Bordering Canada and the United States, North America's Great Lakes are well known as the world's largest body of freshwater, which has made the region an attractive area for urban growth. But what other characteristics — ecological, geological, cultural, and political — are common to the region, which spans two provinces and eight states? And how have they influenced urbanization? How might understanding the Great Lakes basin as one of the continent’s coastal zones help inform future development and design?

Third Coast Atlas: A Prelude to a Plan, by Daniels Faculty Associate Professor Mason White, together with Clare Lyster, Charles Waldheim, and Daniel Ibañez, provides a multi-layered description of the process of urbanization along North America’s “Third Coast.” The large, hardcover book, filled with maps, plans, diagrams, timelines, photographs, and essays, offers an in-depth description of the region, laying the foundation for future engagement and regional endeavors.

“In a continent that often looks to the powers on its east and west coasts, this book envisions a new international, mid-continent epicenter,” writes Keller Easterling in the Atlas’ Forward. “Third Coast Atlas allows us to imagine a time when serious politicians, planners, and developers would never dream of advocating for urban or regional enterprises without first considering the profound correlative intelligence of territorial design.”

Essays include “Cutting the Corporate Lawn,” an analysis the industry’s environmental imact in the region, by Daniels Faculty Associate Professor Alissa North; and “Good’s Gone, Fine’s just Perfect,” an overview of Toronto’s urban development by Dean Richard Sommer. Daniels Faculty Alumni Geoffrey Thün (MUD 2007), and Heather Braiden (MLA 2005) also contributed to the book.

The Atlas is already receiving critical acclaim: Metropolis Magazine listed it among its top 25 books for Fall.

The Toronto book launch will take place at the Daniels Building at One Spadina on October 24. Save the Date! Information will be posted on our Events page shortly.

Below is a discussion with Clare Lyster and Mason White recorded at the Harvard Graduate School of Design.

The Graduate Architecture, Landscape, and Design Student Union (GALDSU) will launch this year’s issue on Friday, October 6. This issue will explore “the multiplicity of ways in which the graduate students of Daniels confront the realities of our world – and their worlds – as a way to imagine and create space for multiple futures.” How, Co-Editors and Alumni Jasper Flores, Elise Hunchuck, and Dayne Roy-Caldwell ask, do the “practices of architecture, landscape architecture, urban design, and visual studies suggest ways for us to design with and for each other?”

The launch party will take place at OFFSITE Concept Space at 867 Dundas Street West. There will be music, food, and a cash bar. Copies of the new publication will be available to purchase. For more information, visit the Eventbrite page.

A note from the editors on the cover image (pictured above): “The moon was installed at the Art Museum at the University of Toronto in April 2016, alongside Gillian Dykeman (MVS 2016)'s video 'Dispatches from the Feminist Utopian Future,' watercolour schematic drawings of the earthworks, and a keystone covered in tachyon particles. For more, please see 'Dispatches from the Feminist Utopian Future (page 13-18) and Psychic Strata: Land, Art, Subjectivity (page 19-26). Both works are by Gillian Dykeman. The cover photograph was taken by Jesse Boles (MVS 2015), courtesy of Gillian Dykeman (2015).

Other photos (in order of appearance): 2-On Spheres by Ekaterina Dovjenko, 3-Wasting Futures by Elaine Chau, 4-To Melt Into Air, Slowly by Vanessa Abram, 5-∆ Museum by Melissa Gerskup and Ray Wu

Bachelor of Arts in Architectural Studies student Marienka Bishop-Kovac and Masters of Architecture student Phat Le recently published the 2nd issue of their zine titled I’M SO MAD that documents stories about living and growing up in Toronto. The first edition featured stories written by Bishop-Kovac and Le. This recent edition expanded to the larger architectural community to showcase stories from citizens concerned with gentrification in Toronto.

“Toronto, my friends have written about you and the fond memories they have shared with you,” writes Bishop-Kovac in I’M SO MAD. “We want a Toronto that is accessible, we want Toronto to live up to another one of its nicknames, Toronto the Good!”

I’M SO MAD 2 is an archive of stories from Daniels Faculty students and alumni Ahlam Mo, Alexandra Spalding, Elif Özçelik, Ji Song Sun, Josie Northern Harrison, Waiyee Chou, Marienka Bishop-Kovac, and Phat Le, and members of Toronto's architectural community Philip Ocampo, Khadijah Salawutang, Mubashir Baweja, and Victoria Willis. Landmarks mentioned include 1840-50 Victoria Park Ave, Rexdale Mall, Coffee Time, the bus stop at Pharmacy Ave/St. Clair, and many more.

'We are putting our memories into words to start a dialogue about gentrification,' Bishop-Kovac told U of T News earlier this year.

I’M SO MAD 2 can be viewed online through Issuu.

In recent years, Broward County located in Southeast Florida hasn’t been able to rely on historical data when preparing their prevention measures against flooding; the weather patterns and sea levels have consistently deviated from expected standards. According to Associate Processor Fadi Masoud,"Nowhere in North America are the patterns of precarious coastal development more visible than in South Florida...Thirty-five miles of levees and 2,000 hydraulic pumping stations drain a metropolitan area of 6,137 square miles (15,890 km²), resulting in the ‘world’s largest wet subdivision’ with $152 billion worth of property projected to be below sea level by 2050." As sea levels rise, millions of Americans could be forced to leave their homes.

So how does a city or region plan in the face of such precariousness? Masoud explored an alternative approach to land-use planning in the article "Coding Flux: Redesigning the Migranting Coast," recently published in Scenario Journal. "The pressures of accelerating coastal change demand a new responsive and flexible zoning paradigm that introduces time, process, and potential into land use regulation," writes Masoud.

Working under a collaborative project between MIT's Urban Risk Lab and the University of Toronto's Daniels Faculty, Masoud — with a team that includes Lecturer Ultan Byrne, Mayank Ojha, Aditiya Barve, and Kelly Leilani Main — has been researching and developing a new method of planning for future weather events for Broward County. They call it “flux code zoning” because of its ability to represent a range of projected future conditions.

Four ecological paradigms have had a direct impact on public policy in North America. Image by Fadi Masoud.

“Normative or traditional zoning has historically relied on two conditions: on the regulation of land and the regulation of use,” writes Masoud. “We posit a third condition, a layer of the zoning envelope that introduces time, process, and scenario-driven flexibility into land use regulation.”

Visit Scenario Journal to read the full article.

Photo, top: South Florida’s urban fabric surrounded by water on three sides. Image by Fadi Masoud.

Associate Professor Liat Margolis was among the lead authors of a report by Sustainable Canada Dialogues urging Canada to shift from an oil producing country to a low-carbon energy leader. The independent paper, written at the invitation of Natural Resources Canada, was developed to examine how Canada could transition to low-carbon energy systems while remaining globally competitive.

Seventy-one university researchers from across the county co-authored the report, which argued that “Canada can seize the global low-carbon energy transition as an opportunity to build a major new economic engine for the country.”

The director of the Daniels Faculty’s Green Roof Innovation Testing Laboratory, Margolis’ research and expertise in performative landscapes and urban infrastructure informed the report’s section on cities, which “have a central role in the low-carbon energy transition” through planning and the management of urban growth.

According to the report, accelerating a shift to a low-carbon economy will require:

• Reducing overall energy demand through energy efficiency and conservation
• Increasing electrification and switching to low-carbon-emitting sources of electricity
• Progressively replacing high-carbon petroleum-based fuels with low-carbon ones

The technologies to make these changes are readily available, say the scholars. So what is stopping us?

“We believe that the key barriers to accelerating the low-carbon energy transition are social, political and organizational” says Professor Catherine Potvin of McGill University who coordinated the report.

The authors point out that “in the past, Canada has successfully undertaken other journeys of great magnitude – including adopting universal healthcare and launching social security.” They argue that “the decarbonisation journey is of equal importance.”

Other U of T faculty who contributed to the report include: Professors John Robinson, Matthew Hoffman, and Steven Bernstein, Munk School of Global Affairs; Associate Professor Matti Siemiatycki and Professor Danny Harvey, Geography and Planning.

Sustainable Canada Dialogues (SCD) aims to propose a range of science-based and viable policy options that could motivate change to help Canada in the necessary transition to more sustainable development. Through the mobilization of scientific expertise, the initiative targets the identification of positive solutions to overcome obstacles to sustainability. Margolis is a member of SCD’s research team, which now includes over 80 researchers from every province in Canada.

Photo, top,  by Catherine Howell

First year Masters of Architecture student Josh Silver recently published the second issue of his zine titled Cntrl+Z[ine]. The publication imagines a series of narratives using fellow student work as a starting point.

Writes Silver:

"Architectural images contain accidental moments of narrative: a scale figure, a shadow designed, a moment, a view. The latent narratives can begin to reveal themselves as stories of poems or songs or essays or memories remembered in passing. This publication explores those accidents of representation; the stories of images, the places imagined but remembered nevertheless as real déjà vu."

CNTRL+Z[ine] #2 includes work from Masters of Architecture students Yasmin Al Sammarai, Bobbi Bortolussi, Diana Franco, Avi Odenheimer, Siri Hermanski, Martin Drozdowski, and Jess Misak. The full issue can be viewed on Issuu.

Image, top: Self-portrait by Josh Silver

Post Doctoral Fellow Roberto Damiani has received a 2017 grant from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts for a proposed book on the work of Professor Emeritus George Baird, former Dean of the Daniels Faculty (2004-2009). Titled The Architect and the Public: The Contribution of George Baird to Architecture, the book will include contributions by Daniels Faculty members Lecturer Hans Ibelings, Director of Master of Architecture Program Robert Levit, Assistant Professor Michael Piper, Professor Brigitte Shim, and Dean Richard Sommer. Other contributors include Pier Vittorio Aureli, Joseph Bedford, Louis Martin, Joan Ockman, Jorge Silvetti, Hans Teerds, and Roemer van Toorn.

From the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts' website:

The Architect and the Public is a collection of essays and interviews on the work of George Baird, and serves as evidence of the architect's public engagement with contemporary society. With the rise of mass media, traditional modes of producing and communicating architecture have been transformed, as many practitioners choose to express the cultural and societal relevance of buildings, and to ground architectural design beyond personal agendas. George Baird's work and research reflects this practice, and Baird—along with Colin Rowe, Kenneth Frampton, and Peter Eisenman—has served as a model for North American architectural debate. From his early theoretical writings as a doctoral student, to his involvement with Toronto city planning, to his commitment to teaching at the University of Toronto and Harvard, Baird played a key role in shaping the relationship between architecture and its multiple publics, many of which emerged in the second half of the twentieth century.

In 2017, the Graham Foundation awarded $568,500 to 72 projects by individuals. The Architect and the Public is one of 34 publications included in the 2017 Grantees list. It is scheduled to be published in 2018.

Damiani is the organizer and curator of Italy under Construction, a program of exhibitions and lectures on contemporary Italian architecture, in collaboration with the Italian Cultural Institute in Toronto. Earlier this year, he curated an exhibition titled Palimpsests and Interfaces that presented four civic buildings by the Venice based architect Renato Rizzi, and seven buildings — four residential and three office buildings — by Cino Zucchi Architetti based in Milan. Information about the exhibition can be found on the Italian Cultural Institute website.

Photo, top: George Baird (front), Ted Teshima (behind). Courtesy of Canadian Architectural Archives, University of Calgary. Toronto, May 1959.

Developing ways to make our contemporary suburbs more livable, humanly scaled, and civically oriented is challenging without a better understanding how they work: why they grew the way they did and the economic pressures that continue to influence the way they’re designed.

Enter Mallopoly, a new website developed by Assistant Professor Michael Piper with students from the Daniels Faculty, including collaborators: Emma Dunn (2015) and Zoe Renaud (2015); the development team: Mina Hanna (2015), Rachel Heighway (2015), and Salome Nikuradze (2016); and course participants: Jordan Bischoff (2015), Janice Lo (2015), Ayda Rasoulzadeh (2015), Beatrice Demers Viau (2015), and Anna Wan (2015). Based on Monopoly, the popular board game about land speculation in the late 19th century mercantile city, Mallopoly provides a graphic manual to help urbanists understand an economic logic for the built form of polycentric urban regions, such as the Greater Toronto Area (GTA).

“The goal is to provide designers with a fresh understanding of these places,” explains the Mallopoly team on their website. This fresh understanding can then be used as a basis for “imagining new civic futures for suburban agglomerations.”

The team describes how this game of city building is organized around malls — the new anchors for the many centres and edge cities that make up the contemporary megalopolis. Over the last thirty years, other large buildings have grouped up around malls producing a quasi civic aggregation of stand-alone buildings whose latent formal logic has yet to be fully understood in architectural or morphological terms.

From Mallopoly’s website:

Like many cities in North America, the GTA has been decentralizing since the post-war boom; the prevailing economic cause being cheap land at the periphery. Sustained governmental and market measures that ensure affordability, access to property; and the rise of the middle class after the war all contributed to Toronto's expansion. During the early phases of urban dispersal, buildings seemed to repel each other with maximum entropy producing a scattered urban form. Car use obviated the need for physical coherence between buildings, helping to produce a built form that seemed to spread like confetti.

In the proposed game, players would start from the downtown core of Toronto and move along the highway to come across “interchange spots” where they could purchase a property. Like the board game Monopoly, players could either purchase a low value property to build cheap and fast or save to densify more inherently valuable sites. After determining where to build, players of this game would then draw a “technique card” to determine how to build, or the type of spatial relationship they are to use between the new buildings and existing mall agglomeration.

The property values and spatial relationships are all based on a study of the polycentric urban form in the GTA. In a sense, the rules to this game are a mirror to reality, and the game itself an opportunity to learn about it. From this understanding, the Mallopoly team argues, new rules can be written that may bring about well informed, yet optimistically motivated alternatives to the current state of the suburbs.

Images above from mallopoly.ca

Mallopoly began as a research studio on Toronto malls at the University of Toronto coordinated by Michael Piper. It has since developed into this online publication.

MALLOPOLLY COLLABORATORS
Michael Piper, Emma Dunn, Zoe Renaud
Development: Mina Hanna, Rachel Heighway, Salome Nikuradze
Research studio: Jordan Bischoff, Janice Lo, Ayda Rasoulzadeh, Beatrice Demers Viau, Anna Wan

SISTER SUBURB
www.projectsuburb.com

Bachelor of Arts in Architectural Studies students Phat Le and Marienka Bishop-Kovac recently published a zine titled I’M SO MAD that documents stories about growing up in the Trinity Bellwoods area in Toronto.

"We love Toronto so much; it's hard seeing the neighbourhood that we grew up in dramatically change," write Le and Bishop-Kovac. "We hope that this zine archives our childhood memories before they fade and encourages others to externalize their feelings of displacement.”

The zine documents existing and bygone landmarks of the Trinity Bellwoods area: Classic Variety, Saint John’s Lutheran Church, Superior Sausage Company, 210 Ossington, and Trinity Bellwoods Park. With each landmark is an accompanying memory about the place: buying sausages for a Slovak dinner, eating injera in the basement of a church, or admiring the moustache of a convenience store clerk.

I’M SO MAD can be viewed online through Issuu.