Water/Front

Adapted from an earlier version, appearing in the 2009 edition of Alphabet City, WATER (edited by John Knechtel, published by MIT Press).

Adaptive designs for urban waterfronts, featured in the launch of the online Places Journal, carried by the Design Observer Group at: http://places.designobserver.com/

Water/Front

In: J. Knechtel (ed.) WATER. Alphabet City Series. MIT Press, 2009.

Adaptive designs for post-industrial urban waterfronts.

See more at: http://alphabet-city.org/water_festival

Sustainable Large Parks: Ecological design or designer ecology?

In: J. Czerniak & G. Hargreaves (eds.), Large Parks. Princeton Architectural Press, 2007. pp. 31-51.

The discipline of landscape architecture encompasses many typologies, from domestic gardens and neighborhood playgrounds to urban designs and state parks. Most critical studies of the discipline tend to approach it from a historical or contemporary perspective organized around criteria such as built versus unbuilt, urban versus peripheral, or competition-sponsored versus commission-based. Very few analyses have been undertaken from the seemingly obvious jumping-off point of size. In Large Parks, Julia Czerniak and George Hargreaves present eight essays by leading scholars and practitioners that engage large urban parks in depth as complex cultural spaces, where key issues of landscape discourse, ecological challenges, social history, urban relations, and place-making are writ large.

From historic parks such as New York's Central Park and Paris's Bois de Boulogne to contemporary projects such as Toronto's Downsview Park and Staten Island's Fresh Kills, to newly unveiled and yet-to-be-built projects such as Ken Smith's ambitious plans for the Orange County Great Park, Large Parks highlights the complexities and unique considerations that go into designing these massive and culturally significant works.

See: http://books.google.com/books?id=lOblA7dwoc4C&pg=PA35&lpg=PA35&dq=Nina-Marie+Lister&source=web&ots=EYX6qD1DBO&sig=Luxu7JHsqRURkWURZWNTVXUYUZo&hl=en&sa=X&oi=book_result&resnum=10&ct=result

Placing Food: Toronto's Edible Landscape

In: John Knechtel (Ed.) FOOD. Alphabet City Series. MIT Press, 2007. pp.

Food is essential to our sense of place and our sense of self, but today—as fast food nation meets the slow food movement and eating locally collides with on-demand arugula—our food habits are shifting. Food examines and imagines these changes, with projects by writers and artists that explore the cultural and emotional resonance of food, from the "everyday Dada" of mashed potatoes and Jell-O to the rocket science of food eaten by astronauts in space.

In Food, an artist photographs everything he ate in 2006 (and some things he didn't eat, including "Food I Left in the Fridge Too Long") and finds the results both "seductive and repulsive"; a writer describes the global agro-assembly line that produces an organic bento box for Japanese commuters containing rice and vegetables from California, pork from Mexico, and salmon from Alaska; a short story writer offers an eight-page graphic novel, Eating in Cafeterias; a landscape architect compares a commercial orange with an organic apple using visualized data; an award-winning New York City food writer tells a postmodern tale about small-town Chinese-American cuisine (featuring chop suey, egg rolls, and flaming lava cocktails); an expert explains the principles of urban food sustainability. Other projects include a map of the free food from fruit trees on public land in a Los Angeles neighborhood, a visionary plan for farms in skyscrapers, and a surprising report on food security. The essays, artwork, and stories in Food offer readers a full menu of intellectual nourishment and aesthetic delight.

See: http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?ttype=2&tid=11297

Trashed Space: Reclaiming Urban Junkscape.

In: John Knechtel (Ed.) TRASH. Alphabet City Series. MIT Press, 2006. pp. 63-74.

Trash: the emptied out, the used up, the broken, the outgrown, the obsolete; the dispossessed, the lost, the left behind. In Trash, writers, artists, and filmmakers look at how we are defined by what we waste and discover that we are what we throw away. Trash surveys a terrain that ranges from micro (a typology of dust bunnies) to macro (studies of landfill design and the trashed space of urban brownfield sites). It investigates the logic of trash as it is applied to humans and looks at lives intimately dependent on trash, taking us from the abducted girls of Juarez to the recycling communities of China.

Trash explores the ethics and psychology of trash and what these reveal about contemporary industrial society. The investigations range from the whimsical to the disturbing, and offers a variety of approaches to rehabilitating and rediscovering what is too commonly tossed aside.

See: http://alphabet-city.org/issues/trash/

Landscapes on the edge: (re)considering the park in the contemporary metropolitan region.

In M. Qvistrom and K. Saltzman (eds.) Ephemeral Landscapes: Exploring Landscape Dynamics at the Edge of the City. Proceedings of the “Landscape Studies at the City Edge” Symposium, Göteborg University, Göteborg, Sweden: May 4-8, 2006. Occasional Publication of Formas: The Swedish Research Council for Environment, Agricultural Sciences and Spatial Planning, and the Nordic Landscape Research Network.

Ecological Design for Industrial Ecology: Opportunities for (Re)

In R. Coté, J. Tansey & A. Dale (eds). Linking Industry and Ecology: A Question of Design. UBC Press, 2005. pp. 15-28.

It might, at first glance, seem to many that industry and ecology make strange bedfellows. For proponents of sustainable development, however, such a union is crucial. How else are we to make the industries that are so central to modern societies consistent with our visions of a sustainable future?

Linking Industry and Ecology explores the origins, promise, and relevance of the emerging field of industrial ecology. It situates industrial ecology within the broader range of environmental management strategies and concepts, from the practices of pollution prevention through life cycle management, to the more fundamental shift toward dematerialization and ecological design. The book makes a compelling argument for the need to think ecologically to develop innovative and competitive industrial policy.

The contributors to this volume draw on their experience in a variety of disciplines to chart a clear path for industrial ecology. Their work not only affirms what has been learned to date in this nascent field but also provides new insight for a discourse traditionally dominated by natural scientists and engineers, by demonstrating that technologies are socially and politically embedded.

This book will be of interest to educators and students in environmental studies, business management, environmental and industrial engineering, and environmental planning. While many of the examples are drawn from Canada, it will also appeal to readers interested in fostering ecologically sustainable industrial and community development in other industrializing and industrialized nations.

Celebrating Diversity: Adaptive Planning and Biodiversity

First author, with J.J. Kay, in: S. Bocking (ed.) Biodiversity In Canada: Ecology, Ideas and Action. Boradview Press, 2000. pp. 189-218.

Our Place: Community Eco-design Means Re-Integrating Local Culture and Nature.

Second author, with N. Luka, 2000. Alternatives Journal. 26 (3):25-30. 

"Design" is a complex concept, bridging the artistic and the scientific domains. It can be seen as any purposeful change to the face of the earth, or in the words of Sim Van der Ryn and [Stuart Cowan], "the intentional shaping of matter, energy, and process to meet a perceived need or desire." The word "ecology" (like "economy") derives from the Greek term for household (from oikos for house). Linking these concepts, Van der Ryn and Cowan use the metaphor of a hinge connecting culture and nature and explain ecological design as "the effective adaptation to and integration with nature's processes." In this sense, ecological design is the problem-solving process of connecting nature's household (the natural environment) to that of humankind (the sociocultural environment) in such a way that our mutual interdependence is at once honoured and embraced. Implicit in this approach is the need to reconnect our communities with natural processes: to "come home" to the natural environment through the creation of meaningful places by re-integrating culture and nature.

Ecological design can be applied at several scales. It is most often applied to individual buildings in the form of architectural treatments and technologies, but rarely to whole communities through proactive planning policies and design guidelines. Plenty of strategies and associated technologies already exist at the building scale. The Toronto Healthy House, for example, is a recent demonstration project that showcases many ecological design ideas. 6 Individual technologies such as green roofs, vertical gardens, and solar aquatic wastewater treatments are well-known applications with many demonstration projects (see "Gardens Overhead" on page 16 and "John Todd's Miniature Ecosystems" on page 26). In contrast, with the exception of eco-villages ("Ecovillage Network of Canada" on page 40), community redesign tends to be neglected in theory and practice.

A systems approach to biodiversity conservation planning.

(1998) Environmental Monitoring and Assessment. 49 (2/3): 123-155

With a recent media-fueled transition from a scientific to a political perspective, biodiversity has become an issue of ethics and ensuing values, beyond its traditional ecological roots. More fundamentally, the traditional perspective of biodiversity is being challenged by the emergence of a
post-normal or systems-based approach to science. A systems-based perspective of living systems rests on the central tenets of complexity and uncertainty, and necessitates flexibility, anticipation and adaptation rather than prediction and control in conservation planning and management. What are the implications of this new perspective? This paper examines these challenges in the context of biodiversity conservation planning. The new perspectives of biodiversity are identified and explored,
and the emergence of a new ecological context for biodiversity conservation is discussed. From the analysis, the challenges and implications for conservation planning are considered, and a systems- based or post-normal approach to conservation planning and management is proposed. In light of the new perspectives for biodiversity, conservation planning and management approaches should ultimately reflect the essence of living systems: they should be diverse, adaptive, and self-organizing, accepting the ecological realities of change.

Key words: adaptive management, biodiversity, conservation planning, ecosystem planning, post- normal science

Integrating research on ecohydrology and land use change with land use management.

Third-author, with B. Bass & R.E. Byers (1998). Hydrological Processes. 12: 2217-2233.

One objective of the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme is to provide a scientific basis for
sustainable development policies. Land use change and ecohydrology are important components of this
scientific basis, but predicting change is diffcult because of the scale and complexity of the interactions between
non-linear ecohydrological and socio-economic processes at different spatial and temporal scales. A systems
framework, the Ecosystem Approach, has been developed to conceptualize these interactions for the purpose of
providing information for sustainable development policy. The Ecosystem Approach combines the dynamics of
the Holling Figure-eight model -- a conceptual model of dynamics that stresses discontinuous change and
destruction as an internal property of the system -- and the properties of self-organizing systems with the socio
political aspects of decision making.
The Ecosystem Approach highlights the problems of managing change in complex systems when that change
may involve unpredictable shifts to a different attractor. Although there are methods available to detect the
occurrence of such shifts, both detection and modelling are complicated by the presence of semi-stable
attractors. When a model or an ecosystem is on a semi-stable attractor, it may appear to remain stable for an
extended period prior to changing as a consequence of inherent instabilities. When the shift to a new attractor
occurs, it is quite sudden and unpredictable. A technical discussion on prediction under conditions of semi-
stability and chaos is included because it enhances our understanding of the role of surprise in ecosystems, as
well as the utility of simulation models.
The principles of the Ecosystem Approach are derived from the theoretical discussion and an example of a
land use policy in the Huron Natural Area in south-western Ontario. These principles provide a clear role for
scientific research, and particularly simulation modelling, within the larger context of policy and land use
management.