.

We can look to European cities for inspiration. In Copenhagen and Freiburg there are high rates of A.T. and supportive built form.

What is most inspiring is that it wasn’t always like that. These cities had similar rates of car ownership, autobahns, few bike facilities, etc.—a strong “car culture.” But over the past twenty-five years they invested in A.T. because they had public and political support for change. New York and London understand this and have been making record investments in A.T. There is a tension in the design community regarding process.

Some would like a strong leader; that is, “enough process and delays, you either get it or you don’t, let’s just do it.” A recent example is Janette Sadik-Kahn, New York City’s visionary Transportation Commissioner. She is making big changes to promote walking and biking in her city. The story that is not often heard is how she is working closely with New York’s local neighbourhood councils and advocates. Nancy Smith Lea, director of the Toronto Coalition for Active Transportation (TCAT), notes Sadik-Kahn’s involvement of the community, “without whom the plans are dead in the water.” TCAT is an organization doing research, advocacy, and summits to educate and build support for A.T. Health promoters and designers rely on organizations like TCAT to understand precedents so that we don’t “just do” the wrong thing.

Utilizing a healthy community framework My experience working with communities to plan for A.T. often starts with a presentation of research linking urban sprawl and car dependence to declining levels of physical activity and to growing incidences of chronic illnesses such as diabetes and heart disease. The public, municipal staff, and some elected officials usually attend. The discussion eventually leads to questions about policy, such as Official Plans, Transportation and Parks Plans, standards, and by-laws.

Much of this work is being led by municipal public health departments, health promoters, heart-health promoters, and provincial health organizations like the Ontario Healthy Communities Coalition. They are experienced in building partnerships to raise awareness and move forward on strategies. They understand how municipal governments work and can organize working groups and local action for change. Often, municipal staff know what needs to be done to support A.T. but they need more support at council. A community A.T. coalition or a municipal A.T. working group can bring critical support. When all of these actors are in place singing the same song, change can happen much more quickly.

Landscape architects as bridge builders Landscape architects are familiar with the range of professional and departmental jurisdictions that shape our built environments.

The discussion about physical activity and health helps to put design issues into a context that transcends departmental divisions and jurisdictions. We all want people to be able to attain their best possible health. Municipalities don’t want to be seen as obstructing people’s efforts to be healthier.

Landscape architects need to frame the discussion using health, physical activity, climate change, and urban sprawl as a way to help build a guiding vision of a healthier community. We need to focus on the bigger picture.

We can use available resources and research such as “Complete Streets,” Places to Grow, MetroLinx, Toronto Coalition for Active Transportation, The Ontario Healthy Communities Coalition walkOn, Active and Safe Routes to School, and others. And we can support the work that our sister profession the Ontario Professional Planners Institute is doing. We can work with public health units especially where there is a coalition or a public discussion about how our communities affect health.

We can look for more opportunities to bring stakeholders (including staff and community) together and tie the design initiative into larger municipal strategic directions that refer to health. When asked, people want healthier communities, and landscape architects are in a good position to contribute solutions.

For information on The Ontario Healthy Communities Coalition, please visit www.ohcc-ccso.ca.

BIO/ PAUL YOUNG, OALA, IS A LANDSCAPE ARCHITECT AND HEALTH PROMOTER WORKING WITH VARIOUS PUBLIC HEALTH AGENCIES AND COMMUNITY GROUPS TO IMPROVE CONDITIONS FOR ACTIVE TRANSPORTATION. HE CAN BE REACHED AT PAULYOUNG@PUBLICSPACEWORKSHOP.CA, (416) 461-0351.

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Technical Corner

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TEXT BY NANCY CHATER, OALA

LEED-ND Urban planning framework breaks new ground

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Dockside Green, a mixed-use development in Victoria, B.C., is one of the LEED-ND pilot projects.

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Dockside Green

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The greenway at Dockside Green will eventually run the length of the entire development.

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Dockside Green

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Cherry Street is a LEED-ND pilot site in Toronto.

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Phillips Farevaag Smallenberg and The Planning Partnership

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Stormwater runnels located throughout the Dockside Green development collect stormwater and feed it into the greenway.

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Vince Klassen

How much can urban planning do to create vibrant, livable neighbourhoods? A new program from the U.S. Green Building Council’s LEED rating system (simultaneously being reviewed by the Canadian Green Building Council)—LEED for Neighbourhood Development, known as LEED-ND—intends to do a great deal. With its far-reaching criteria that promote the creation of compact, walkable, mixed use neighbourhoods, LEED-ND foregrounds the vital role of a network of universally accessible streets, open space, and parks for community building, as it synthesizes a broader paradigm shift in planning which gives priority to pedestrians over automobiles in urban neighbourhood design. Landscape architects will thus play an important role in the design of projects that can voluntarily seek a LEED-ND rating.

Indeed, the requirement for “access to public space”—among other criteria— generates landscape architectural projects through the stipulation to include “a park, green plaza or square within 1/6 mile of 90 percent of the dwelling units and business entrances.”

Historically unprecedented in scope as a planning document, LEED-ND integrates the planning principles of smart growth and new urbanism with green building practices. LEED-ND significantly expands the reach of earlier LEED rating systems (which focused primarily on green building practices with a few credits for site selection and design) to address the relationship of buildings and open space to their neighbourhood, and relate the neighbouhood to its larger region and landscape. LEED-ND is structured around three categories: Smart Location and Linkage; Neighbourhood Pattern and Design; and Green Construction and Technology, with additional points for innovation.

The link between health and walkable neighbourhoods is now widely documented. To increase healthy options and reduce pollution, LEED-ND emphasizes increasing transportation choices and decreasing automobile dependence. Quantified walkable distances to transit, employment, stores, and services combined with well-planned

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bike lanes and attractive, interconnected streets are all part of the rating system, as is the inclusion of diverse uses for buildings in order to create the jobs, services, and destinations within the neighbourhood. Thus, LEED-ND effectively offers an inclusive vision of what constitutes a “healthy community.”

For example, one of the prerequisites in the Neighbouhood Pattern and Design category is “Open Community.” The stated intent is to “promote communities that are physically connected to each other; foster community and connectedness beyond the development.” The requirement to meet the prerequisite (not optional) credit is that “all streets and sidewalks built for the project must be available for public use and not gated. Gated areas and enclaves are not considered available for general public use.” This prerequisite in LEED-ND is a reminder of the fundamentally political (i.e., contested, negotiated) nature of urban planning as it shapes the places in which we live. It is refreshing to see gated communities critiqued from the perspective of community health.

The problem of urban sprawl and protection of wetlands, forest lands, and agricultural lands is addressed by encouraging infill projects on previously developed sites, close to existing town and city centres, with good access to transit and with preference for higher densities. At minimum, sites must be adjacent to existing development. Greenfield development does not qualify, period. At the same time, the technical demands of developing contaminated brownfield sites have been raised, as “cleanup methods which include only capping or translocation of contaminated material to an off-site location will not achieve this credit” for “Contaminant Reduction in Brownfields Development.”

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Canadian context Dan Leeming, planner, educator, and cochair of the Canadian LEED-ND review committee, has spent more than two years working on the development of LEED-ND. Leeming explains that the Canadian Green Building Council (CaGBC) is reviewing the USGBC’s balloted version of the rating system and translating it for the Canadian context. Leeming notes there are numerous aspects that involve landscape architects, such as open space and streetscape design, heat island reduction, and management of stormwater. One of the most challenging aspects in his experience is the coordination with existing approval agencies when applying new approaches to community design. New energy systems need to interact with existing utilities, for example. Another challenge is administering LEED-ND projects which require significant documentation to provide the submittals for accreditation. One of the goals of the CaGBC, according to Leeming, is to streamline the paperwork. He believes there will be widespread support of LEED-ND because of the urgency of environmental issues and climate change: “We have one generation to achieve greenhouse gas reductions.

LEED-ND is the most comprehensive approach ever developed.”

LEED-ND includes categories employed in earlier LEED rating systems, but it also incorporates social equity issues such as ratios of affordable rental housing and affordable for-sale housing to facilitate mixed income levels. In step with recent interest in local food movements, credits are also awarded for incorporating local food production into neighbourhood design to minimize the impact of transporting food long distances and to increase access to fresh foods.

Pilot program LEED-ND completed its two-year pilot program stage in early 2009. During the pilot stage, 238 projects from six countries (205 in the U.S.) were registered, ranging in size from urban infill projects less than an acre to entire new communities of more than 12,000 acres. Twenty-four of the pilot projects were Canadian, including six in Ontario. The post-pilot version of the rating system, which will be available to the public, is expected to launch in the U.S. in the summer of 2009 and in Canada in spring 2010. As of April 2009, more than 25 pilot projects had achieved LEED-ND certification (most at the planning stage). Because LEED-ND projects will have longer construction periods than single buildings, a three-stage certification process has been created. The first stage is the “optional pre-review” of the plan. The second stage is “certification of an approved plan.” Stage three is “certification of a completed neighbourhood development.” This systems allows projects to register early or later in their development.

David Leinster, OALA, views the LEED-ND framework as “part of the reality of the way we plan now.” As partner in The Planning Partnership, Leinster is on the design team for the West Donlands of Waterfront Toronto, one of the six Ontario LEED-ND pilot projects.

The West Donlands will introduce the ‘woonerf,’ a Dutch term for a street design that gives priority to pedestrians. Narrow, curbless, with a cobble-style paving, the woonerf acts like a “living room for the neighbourhood,” as Leinster puts it. The biggest technical challenge of LEED-ND, in Leinster’s view, is still “making trees grow in cities.”

Creating conditions for the urban forest in the context of urban density is one of the most difficult things we do as landscape architects, he says. Leinster credits the LEEDND system as providing measurable criteria for sustainability: “We have to start somewhere. LEED-ND is a good start.”

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Anna Palamarchuk, Sustainability Research Analyst with Waterfront Toronto, is part of a team participating in the LEED-ND pilot program. The East Bayfront, West Donlands, and North Keating areas of Waterfront Toronto development (listed together as “Waterfront Area 1” with LEED-ND) are pursuing a gold LEED-ND rating and are currently in the first, voluntary pre-approval stage.

Palamarchuk notes that one of the challenges of participating in the pilot has been translating U.S. requirements to a Canadian policy context. This will be streamlined once LEED-ND is in place with the CaGBC. “Sustainability is a process, as well as an end-product,” Palamarchuk points out. “The LEED-ND framework includes process, allocating credits for community consultation.”

For more information on LEED-ND, visit www.usgbc.org/leed-nd, www.cagbc.org/leed/systems/neighbourho od_developments/index.php, www.nrdc.org/cities/smartgrowth/leed.asp, and http://www.cnu.org/leednd.

BIO/ NANCY CHATER, OALA, IS THE TECHNICAL CORNER COLUMNIST FOR GROUND AND CO-CHAIR OF THE EDITORIAL BOARD.

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Professional Practice

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Walk the Talk Green office practices in landscape architecture firms

TEXT BY JOANNE ADAIR AND NATHAN PERKINS

Although landscape architects are uniquely situated to assume a leadership position in sustainable design, a qualitative study utilizing in-depth interviews with selected firms in the GTA in early 2009 suggested that there are barriers to bringing sustainability into the office. While the interviews highlighted the lack of, and barriers to, adopting sustainable office practices, the most promising results are the willingness of landscape architects to walk the talk with some help and information.

As green design and planning initiatives such as LEED have captured public attention in recent years, landscape architects have, at times, seemed to struggle with the notion that while we are uniquely suited to be at the forefront of the green revolution, much of the action is taking place elsewhere. There may be a number of reasons for this, including lack of knowledge, professional inertia, conservative business practices, and lack of motivation, but few of these reasons are insurmountable for creative individuals in a tightly knit professional community.

One of the reasons we undertook this exploratory study was because we wanted to look behind the professional work that landscape architects do and get a better sense of the behavioural practices that landscape architects engage in—specifically, those practices that many of us believe define us. Although the number of principals and office administrators interviewed was small, the results from this study and review of a wide-ranging body of literature suggest that the views expressed were representative of some of the issues that all design offices are facing.

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The results from interviews with people from a sample of firms in the GTA suggested that there are commonly perceived barriers in bringing sustainability into the office. (The study focused specifically on office practices, rather than design projects.) A common response heard from the participants about implementing sustainable office practices—things like creating a procurement policy for paper and office supplies, conducting an energy audit, or installing energy-efficient light bulbs—was that making the office “greener” was a worthy goal, but not necessarily a priority in a challenging economic climate. What we found interesting was the divide between the personal and professional, between design practice and personal behaviour.

Professional Practice

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The OALA code of ethics states, “Within the limits placed upon them by their responsibilities to the general public, their clients and the profession, members shall exert every effort towards the protection, preservation and enhancement of the earth’s environmental resources.” (OALA, 2006, Section 3.4) Based on the results of the interviews, and the challenges many landscape architects face in professional practice, we identified five implementable actions that could make a meaningful difference in sustainable office practices and bridge the gap between personal and professional sustainability goals.

Participation: All office employees could and should be involved in creating, implementing, and monitoring sustainable goals, initiatives, and practices. As one office principal remarked, “We [the staff] have never really formally discussed sustainability, we just kind of do it here and there.” A sustainable office mission in which all employees are invested was seen as the start to creating an environment in which innovation is fostered. As well, participation can extend among offices where information and initiatives are shared.

Transportation: Creating a company transportation plan where employees are offered incentives for biking to work, using public transportation, working flexible hours, using green company cars, etc., were identified as the possibilities that firms could benefit from immediately.

Materials and Practices: Surprisingly little is known about the sourcing for office consumables, power consumption, furnishings, etc., yet this is one area that has a significant impact on the fiscal and environmental bottom-line in professional offices. The results from this study suggest that the lack of appropriate information is often the barrier to implementing office procurement practices.

Public Relations: Offices that adopt a sustainability program should not be shy about publicizing their commitment and achievements. We believe that the moral reward for sustainable behaviour, however meaningful, is not enough and that some form of professional recognition is needed. A green office certification program, professional awards, and/or acknowledgement for sustainability organized by the OALA or CSLA could provide both individual offices and the professional organizations with the positive strokes that all innovators desire at some level.

Leadership: One of the common refrains heard in the interviews was that sustainable office initiatives were often piecemeal and informally pursued by individuals. We believe that a sustainability coordinator (a principal or staff member) is necessary to champion intra-office initiatives and practices, to introduce new information and monitoring, and to act as both a cheerleader and innovator within the office. Further, a committed sustainability coordinator within the office would, we think, reap financial and public-relations dividends.

Innovation is often a response to common, everyday problems that have not elevated themselves to the “must deal with now” category of importance. With all of the conflicting and complex issues that require attention in building and maintaining a landscape architecture practice, we suspect that sustainability has not yet become a focal and immediate problem and that the barriers that exist at present, though real, simply require creativity and commitment. It is our hope, and this was echoed by the majority of professionals interviewed, that landscape architects can be at the forefront of both sustainable design and sustainable living. Where there is a will, innovators find a way.

BIO/ JOANNE ADAIR, MLA, IS THE BUSINESS ENGAGEMENT OFFICER WITH THE WORLD WILDLIFE FUND (WWF-CANADA).

BIO/ NATHAN PERKINS, PHD, FASLA, IS THE UNDERGRADUATE PROGRAM COORDINATOR AT THE UNIVERSITY OF GUELPH.

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There are commonly perceived barriers to bringing sustainability into office practices, but five targeted actions could make a meaningful difference.

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istock © Ettore Marzocchi

Notes

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Notes: A Miscellany of News and Events

legislation In May 2009, the City of Toronto passed a new green roof bylaw that consists of a green roof construction standard and a mandatory requirement for green roofs on all classes of new buildings. The bylaw requires up to 50 percent green roof coverage on multi-unit residential dwellings over six storeys, schools, non-profit housing, and commercial and industrial buildings. Larger residential projects require greater green roof coverage, ranging anywhere from 20 to 50 percent of the roof area.

“The bylaw breaks new ground on how to structure a mandatory green roof requirement, and the construction standard also contains important best practices that may prove to be a model for other cities,” said Steven Peck, President of Green Roofs for Healthy Cities.

For more information on the bylaw, see www.toronto.ca/building/.

competitions Professionals and other creative individuals are putting their talents to work designing homes for a high-flying crowd: the urban bird population.

Toronto Botanical Garden recently launched a “For the birds...” campaign, running from June to October 2009. The fivemonth project was developed to raise awareness of the interdependency between gardens and birds.

More than a billion songbirds migrate through the City of Toronto every spring and fall, and bird-friendly gardens can provide a much-needed oasis—housing, contaminant-free vegetation, and connected green space. In return for a safe haven, they pollinate plants, spread seed, eat insects, and provide joy with their songs.

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Kate Fox-Whyte and her birdhouse design

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Toronto Botanical Garden

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Denis Flanagan and his birdhouse design

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Toronto Botanical Garden

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Martin Wade, OALA, and his birdhouse design

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Toronto Botanical Garden

As part of the TBG’s campaign, a competition was held to design birdhouses for different species of birds. A panel of jurists selected the finalists in June, and the birdhouses are currently on display at the TBG. Winners in various categories will be announced at the Flocktail auction and awards event to be held at the TBG on October 1, 2009.

For more information, visit www.torontobotanicalgarden.ca/birds.

Notes

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conference

accreditation

CitiesAlive, the World Green Roof Infrastructure Congress, will take place in Toronto from October 19 to 21, 2009. More than sixty acclaimed speakers from diverse markets around the world will present on innovative projects and design, leadingedge research and technical performance developments, policies that support green infrastructure development, and emerging trends in green infrastructure.

Green Roofs for Healthy Cities recently announced the first wave of accredited Green Roof Professionals (GRPs). These individuals have successfully completed a multi-disciplinary exam encompassing five areas of concentration including predesign, design, contract management, quality assurance and support, and maintenance. GRP accreditation verifies that the individual has attained the level of interdisciplinary knowledge of best practices associated with the successful design, installation, and maintenance of green roof systems. GRP accreditation training courses provide continuing education credits for AIA, ASLA, APA and LEED.

Agenda highlights include green roof/wall designs and projects that push the boundaries of vegetated architecture; underground green walls; urban forest and green energy projects; urban green roof agricultural projects; and vegetated building envelopes in multiple cities across Europe and Asia.

“Our recent North American industry survey reports the American green roof industry grew by 35 percent in 2008, so we are proud to establish the Green Roof Professional accreditation that keeps pace with the growing demand for qualified professionals in this sector,” said Steven W. Peck, Founder and President of Green Roofs for Healthy Cities.

A regional programming highlight, “Transforming Toronto,” provides a guide to North America’s hottest new green roof market and features the City of Toronto’s cutting-edge policies and programs.

For more information on GRP accreditation or to register for training courses, see www.greenroofs.org.

For more information, visit www.citiesalive.org.

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awards On June 4, 2009, at the University of Toronto ring ceremony, the OALA Certificate of Merit was presented to MLA graduate Andrea Mantin. The ring ceremony was held for graduating students from the master of landscape architecture, master of architecture, and master of urban design programs at the John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design.

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Interested in being involved with Ground: Landscape Architect Quarterly?

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The OALA Editorial Board is looking for volunteers who can help out with various tasks, such as research, transcription, and writing. Any level of commitment is appreciated, from researching upcoming events for the Notes section to transcribing Round Table discussions...

Fun, satisfying work—and the best part, no need to attend meetings!

To get involved, please e-mail magazine@oala.ca.

Artifact

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hares & squares

On a small rural road approximately 15 minutes west of the Ontario town of Perth, drivers passing by this summer were confronted with a strange, surreal site: massive jackrabbits poised in mid-hop and large squares balanced in mid-tumble. These brightly painted plywood cutouts were the work of landscape architects Barbara Flanagan-Eguchi, OALA, and Real Eguchi, OALA, who were invited by the curators of fieldwork, an ongoing public art project in a field near Perth, to create a site-specific artwork.

Interrupting the view of the picturesque countryside, the installation combined two cultural forms—lawn ornaments and signage boards—to playful yet serious effect.

The non-native jackrabbit may be a feral addition to the Ontario landscape and the squares an icon of urbanism, but in this Ontario field they danced in harmony. Can the human species likewise find this balance in our leaps and tumbles through the natural world?

For more information on fieldwork, visit www.fieldworkproject.com.

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Landscape architects Barbara Flanagan-Eguchi and Real Eguchi placed these surprising additions to the view in a field near Perth as part of a public art project, fieldwork.

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bREAL art + design

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