Ecological Urbanism, Landscape Architecture, Ecological Design, Urban Ecology, and Landscape Urbanism
Insurgent Ecologies : ( Re )Claiming Ground in Landscape and Urbanism
Nina-Marie Lister
Landscape and Urbanism
Ecology has come of age. In the past two decades, designers of landscape projects have become increasingly fascinated with the science of living systems as both instrument and metaphor. From the large, performative, operational landscape designs for brownfield and derelict sites to the “designer ecologies” 1 being deployed in smaller city parks, ecology is now central to the vocabulary and language of the contemporary landscape. In the strict sense, ecology is a branch of the biological sciences; it is the study of the complex relations between organisms and their environment.2 More broadly, ecology is often used in a metaphorical context for the relationship between humans and their various constructed environments, from social-cultural to political-economic.3 In the realm of critical social science, ecology is used in the vernacular plural to describe human relationships with everything from urbanism, culture, and religion, to food, fear, and pizza.4 Yet as the shape and form of our physical, constructed environment changes with the political-economic and social-cultural forces of globalization, decentralization, and post-industrialization, the ground plane of the contemporary metropolitan region has reshaped the paradigm of ecology. This coupled and reinforcing relationship between ecology and landscape hinges around design: All of our ecologies—multiple, layered, complex, and insurgent — collectively inform the design of our urban and urbanizing landscapes. And these emergent landscapes, in turn, continue to shape the ecologies that define us. In the context of the rise of ecology as science, strategy, and speculation within the growing confluence of landscape and urbanism, two case studies in Toronto highlight the changing role(s) of ecology in design: River + City + Life, a proposition to remediate and transform the Lower Don Lands on Toronto’s waterfront, and Evergreen Brick Works, a master plan to reclaim and reinterpret an abandoned quarry and brickmaking industry on the Don River. These cases are testimony to the prominence of not one but several distinct ecologies of design, each of which is relevant to the challenge of postindustrial landscape design, and more broadly, to an “ecological urbanism.”
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Given the multifaceted evolution of our built environments, design for the bounded and bifurcated notion of “city” and “landscape” is now both outmoded and insufficient. Rather, design for the contemporary metropolitan landscape is the challenge ahead. This blurred continuum from urban, suburban, and exurban to rural demands both a fundamental and contextual reengagement of culture and nature. The emerging theory of landscape urbanism5 is evidence of this broader trend toward a confluence—or if we consider the historical evolution of the disciplines, a rapprochement— between ecology, planning, and landscape architecture, in the context of contemporary urbanism. Prior to industrialism, “city” and “landscape” were neither dualistic nor opposing forces. It is only through the industrial era that city, country, and landscape (and their attendant disciplines of practice) became isolated, discrete zones of practice. It is widely accepted that this separation was driven by Cartesian, deterministic planning and design, underwritten by a Newtonian mechanistic worldview, and rooted firmly in the ideals of order, prediction, and control. However, new understandings in ecology 6 have fundamentally challenged the assumptions of predictability and control of living systems. This evolved understanding of ecology, coupled with the increasing forces of globalization and decentralization, has leveraged the opening of the post-industrial landscape to the deployment of a new breed of urbanism—one that is characterized by multiplicity, plurality, diversity, and complexity. A variety of recent projects for post-industrial sites7 bear witness to the primacy of landscape as a new medium of urban order, and a number of these involve a progressively more sophisticated reading and use of ecology in design. As various designers have observed, post-industrial reclamation and remediation projects involve a trajectory of strategies in repurposing, transforming, and eventually recalibrating the site. Each of these progressively complex strategies is defined by the use of ecology, both grounded in science and inferred in speculation and representation. As Jane Amidon notes, “These designers remarried the idea of nature with the real thing— working ecologies—mending centuries of divorce.”8 The implications of landscape urbanism are principally concerned with engaging processes that facilitate design in the context of complex and dynamic cultural-natural systems. In this respect, landscape urbanism is necessarily more than just another “new” urbanism; it is concerned with more than merely urban form, and centers on a more complex problematic; it is a multiscaled and multilayered urbanism involving
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cultural, social, political, economic, infrastructural, and ecological conditions that are layered, tangled, and mutually dependent. The dynamic metropolitan landscape is no longer a tabula rasa; it is a living field that has been and will continue to be reinvented many times over, from pastoral greenfields to post-industrial brownfields, at times engaging and other times ignoring the history and context implicit in SolaMorales Rubió’s notion of the “terrain vague”: those places characterized by “void, absence, and yet also promise, the space of the possible, of expectation.” 9 These are the voids that Georgia Daskalakis and Omar Perez have called the “posturban residual spaces of the abandoned industrial city.” 10 In these spaces—whether made, remade, created and recreated, or remediated and reclaimed—each unfolding emerges with new ecologies yet to be identified and validated. Indeed the potential for synecologies, or synthetic, integrated culturalnatural ecologies that emerges from forgotten landscapes, is an impetus to fundamentally reconsider the notions of both landscape and urbanism. James Corner has offered “landscraping” as another tactic for post-industrial landscape design.11 These sites are often contaminated and can accept no new construction until they are cleared, remediated, and literally scraped clean. In so doing, the post-industrial landscape represents a new palette for designers: one characterized by landscapes of potential, awaiting the recognition of insurgent ecologies that, despite degraded environments, have emerged or may yet emerge in the interstitial spaces of past uses and current conditions. These too are apertures for the creation of new hybrid ecologies, open to multiple interpretations in the evolving context of the future city. Similarly, Charles Waldheim has observed that landscape is more than just the lens of representation; it is a medium of construction.12 In this context, landscape is a layered, synthetic phenomenon, encompassing more than a two-dimensional surface. If our collective analyses of site and context shift beyond the ground plane and embrace the social-cultural and political-economic dynamics of landscape, new typologies of infrastructure necessarily emerge.13 Indeed, contemporary urbanism requires a multifocal perspective, one that encompasses the notions of form, function, field, and flows 14 across and between the dynamic layers. In this sensibility, aspects of “culture” and “nature” are neither separate nor confused, but woven together throughout the metropolitan landscape.
Adaptive Design for an Ecological Urbanism
But how do we design effectively, meaningfully, and responsibly in the dynamic context of an ecological urbanism? Clearly, the complexity inherent in post-industrial metropolitan sites demands strategies that move past the static notions of restoration and rehabilitation to some pristine state. Underscoring contemporary strategies in recent landscape projects that span a spectrum of interventions, from remediation, reclamation, and restoration to transformation and recalibration, is a progressively more sophisticated notion of adaptive design. Adaptive design is a term15 coined by me, and evolved through research based on the work of C.S. Holling,16 to refer to an integrated, whole-system, learning-based approach to the management of human-ecological interactions, with explicit implications for planning interventions and resulting design forms. These interventions and their forms must be both adaptive and resilient to sudden, discontinuous environmental change—change that is normal, but cannot be predicted with certainty or controlled completely. Long-term sustainability and health of landscape systems demands the capacity for resilience—the ability to recover from disturbance, to accommodate change, and to function in a state of health—and therefore, for adaptation to environmental change that, while normal, is often limited in predictability and “surprising” in effect.17 Adaptive design (or properly, adaptive ecological design) draws on current ecological science and is a response to urbanizing landscapes that are under pressure from competing resource demands and land uses. Adaptive design is, by definition, sustainable design; the long-term survival of human and other species demands adaptability, which is predicated on resilience. But resilience and therefore sustainability must not be limited to merely “surviving” in an ecological context. Indeed, resilient, adaptive, and thus sustainable design means “thriving,” and therefore must necessarily include economic and ecological health and cultural vitality as planning and design goals. Recent insights from the ecological and complex systems sciences have challenged decision makers, planners, and designers to become less concerned with prediction and control and to move toward more organic, adaptive, and flexible planning, design, and management strategies.18 In the absence of ecological certainty and predictability, the implications for decision making and ultimately, design, are that an integrated and whole-systems approach to landscape is necessary: a single discipline or expertise cannot solve complex ecological problems that occur at multiple scales. Where the notion of expertise is challenged in the face of ecological
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Graffiti at Toronto’s Brick Works ( 2007 ) prior to the plan for its adaptive reuse as an environmental learning center Post-industrial decay and displacement on the Toronto waterfront : The squatter community of Tent City was evicted and the site bulldozed while awaiting the revitalization promised by WATERFRONToronto with the new “ Lower Donlands ” community. Awaiting realignment into a new estuary as part of the Lower Donlands master plan, the mouth of Toronto’s Don River and Canada’s largest urban watershed “ drains ” into Lake Ontario through a cumbersome 90-degree turn.
uncertainty, meaningful community engagement in the planning and design process is therefore necessary—decisions must be discussed, debated, negotiated, and ultimately learned rather than predetermined by rational choice. Adaptive design thus constitutes decision making that is inclusive of multiple perspectives, adaptive to regular but unpredictable environmental change, and both resilient and responsive to these changes, responding, for example, to new ecological information in a timely way, before critical and irreversible thresholds are crossed. In this way, adaptive design emerges from a deliberative, integrative, cyclic, and continuous—rather than deterministic and discrete — approach to planning, design, and management. The adaptive context is one where learning is a collaborative and conscious activity, derived from empirically monitored or experientially acquired information, which in turn is transformed into knowledge through adapted behavior. This tactic relies on continuous learning through scale-appropriate experiments in community-appropriate design—experiments that are responsive, responsible, and ultimately “safe-to-fail” (rather than “fail safe”). What then might adaptive ecological design look like, in the context of an ecological urbanism? The following two project examples depict early efforts at adaptive ecological designs in practice, applied to post-industrial sites in Toronto, Canada.
River + City + Life : A Design for Toronto’s Lower Don Lands
Located in the Great Lakes Basin, on the north shore of Lake Ontario in the industrialized heart of North America, Toronto is a city-region of 5 million and is one of the five fastest-growing metropolitan areas in North America.19 It is also one of the world’s most ethno-culturally diverse cities,20 and its social ecology is as complex as the native riparian ecologies of the lakeshore and the ecologies of the GreatLakes/St. Lawrence-Lowland forest that characterize its landscape. At the intersection of these ecologies, on the Toronto
waterfront, the design emphasized resilience, weaving these ecologies through-out the plan. River + City + Life is a design proposal led by Stoss Landscape Urbanism, a finalist in an international design competition to remediate and revitalize 40 hectares of post-industrial Toronto waterfront, at the mouth of the Don River.21 A key part of the city’s multibillion-dollar waterfront revitalization plans, the site is potentially prime real estate, yet suffers from a legacy of contamination and a complex pattern of land tenure, shared between private and public sector holdings, further complicated by multi-agency oversight. The Don River flows from its headwaters in a glacial moraine north of Toronto through the heart of Canada’s largest city, bisecting the region into a series of forested ravines before reaching Lake Ontario. The Don River watershed is the largest urbanized watershed in Canada, draining an area of 227 square miles. At its outflow, the Don is significantly degraded, having been channeled for the final one-and-a-half miles of its journey to the lake. Suffering from oxygen depletion, high turbidity, poor flow, and seasonal contamination by sewage effluent, the river is effectively stagnant, polluted, and choked with debris. As such, the Don is characteristic of many post-industrial waterfront sites: derelict and forgotten as the armature of the city has all but subsumed it. As a response to the challenge to remediate and revitalize the lower Don Lands, River + City + Life is a radical and bold exploration of the creative tension between “nature” and “culture” in the urban condition. This complex urban project challenged design teams to renaturalize the mouth of the Don River, while simultaneously reengineering the floodplain and creating a new urban edge to the city’s downtown. Working at the confluence of the urban core and the derelict Port Lands on the city’s waterfront, the Stoss team explicitly adopted an adaptive design concept, based on the primacy of the river and its dynamics. Centered on the notion of resilience, the
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River + City + Life : The Stoss master plan and competition finalist scheme for Toronto’s Lower Donlands community on the city’s east-central waterfront
plan recalibrates the mouth of the river and its floodplain, resulting in a new estuary. Importantly, this is not a restored estuary but a landscape transformed through the creation of a new river channel, supported by several secondary channels to accommodate seasonal inundation, and defined by the “river spits”—sculpted landforms, able to withstand changing lake levels, seasonal flooding, and multiple recreational, educational, and residential uses. The Stoss plan effectively proposes a new set of integrated cultural and natural ecologies for the site, organized principally by the river and its own self-organizing hydrology. The engagement of a complex ecological, social-cultural, and economic system rests squarely on “putting the river first,” reversing the convention of the last century and a half. In hinging the design on “renewal” rather than “restoration,” the Stoss team made explicit and central the bold (but essential) notions of adaptation to occasional flooding, mediation between “natural” and “alien” species, and a thick layering of habitats and ecotones—some cultural, others natural; some seasonal and others permanent. The result is a design that weaves a resilient waterfront: an urban tapestry of public amenity, urban edge, and ecological performance. This proposal reconceives the city as a hybrid cultural-natural space— a signature step for landscape urbanism and its operational ecologies.
Evergreen Brick Works
Some 4 miles upstream of the Lower Don Lands, on the Don River, is a different emerging example of the intersection of ecology, landscape, and urbanism. This 40-acre site is located in the geographic core of downtown Toronto, on an arterial road off a major expressway, and is a designated cultural and natural heritage site. Evergreen, a Canadian national charity,
Bird’s-eye view of the proposed River + City + Life master plan for Toronto’s Lower Don and the waterfront : Engineered river spits and braided channels provide the armature for a flood-adapted waterscape that fluctuates with the seasons, changing lake levels, and storm events.
commissioned a master plan to transform this post-industrial site into an international showcase for urban sustainability and ecological design, centered on the reclamation and reinterpretation of the abandoned quarry and former brick works. The project is an innovative public and nonprofit development partnership in which the city and the regional conservation authority own the land and manage the restored quarry (now a 28-acre wetland), while Evergreen has proposed and won a long-term lease for the 12-acre industrial pad and heritage buildings. Adjacent to the historic Todmorden Mills (ca. 1790), the site was home to the Don Valley Brick Works, a brickmaking facility that produced, at its peak, 43 million bricks per year—the majority of brick used in urban construction across Canada for almost a century, from 1889 to 1984.22 Over the years, the quarry exposed layers of extraordinary quaternary geology, resulting in a UNESCO World Heritage designation for the site. The quarry was filled in and restored as a wetland during the 1990s and is currently managed by the city as a recreational park and by the regional Conservation Authority as a natural heritage conservation site. To redevelop the industrial buildings and remediate the site, Evergreen is raising the $55 million (Canadian) project budget, of which $32 million has been invested to date. Evergreen’s mandate—to deepen the connection between people and nature by bringing nature, culture, and community together in the city 23 —is central to the site plan and design scheme. At its core, Evergreen Brick Works is a year-round learning center for citizens. The master plan proposes Canada’s first large-scale environmental discovery center integrating cultural and natural heritage, and ecological and social services, through a wide range of features. These include sustainable “green” buildings; a native plant nursery; a demonstration kitchen and children’s gardens; a local farmers’ market; an organic restaurant; conference and event facilities; children’s camps; and family, youth leadership, and youth-atrisk programming. The Brick Works project departs from other urban ecology endeavors in that it is not principally about restoration. Rather, in recognizing Evergreen’s urban constituency and its place at the heart of the urban landscape, the project centers on establishing a relationship between nature and culture. Interestingly, at its inception in 1991, Evergreen’s core mission was to “bring nature back to the city,” achieved primarily through naturalization and restoration efforts. The past decade has seen Evergreen’s mission evolve to a more sophisticated reading of urban ecologies and the means by which
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these are expressed in the urban landscape. This shift in thinking mirrors the evolution of other post-industrial remediation projects. The brick works master plan reflects this paradigm shift, as is evident in the four themes underpinning the project: Innovation & Discovery, showcasing innovative technologies and programming to help citizens integrate sustainability into their lives; Food & Community, focusing on nutrition programs for family and youth-at-risk, and the promotion and support of local, sustainable food sources; Natural & Cultural Heritage, conserving and protecting archaeological, industrial, and natural heritage through adaptive reuse of heritage buildings and landscape resources; and Gardening & Greening, providing opportunities for learning about local foods and cooking, native plant recognition and gardening, green design, and local habitats.24 As a learning center explicitly geared toward the integration of culture, nature, and community, situated in the heart of Canada’s largest city, Evergreen Brick Works is an innovative plan for the deployment of several ecologies within a complex urban landscape. Although juxtaposing elements of wild nature with groomed gardens, and arts and cultural activities with the old industrial buildings, the Brick Works does not suffer from conflicting land-use goals, as one might expect. Instead, the site is engaging creative ecological design as a manifestation of both cultural and natural heritage within the urban context. Not unlike Latz + Partner’s Duisberg Nord Park in Germany, the Brick Works site moves past the convention of ecology-as-nature preservation and into the realm of cultural and political ecologies, both as metaphor and program for learning and teaching ecological literacy. Yet the project still manages to give traction to operational ecologies of remediation and reclamation, both in its landscape plan for native habitats and in its adaptive reuse and “green” building. In all its complexity, the site offers a wide array
Garden in the city : Adaptive reuse of the Evergreen Brick Works turns a postindustrial brickmaking plant in into a native plant nursery, farmer’s market, and environmental learning center. Winter city : Adaptive reuse of the Evergreen Brick Works shifts with the seasons — summer greenhouses become winter ice pads and outdoor snowscapes, with the exposed steel structure open to the sky and the elements.
of contemporary interpretations of ecologies in the context of landscape and urbanism—from the artful juxtaposition of creative performance in an abandoned factory to urging the community to “rethink space.”
Reflections
The last decade of large-scale post-industrial urban projects has seen landscape and ecology become primary vectors in contemporary urbanism, and indeed, in city building writ large. In a “coming of age” moment, ecology has gone from subservient science to design partner in shaping global cities. From the vantage point of ecology, this is no small achievement, especially as it originates through the practice of landscape architecture, and to a lesser degree, through urban planning. As such, this new role for landscape offers concomitant fresh perspectives on, and roles for, its related and supporting disciplines, in particular, ecology. The (re)engagement of these disciplines signals a timely reinvigoration of both landscape architecture and planning, underscoring their centrality in the making of contemporary cities. In this context, the Toronto examples are only two of a growing number of projects across North America that reflect a catalytic moment in the evolution of the metropolis. In these and other similar cases, the post-industrial landscape is less concerned with restoration than remediation: casting back to a precolonial ideal of nature is neither feasible nor desirable. Rather, a new synthesis has emerged, seizing the niche between culture and nature, manifest in the insurgent ecologies of our time. Yet that quintessentially human act of intentional manipulation25 —the design of space and place—is nothing if not intimately connected with other species and the context in which we dwell. In the dynamic landscapes that characterize the modern urban region, the act of designing and thus
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Evergreen Brick Works, Toronto, begins the process of adaptive reuse with a simple paint job, urging passersby to “ Re-Think Space. ”
affecting and ultimately shaping both new and existing ecologies must therefore be born of an intimate understanding of place—of scale, context, and history. This is not a manifestation of ecological modernism, but rather, an evolution into an ecological urbanism. To design ecologies that sustain vibrant, healthy, and self-organizing urban landscapes, our interventions must necessarily be contextual and deliberative. To do so demands both fundamental renegotiation of our relationship with what we perceive as “nature” and our place with/in it, and a consequent reengagement with culture. Good (and thus necessarily ecological) design that results from this context, as I have articulated here and elsewhere,26 is adaptive, resilient, and reflective; it is born of place, and it honors the land that sustains us.
1 I have used the term “designer ecologies” to refer to the largely symbolic gestures designers use to recall or represent a relationship to nature, often out of necessity at relatively small scales or in conditions that are constrained. See Nina-Marie Lister, “Sustainable Large Parks : Ecological Design or Designer Ecology?” in Julia Czerniak and George Hargreaves, eds., Large Parks ( New York : Princeton Architectural Press, 2007 ), 31–51. In a similar but more pejorative context, William Thompson uses the term “boutique ecology” to refer to the often superficial ecological representation in landscape projects in which designers brand their projects “ecological” but avoid the challenges of dealing fundamentally with ecological complexity. See William Thompson, “Boutique Ecologies” Landscape Architecture, April 10 , 2006 , 2 As defined by Eugene P. Odum and Howard T. Odum in the classic text Fundamentals of Ecology ( third edition ) ( Philadelphia : Saunders, 1953 [1971] ). 3 As used in this broader context, for example, by Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind ( Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 1972 ). Similar examples can be found in the scholarship of John Dryzek, Tim Forsyth, Roger Keil, Sian Sullivan, Adam Swift, and Paul Robbins ( and others ) in political ecology, and Murray Bookchin, Ramchandra Guha, and David Pepper ( and others ) in social ecology. 4 Among many examples are : Harvard University Graduate School of Design’s new seminar in Ecology as Urbanism ( see : http ://www.gsd.harvard.edu/academic/ upd/maudmlaudrequirements.htm ); York University’s Faculty of Environmental Studies curriculum stream in political and cultural ecologies ( http ://www.yorku.ca/ fes/about/WhatIsEnvironmentalStudies.
htm ); the new research journal, Ecology of Food & Nutrition ( published by Taylor & Francis ); SAFE — Society for Agriculture and Food Ecology, a U.C.-Berkeley students’ group ( http ://agrariana.org/safe-smission ); Mike Davis’s The Ecology of Fear ( New York : Vintage Books, 1998 ); and Sandra Steingraber’s The Ecology of Pizza ( http ://www.motherearthnews.com/RealFood/2006 -06 -01/The-Ecology-of-PizzaOr-Why-Organic-Food-is-a-Bargain.aspx ). 5 See Charles Waldheim, ed., The Landscape Urbanism Reader ( New York : Princeton Architectural Press, 2006 ). 6 The evolution of ecological science in relation to planning has been traced by N.M. Lister, in “A Systems Approach to Biodiversity Conservation Planning,” Environmental Monitoring and Assessment 49, no. 2 /3 ( 1998 ) : 123 –155 . See also Brad Bass, R. Edward Byers, and Nina-Marie Lister, “Integrating Research on Ecohydrology and Land Use Change with Land Use Management,” Hydrological Processes 12 ( 1998 ) : 2217–2233 . 7 For example, Field Operations’ design for Fresh Kills, New York; OMA, Bruce Mau, and Inside Outside’s design for Parc Downsview, Toronto; Latz + Partner’s design for Landschaftspark Duisburg Nord; and Stoss’s design for the Lower Don Lands, Toronto. 8 Jane Amidon, “Big Nature,” in Lisa Tilder and Beth Bloustein, eds., Designing Ecologies ( New York : Princeton Architectural Press, 2009 ). 9 Ignasi de Sola-Morales Rubió, “Terrain Vague,” in Cynthia C. Davidson, ed., Anyplace ( Cambridge, MA : MIT Press, 1995 ), 120 . 10 Georgia Daskalakis and Omar Perez, “Things to Do in Detroit,” in Georgia Daskalakis, Charles Waldheim, and Jason Young, eds., Stalking Detroit ( Barcelona : ACTAR, 2001 ).
11 James Corner, “Landscape Urbanism,” in Mohsen Mostafavi, ed., Landscape Urbanism : A Manual for the Machinic Landscape ( London : Architectural Association, 2003 ), 58 –63 . 12 Charles Waldheim, “Landscape as Urbanism,” in Waldheim, ed., The Landscape Urbanism Reader, 37–53 . 13 The infrastructures of ecology, transportation, fuel, waste, water, and food are but a few of the extensions of surface conditions into the realm of urbanism. This concept was explored by a variety of landscape scholars at the symposium “Landscape and Infrastructure,” convened by Pierre Bélanger, Associate Professor in Landscape Architecture at the University of Toronto, October 25 , 2008 ( publication forthcoming ). 14 With thanks to Professor Brian Orland, who offered the addition of “flows” to this line of logic, following my Bracken Lecture on September 23 , 2008 , at Pennsylvania State University, Department of Landscape Architecture. 15 For a detailed development of adaptive ecological design, see Nina-Marie Lister, “Sustainable Large Parks,” and “Ecological Design for Industrial Ecology : Opportunities for ( Re ) Discovery” in Ray Coté, James Tansey, and Ann Dale, eds., Linking Industry and Ecology : A Question of Design ( Vancouver : UBC Press, 2005 ), 15 –28 . For a broader socio-ecological systems context, see David Waltner-Toews, James Kay, and Nina-Marie Lister, The Ecosystem Approach : Complexity, Uncertainty, and Managing for Sustainability ( New York : Columbia University Press, 2008 ). 16 C.S. “Buzz” Holling, “The Resilience of Terrestrial Ecosystems : Local Surprise and Global Change,” in W. C. Clark and R. Edward Munn, eds., Sustainable Development of the Biosphere ( Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 1986 ), 292–320 .
17 Ibid. 18 Lister, “Sustainable Large Parks,” and Waltner-Toews, Kay, and Lister, eds., The Ecosystem Approach. 19 City Mayors’ Statistics, “The World’s Largest Cities and Urban Areas in 2006 ,” http ://www.citymayors.com/statistics/ urban_2006_1.html ( accessed October 27, 2008 ). 20 See Statistics Canada, Annual Demographic Report 2005, catalog no. 91-213 -XIB ( Ottawa : Ministry of Industry, 2006 ); and Elizabeth McIsaac, “Immigrants in Canadian Cities : Census 2001 — What Do the Data Tell Us?” Policy Options ( May 2003 ), 58 –63 . 21 The international design competition was sponsored in 2007 by WATERFRONToronto, a government agency charged with overseeing the revitalization of the Toronto waterfront. See : http ://www. waterfrontoronto.ca. The Stoss-led team was comprised of Stoss Landscape Urbanism ( Boston ), Brown & Storey Architects Inc. ( Toronto ), and ZAS Architects ( Toronto ) with Nina-Marie Lister, pLandform, and Jackie Brookner, Brookner Studio NYC. 22 Evergreen, http ://evergreen.ca/ rethinkspace/?page_id=12 ( accessed October 30 , 2008 ). 23 Evergreen, http ://www.evergreen.ca/ en/about/about.html ( accessed October 30 , 2008 ) and http ://www.evergreen.ca/en/ brickworks/pdf/EBWCampaign_2008 .pdf ( page 3 ) ( accessed October 30 , 2008 ). 24 Evergreen, http ://evergreen.ca/ rethinkspace/?page_id=12 ( accessed October 30 , 2008 ). 25 While it may be argued that other species ( social mammals in particular ) also shape their habitats, it is generally accepted that only humans and the higherorder primates do so with intention — not merely instinct. 26 Lister, “Sustainable Large Parks,” 35 –57.
Hands-on experiential learning at the Children’s Discovery Centre, Evergreen Brick Works, Toronto
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