Selected Topics in Urban Design

Landscape Infrastructure: The Metropolitan Toronto Case

Urban landscapes create a spatial armature and infrastructure for the metropolis and its region. Landscape infrastructure exists beyond simple form. It is understood as a network of open spaces, connections, and facilities, based on geomorphology, and provides neighborhood amenities and ecological services and support for more conventional infrastructure systems like transport or water sanitation and supply. Compendia of physical and social systems, these urban landscapes are shaped over time by reciprocal interactions between human and non-human forces and processes. These interactions have intensified since the end of the 19th century and they have accelerated even more with post-war metropolitan sprawl. This phenomenon has been addressed differently at different times and in different places, but the ideas of "parks systems" and "open space networks" have offered broadly shared planning principles. Recently, landscape ecology, sustainable development and biodiversity have provided new frameworks for understanding and designing those.