The Daniels Faculty’s former building at 230 College Street is now being renovated to become the home of U of T’s student union — but the its Green Roof Innovation Testing Laboratory on the rooftop, remains in full swing. We spoke to Master of Landscape Architecture students Catherine Howell and Hadi El-Shayeb about their experience working at the GRIT Lab this summer and the plans to launch a second site on the roof of the Faculty's new home at One Spadina Crescent.

How did you become involved with the GRIT Lab?
Catherine: The GRIT Lab was one of the main drivers for me to come to Daniels. I did my undergraduate degree in health studies at Queen’s and when figuring out what to do next, I saw the GRIT Lab website and thought, “this is so cool!” It was an interesting facet of landscape architecture and architecture that I had never heard of before. I had it in the back of my head that I wanted to help out in some way. I had Liat Margolis as a professor in first year, and she was very inspiring. The opportunity to work alongside Liat, while playing an active role in the green infrastructure movement, has made for an extremely engaging summer thus far.  

Hadi: I’ll be starting the Master of Landscape Architecture program in September. I did my undergraduate degree in Planning at the University of Waterloo, and a lot of my research was on climate change adaptation. I also worked for the Ministry of Environment and Climate Change as a Policy Intern on renewable energies, and attended the COP22 Marrakech the UN Climate Change Summit that happened in Morocco last November. The GRIT Lab was very interesting to me because green roofs are an opportunity to adapt to climate change. I messaged a few professors, including Liat, and thankfully she responded to me and added me onto the project. I have always been interested in landscape architecture and its role in ecological design. I’m really interested in environmental and climate change adaptation. GRIT Lab is a subset of that.

What are your responsibilities at the Lab?
C: We’re the “nine to fivers,” the Lab Managers and Research Assistants, so we have to be surface-level experts in everything, from electrical wiring to coding to sensors. The GRIT Lab is a system: it includes physical inputs, such as sunlight and water; the sensors that monitor factors such as rainfall, soil moisture, and water retention; a computer; and then the production of infographics that demonstrate these processes. We have to understand all levels of that process. We also have to help coordinate a number of people who are doing research here, including undergraduate, masters, and PHD engineering students. We need to make sure they’re happy with the data being collected, troubleshoot broken sensors, and so on. We’re also working on articles for publication that summarize GRIT Lab research so that it is understandable to the general public.

Sedum planting | Photo by Josie Harrison

And what has some of that research found?
C: I’m writing about green roof hydrology and how green roofs hold onto water. Right now, it’s understood that they can absorb up to 50% of stormwater, but actually with the right combination of plants and soil they can hold onto 70-80%, which is huge. Especially in cities like Toronto where we now have the Green Roof Bylaw, you can really maximize the benefits of your green roof if you know the right combinations. It can function as a low impact development option: if you have enough green roof coverage on your building then you might not have to install any ground water storm management infrastructure like swales or cisterns to meet the wet weather flow standards.

H: One of the articles I’m writing is on growing media, its effect on different performances, and how selecting different media can have different benefits. For example, both mineral-based and compost-based growing media are popular in Canada and Southern Ontario. It is believed that compost-based media compacts and loses organic content over time, but our studies show that it doesn’t actually do that, and, additionally, it can absorb about three times more water than mineral-based meda.

meadow planting | Photo by Josie Harrison

C: I’m also writing about bees and Sedum versus meadow planting. Right now there is a big push to promote native pollinators in Ontario. It has been shown that native plants attract more native bees, but Sedum, which is not native to this region, is the preferred green roof planting type. It goes to show that we have to carefully consider plant selection on green roofs if we want to promote biodiversity. With more and more greenroofs being built, the plants we choose could have a regional impact on ecological diversity.

What have you learned from your experience working at the GRIT Lab so far?
H: Seeing the technical components put into this green infrastructure has been a big thing for me. The importance of data collection and the nitty gritty details has been eye-opening. I’ve learned that there is a strong need to collect all the data to improve our systems.

C: I was surprised by how varied green roofs can be, and how the variables (planting type, depth, soil, irrigation type) can have different outcomes. I thought it would be pretty simple, like you can spread out a mat of Sedum and call it a day. But not all green roofs are created equal and you need to figure out the location, the size, and what you want your main objective to be to design one properly. Consciously designing green roofs is incredibly important for maximum effectiveness.

Catherine Howell looking south down Spadina Avenue from the roof of One Spadina. PhD student Omar Bawab is helping develop plans for a second site of the GRIT Lab over the summer | Photo by Josie Harrison

How will the GRIT Lab expand its research at One Spadina?
C: There is a giant cistern underneath One Spadina that holds all the rainwater that falls on the property. They want to use the grey water from the cistern to irrigate the green roof. We need to test the quality of that water and how it will affect the various plants on the roof. There will be quite a lot of urban contaminants, including salt from de-icing the walkways. I’m curious to see the results from that, whether the water will need to be treated or not.

H: Omar Bawab is an international PhD student here on a global exchange program, to help develop the plans for the green roof testing beds at One Spadina. He has a lot of experience with green roofs and particularly connected cisterns for water collection, which is the main purpose for building this roof. Catherine and I will be helping him draft the visual representation for the project.

GRIT Lab student researchers, from left to right: Redwan Baba & Diego Domingo, undergraduate students, Civil Engineering; Catherine Howell, MLA; Eric Wang, undergraduate student, Civil Engineering; Hadi El-Shayeb, MLA; Marisa Fryer, graduate student, Civil Engineering | Photo by Josie Harrison

How do you think your experience this summer will influence your future research or ambitions?
H: One thing I’m finding really interesting is linking the local scale action at the GRIT Lab to global scale policies. We have these huge ambitions to bring down emissions and stop the global average temperature from increasing, but how do we do that at a local scale? I’m interested in the role that landscape architecture can play in this.

C: Learning so much about green roofs as a summer job has really piqued my interest in them. As a landscape architect, I would love green roofs to be a big part of my practice when I start working in the field.

When he graduated in 2015, Jonah Ross-Marrs received the Jackman-Kuwabara Prize, awarded to the student judged to have the most outstanding Master of Architecture thesis of the year. That summer, he won a Pier 9 Artist-in-Residence fellowship at AutoDesk in San Francisco. How’s life a year after graduation? Honours Bachelor of Arts in Architectural Studies student Josie Northern Harrison (HBA 2017) caught up with Ross-Marrs over email to find out how his time at U of T has helped prepare him for future work in computation and architecture — and how he plans to expand on his thesis this Fall as a new student in the Master of Science in Architecture Studies (SMArchS) in Computation at MIT.

What inspired you to study architecture at the Daniels Faculty?
After completing an undergraduate degree in History, I wanted to study something tangible that would give me a foothold in the professional world. I was inspired by the models and diagrams on the walls of the architecture department at McGill University and felt I would be more at home in such an environment. I thought architecture might be an opportunity to build on my hobby of making electro-mechanical things and bring my creative work into a more formal academic environment.

I decided to study at Daniels because of the accomplished faculty. I liked the diversity of professors and felt the reputation of the school would help me in my career. I also felt that living in a large urban center would be a good supplement to my studies.

When did you first start experimenting with open source software?
I have been interested in electronics since the mid-1990s, when I began building simple solar-powered robots from e-waste. My interest was sparked by the magic of tiny, intricate mechanisms coming to life when charged with electricity. When Arduino (an accessible type of open-source hardware and software) was released, it allowed a whole group of people like myself access to microchips (mini reprogrammable electronic brains) that was previously unavailable. Once I was familiar with Arduino, it was a natural progression to make Do-It-Yourself (DIY) Computer Numerically Controlled (CNC) machines.

How did studying at the University of Toronto influence your work?
Every design studio was, for me, life-changing and extremely challenging. I wasn’t sure I would continue on the traditional path of a practicing architect, so I used the courses I took as opportunities to develop my own creative method. I began to develop a creative process and learned that my strengths were in visual communication. I also learned to work within a highly critical environment and to accept criticism of my work. Studying design changed my view of making and made me aspire to higher ideals and have a greater appreciation for the context of my work.

Living in Toronto, I had access to valuable resources needed for experiments with custom CNC tooling. Active Surplus, Jacob’s Hardware, Above All Electronic Surplus, Hacklab.To, and other communities were crucial assets to my projects.

The Mini CNC Foam Cutter tutorial that you posted on Instructableshas been very successful (with ~42,000 views and ~500 favorites). Will you continue to contribute to the open source/hardware hacking community?
I have published a few more Instructables since the Mini CNC Foam Cutter and hope to get feedback from the community about the value of these projects. I hope to meaningfully contribute to the open-source community because I build on projects created by my peers as prime resources for my investigations. For the open-source hardware community in particular, I would like to continue to develop a series of mini CNC machines that work with different materials and use e-waste components in different ways.

What was it like being an Artist-in-Residence at the Autodesk Pier 9?
The Autodesk Artist-in-Residence Program was an excellent opportunity to interact with the programmers who develop software used by designers, and to gain access to cutting edge fabrication technologies. It was also an opportunity to meet incredibly talented designers and artists from around the world and learn from their practices. The San Francisco tech scene in general is extremely stimulating and full of intelligent and entrepreneurial individuals.

What did you create for the residency?
My project captured a moment that is normally lost in the process of printing a 3D model. When a computer prepares a 3D model for printing, it rebuilds the model out of triangles (i.e. translates the model into triangles) before virtually slicing the model into layers for the 3D printer to interpret. This first triangulation step is called the meshing process. I printed each component of this translation process separately in the order they have been rebuilt by the meshing algorithm. This was done with various input models: a house, a car, a washing machine, or a pencil sharpener. The results visualize the work of the meshing algorithms, providing a behind-the-scenes look into an almost instantaneous computer process that designers interact with every day but would never experience spatially. The potential of the project is in the way it can analyze and compare the behavior of different algorithms designed to do the same task in a kind of visual short-hand.

Do you hope to expand on the work you did for your MArch thesis in the SMArchS program in Computation at MIT?
At MIT, I hope to continue exploring my MArch thesis project and follow it wherever it leads me while challenging myself to increase my skill level in programming languages. Most of all, I hope to meet others in my field and learn from them, hopefully allowing myself to evolve and develop new insights.

Do you have any advice for students starting their Masters of Architecture degree next year?
I would suggest attending the guest lectures as they are a valuable opportunity to get insight into the design process and various strategies of presenting work. I think maintaining an interest in extra-architecture subjects is important because of the nature of inspiration. Connected with this, I think it is important to find ways to maintain a balanced lifestyle throughout the degree.

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

Between rising lake levels, routinely flooded basements, and recent memories of cars and trains stranded in flooded streets, water is on the mind of many Torontonians. With extreme weather events on the rise due to climate change, what can be done to protect our homes, roads, and parkland in the future?

“With GRIT Lab on the job, the Toronto Islands, as well as the rest of the city, may avoid a future as a swimming pool,” says the Globe and Mail’s Architourist Dave LeBlanc.

LeBlanc recently visited the Daniels Faculty’s award winning Green Roof Innovation Testing Laboratory and met with its director Liat Margolis, who told him about the lab's research, which aims to improve how we design green roofs to reap the most environmental rewards in urban environments like Toronto. In addition to aiding in water management by absorbing rainfall before it washes into our sewers and homes, green roofs provide thermal cooling, increased biodiversity, pollinator habitats, and more.

But, as Margolis says, “not all roofs are created equal.” The interdisciplinary team of researchers at the GRIT Lab are working to discover which combination of materials will have the largest impact, given the site, factors such as the height of the building, and the community's environmental goals.  Because, as LeBlanc writes, “different plants thrive under different conditions,” and because the environmental issues in one area may be different from another, there’s "no one size fits all" solution.

Writes LeBlanc:

Prof. Margolis explains that, properly designed, a green roof can retain 85 per cent to 90 per cent of rainfall during the peak of a storm. In a future Toronto with, say 50-per-cent coverage, this would deliver “a significant contribution in flood reduction.” If a green roof is closer to protected Greenbelt areas (these do dip into Scarborough), it’s better to allow more of that water to find its way back into the soil, so, in that case, give the bees wildflowers instead.
 

To help get out the message and inform best practices, the GRIT Lab works with a number of industry partners, including Tremco, bioroof systems, and Sky Solar, among others. The City of Toronto — which in 2009 became the first city in North America to adopt a green roof bylaw requiring new buildings with a gross floor area over 2,000 square metres to have a green roof — has also worked closely with the lab, providing funding and reviewing research results.

Although the Daniels Faculty has moved to its new home at One Spadina, the GRIT Lab will continue its research on the roof of Faculty’s former building at 230 College. A second site will open on the roof of One Spadina Crescent in the near future.

Visit the Globe and Mail’s website to read the full article “In search of the greenest roof.”

In April, Daniels Lecturer and alumnus Ultan Byrne (MArch 2013) and alumna Elise Hunchuck (MLA 2016) were invited to present their respective research at the "Architectures, Data & Natures: The Politics of Environments" conference in Tallinn, Estonia. Organized by Maroš Krivy and featuring keynote talks by Matthew Gandy (Cambridge) and Doug Spencer (AA, Westminster), the conference interrogated the “two themes that stand out in contemporary architecture and urbanism: ecology, revolving around sustainability, resilience, metabolic optimization and energy efficiency; and cybernetics, staking the future upon pervasive interactivity, ubiquitous computing, and ‘big dat­a’.” The hypothesis discussed at the conference is that “they are really two facets of a single environmental question: while real-time adjustments, behaviour optimisation, and smart solutions are central to urban environmentalism, the omnipresent network of perpetually interacting digital objects becomes itself the environment of everyday life.”

“Typical CAPTCHA Threshold” screenshot by Ultan Byrne, 2017

In response to this environmental question, Ultan Byrne presented his work “Digital Thresholds and the Classification of Network Users” in which he looked to the technologies of the threshold that seek to distinguish ‘human’ from ‘bot,’ questioning them within the framework of urban theory: how can these technologies be conceptually positioned in relation to other technologies of the threshold (the password, the lock, the door, the city gate)? In what way did they develop over time (and with what relationship to research in Artificial Intelligence)? Byrne’s presentation looked to understand the contemporary moment, when it remains technologically feasible and is also considered valuable (economically, socially) to distinguish network users in this way.

Elise Hunchuck presented her project, Incomplete Atlas of Stones, in a presentation with Christina Leigh Geros (Harvard GSD) titled “Cartographies of Residence for Cities yet to Come: Points, Lines, and Fields.” Reassessing the terms of engagement with sustainability and resilience through her field work in northern Japan, Hunchuck presented her survey and mapping of historical environmental data for community-based resilience in the form of tsunami stone markers along the Sanriku Coast. A network of historical data at the scale of 1:1, Elise asks what the epistemological status of these markers might be; what kind of knowledge do they produce; and, what is the effect of these markers on the way communities and governments understand the always present risk of an earthquake or tsunami?

Presented as a case study alongside the PetaBencana initiative (in which the power of citizen cartographers is harnessed by the gathering, sorting, and displaying of geotagged tweets; each tweet sharing individual information about flooding, inundation, or critical water infrastructure in Jakarta, Indonesia), Elise’s Incomplete Atlas asks increasingly urgent questions while proposing transferable, multi-scalar, multi-centered approaches as a way to think in relation to our environments.

Both presentations will be made available online by the Faculty of Architecture, Estonian Academy of Arts, Estonia, in cooperation with the Department of Geography, Cambridge University, UK (the research project Rethinking Urban Nature).

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Ultan Byrne is a researcher with previous degrees in architecture and philosophy. In a combination of teaching, writing, and programming, Ultan considers the relationships between technologies of digital networking and persistent questions of architectural/urban design. Ultan is a lecturer at Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design at the University of Toronto.

Elise Hunchuck is a researcher and designer with previous degrees in landscape architecture, philosophy, and geography whose work focuses on bringing together fieldwork and design through collaborative practices of observation, care, and coordination, facilitating multidisciplinary exchanges between teaching and representational methods as a way to further develop landscape-oriented research methodologies at the urban scale. Elise is currently based in Berlin as the research coordinator of anexact office and the project assistant for Reassembling the Natural. A University Olmsted Scholar, Elise is also a member of the editorial board for SCAPEGOAT: Architecture / Landscape / Political Economy. Elise’s field work and research in Japan that formed the basis of her talk and MLA thesis was generously supported by the Daniels Faculty Peter Prangnell Travel Award (2015).

Lead image: “77 Tsunami Stones” from An Incomplete Atlas of Stones by Elise Hunchuck, 2017

By Romi Levine
cross-posted from U of T News

University of Toronto post-doctoral researcher Terri Peters admires the sunlit graduate studio space on the third floor of the just-renovated One Spadina building – the new home of U of T’s John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design.

The large north-facing windows and the numerous skylights brighten the space without the need for artificial light.

Peters says this space is not only aesthetically pleasing, but it also has benefits to our well-being.

“You’ve got the natural light coming in and there's numerous studies that show increased productivity in day-lit environments,” she says. “Daylight is central to architecture and experience and to energy savings.”

Peters is the Daniels faculty’s only post-doctoral researcher. She studies how architecture and design can be used to both improve people’s well-being and be sustainable – calling the design practice “superarchitecture.”

“The idea with superarchitecture isn't that our buildings will get better, it's that we get better being in our buildings,” she says. “What if the jeans I was wearing were also toning my thighs and exercising me or my jacket should be charging my phone – all these things in our environment are designed and could be making us better.”

Peters guest-edited the most recent edition of Architectural Design Magazine on the topic of designing for health. Starting next month, she will be researching superarchitecture as a cross-disciplinary initiative between Daniels and the School of the Environment in the Faculty of Arts & Science.

“U of T has so many different people working on different parts of this puzzle,” she says. “No one discipline can claim all of this territory.”

There has been plenty of proof that improving our surroundings – by boosting natural light, adding greenery and plenty of fresh air – makes us feel healthier, says Peters.

“I've been gathering the evidence for this stuff. If we can prove it and we can argue it better, maybe it'll become a part of green building.”

There are certifications that measure well-being and sustainability, such as the WELL and LEED standards – but there needs to be a more comprehensive system, she says.

“There are challenges because fundamentally it should be about taking the existing condition and making it better whereas these green and wellness rating systems are about benchmarks and standards and measurement – they don't compare itself to itself,” says Peters.

Toronto is beginning to embrace superarchitecture, she says. The Active House – an experimental home designed by architecture firm superkül, which is led by U of T instructor Meg Graham – is putting these principles into practice.

“They're measuring green-ness and health and well-being and they're a bit like demonstration houses – they're not a mainstream way of building but they could be,” says Peters.

As these small examples of superarchitecture become more prominent, people will start to see – and feel – the benefits of conscientious design, she says.

“As people see it paying off, they’ll want these spaces and environments more – it will take off.”

Image, top: Terri Peters says the natural light at U of T's One Spadina building has "super" qualities (photo by Romi Levine)

Image, above: The Centennial Park Active House in Toronto was designed by superkül architects with Great Gulf and Velux Canada. It's an example of how superarchitecture can be used when designing homes, says Peters (photo courtesy of Terri Peters)

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

Associate Professor Liat Margolis reported findings from the past seven years of research at the Daniels Faculty's Green Roof Innovation Testing Laboratory (GRIT Lab) in an article written for the most recent issue of Ground Landscape Architect Quarterly. 

The GRIT Lab is located on the rooftop of 230 College Street in Toronto. Established in 2010, the  state-of-the-art facility is the only one of its kind for testing the environmental performance associated with green roofs, green walls and solar photovoltaic technologies in Canada.

“It is essential that design guidelines and performance benchmarks emerge from an understanding of the local environment,” writes Margolis. “In other words, empirical research and post-construction evaluation undertaken in distinct climate and ecological regions will help to generate the quantitative data necessary to develop more nuanced and locally relevant policies and practices.”

Margolis and the interdisciplinarey team of researchs that work at the GRIT Lab found that in some situations, different variables — such as plant and soil type, irrigation practices, and soil depth — provided nuanced outcomes that would benefit different situations. For example, Sedum plants were more hardy than the grass and herbaceous plantings; however, the grass and herbaceous plantings provided a more welcoming environment for native wild bee populations.

Margolis cites examples like this to illustrate the importance of continuing the investigation of green roof performance metrics. Says Margolis, “many options exist and have yet to be developed for growing media, plant communities, and irrigation techniques.”

For the full article and more articles from the Winter 2016 issue, visit the Ground magazine website.

Announcing the Committee on the Environment, Climate Change, and Sustainability
Margolis is among the members of U of T's new Committee on the Environment, Climate Change, and Sustainability. The creation of this Committee was one of the key recommendations in the Administrative Response to the Report of the President’s Advisory Committee on Divestment from Fossil Fuels. Its mandate is to identify ways to advance the University’s contribution to meeting the challenge of climate change and sustainability, with a particular focus on research and innovation, teaching, and University operations.

Last year, Sustainable Canada Dialogues (SCD) — a network of over 60 scholars from universities across Canada — launched a report outlining “science-based, viable solutions for greenhouse gas reductions.”

Last week, it released a new, follow-up report: Rating Canada's Climate Policy, which detailed the country’s progress to date.

So how well is Canada doing in addressing climate change? The group — which includes Associate Professor Liat Margolis of the Daniels Faculty — is “cautiously positive about Canada’s deployment of climate policies,” but notes that such policies “will lack credibility until the federal government begins to ask the really difficult question: how to transition away from fossil fuels?”

Margolis, the director of the Daniels Faculty’s GRIT Lab (that’s the Green Roof Innovation Testing Laboratory) spoke to U of T News about the report, and the steps that Canada needs to take to make meaningful inroads on the climate change front.

Key to tackling climate change in cities are policies to increase and maintain the urban forest. Margolis was also recently interviewed for an article in the Globe and Mail about the important role that parks and trees play in urban environments:

The benefits of trees and parks in urban centres have been known since the green belts (open land areas protected from urban sprawl) set aside in England during the Industrial Revolution and the parks in U.S. cities designed in the mid-1800s by visionary landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted, who was also a public health official. “It is not a new idea,” [Margolis] says, “but, one that we have to continue to integrate into policy and planning.”