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).

/////

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.”

Associate Professor Mason White will serve as the Jury Chair for this year’s Steedman Fellowship — one of the oldest and most prestigious awards in the United States. The 2016 Call for Proposals marks a shift for the biannual Fellowship from a design competition to an invitation to develop research proposals that respond to a particular theme. To go along with this change, White created the 2016 theme of Adaptation.

From the Steedman Fellowship website:

“Our age is increasingly defined by unpredictability and a need for contingency in design. However, the life of a building or design cannot always keep pace with changes in culture, context, or climate. How is the rigidity of architecture slackened? Where does the ability to adjust, modify, or respond to factors exist? Can (and does) Architecture adapt?  

This year, the theme of adaptation is offered as an area of enquiry. In biology, adaptation enhances the survival and fitness of organisms. Within design, demands for adaptive responses to climatic, cultural, or societal change have tested architecture’s transformative properties. More than ever, exciting new considerations of accessibility, sustainability, and flexibility are being incorporated earlier and earlier into design processes. It could be argued that an inability of architecture to adapt will be its demise.”

 

The Steedman Fellowship is open to practicing architects anywhere in the world who have received an accredited degree in architecture within the last eight years. Proposals are due November 1. The winning proposal will receive $50,000 to support up to a year of international travel and research. Other members of the jury include Deborah Berke, Elena Cánovas, Joyce Hwang, and Jeff Ryan.

White, along with Lola Sheppard, is a founding Partner at Lateral Office. Earlier this year, their firm won a Royal Architectural Institute of Canada Urban Design Award for Impulse — a playful installation created for the Place des Festival in Montreal. The artwork transformed Montreal’s arts district “into a space of urban play through a series of thirty interactive acoustic illuminated see-saws that respond and transform when in motion.”

During a trip to Adelaide, Australia in 2015, Jordan Duke witnessed her first wildfire.

“We were driving over a hill and I could see a large plume of smoke in the horizon,” she said. “Thousands of hectares were on fire.” From the plane, the next day when she flew out, Duke was struck by the vast expanse of charred earth. She thought about it the entire flight home.

As a student in the Master of Landscape Architecture program at the John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design, Duke wondered: what could landscape architects do to help mitigate wildfire disasters? In the wake of the fire that struck Fort McMurray in Alberta in May, it’s a question that carries increased relevance — particularly since wildfires are predicted to increase in the future.

For her thesis project the following year, Duke researched how wildfires could be mitigated through tools that exist within the realm of landscape architecture. Her research culminated in the development of a strategy for Cleland Conservation Park. The park is based in South Australia where in February 2009, wildfires claimed over 170 lives. Her plan — which combined remote sensors embedded in the landscape with site-specific landscape design strategies that would produce both short- and long-term results — projected new possibilities, not only for the field of landscape architecture but also for how we could diminish such disasters in the future.

“There’s a lot of planning when it comes to wildfires in terms of where to build neighbourhoods, and there are many techniques to track and evaluate an area’s likelihood of burning, but I found that there were few systems in place to reduce the risk of a large wildfire occurring in the first place, “ says Duke.

Inspired by her work the previous summer at the Daniels Faculty’s Green Roof Innovation Testing Laboratory (gritlab), the first part of her strategy included embedding remote sensors within the landscape that would allow for real-time monitoring of data such as humidity, wind, temperature, vegetation density, and water availability — factors that contribute to the likelihood of a fire.

“At gritlab, we learned that sensor technology is cheap and easy to deploy. I had no computer engineering background, but by the end of the summer, we were installing sensors throughout the green roof, downloading data and doing analysis,” says Duke. “This triggered an idea: what if we could take these sensors and deploy them across a huge site to monitor variables that would let us know in advance when fires are likely to happen?”

Under Duke’s plan, data from the sensors would activate a variety of responses across the landscape. For example, on dry, hot days, weather modifiers installed along the ridges and valleys of the park would disperse mist across the site to increase humidity levels. Using the regular ocean breeze moving across the site, the modifiers would also scatter the seeds of fire-resistent cypress trees along the ridges of the landscape. Over time, the wall of trees that would eventually grow would become windbreaks that could help slow the pace of a fire.

Excess rainwater, which normally flows down the hills to the ocean during heavy rain, would be collected in reservoirs, which could become recreational pools for people visiting the park or sources of water for animals in search of refuge. When sensors indicate the risk of a fire in a particular location, however, the water would be released down the valley to soak the landscape below. The large amount of rapidly released water would also increase erosion runoff, thus creating firebreaks throughout the valley.

Duke also considered vegetation, which provides fuel for burning fires. Artificial watering holes strategically placed throughout the park would attract animals in times of drought. Native wallabies, kangaroos and other animals coming to the pools of water would then feed on nearby vegetation, reducing fuel for a potential fire.

“None of these devices eliminate risk,” says Duke. “Instead, they work to shift risk from large scale, catastrophic events to smaller, everyday risk levels.”

In addition to these and other tactics designed to mitigate risk, Duke explored ways to influence human behavior. The weather monitors along the ridge of the hill above the city, for example, could be programmed to light more brightly at night during periods of high-energy use.  

“The idea is to change the collective consciousness of the local population by highlighting invisible phenomena and patterns that are contributing to climate change and wildfire occurrences,” says Duke. Energy consumption in the city of Adelaide is among the highest in Australia.

While the scope of her thesis was to research and propose a new approach to mitigating wildfires, Duke does hope to one day build and test her project.

Her hope is that the strategy she devised will plant the seeds for ways that landscape architects can contribute to wildfire mitigation in the future.

“Developing science fiction scenarios are necessary,” says Duke. “Imagining what could be done is usually the first step towards something actually happening.”

Assistant Professor Liat Margolis was Duke’s thesis advisor. Duke received the American Society of Landscape Architects Certificate of Honor and the Canadian Society of Landscape Architects Student Award of Merit at this year’s graduation awards ceremony.