Mark Sterling, the Director of the Daniels Faculty's Master of Urban Design program, was recently named a fellow of the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada (RAIC) in recognition of his outstanding achievement to design excellence, scholarship, and distinguished service to the profession.

Fellows will be inducted at the College of Fellows Convocation ceremony at the Royal Conservatory of Music in Toronto on October 29 during the annual RAIC Festival of Architecture, which takes place October 26-30.

An award-winning architect, urban designer and professional planner, Sterling is a leading thinker on new approaches to compact urban form and an innovator in exploring intelligent development scenarios through a variety of approaches to digital visualization. In addition to his role at the Daniels Faculty, he is Principal of Acronym Urban Design and Planning, where his experience in city building at multiple scales, combined with his ability to bring diverse groups of people together, make him a strong guide to the designers who collaborate to build better communities. 

Sterling is currently leading several major intensification projects, including Toronto Community Housing’s Lawrence Heights Redevelopment Plan, a new 100-acre neighbourhood design that includes incremental rebuilding of existing social housing stock while rebalancing the transportation network for pedestrians, cyclists, and current and future transit facilities.  He has also been leading teams developing strategies to increase density around proposed transit corridors in Markham and Newmarke in response to Ontario’s Places to Grow legislation.  On the West Don Lands Public Realm Plan, he is the urban design lead working with Waterfront Toronto to transform a previously underused 80-acre site into new public space that encourages active transportation.

For the new Steeles West Station, a new station on the extension to the Spadina subway line, Sterling led a review to investigate development potential around the new station that included balancing the goals and requirements of multiple stakeholders including the TTC, York Region Transit/VIVA, GO Transit York University, The City of Toronto and the City of Vaughan. Experienced in transit-oriented environmental assessments, his team also provided urban design studies along Toronto’s waterfront for the TTC from Union Station to Exhibition Place and from Dufferin to Roncesvalles. 

Sterling’s experience includes the University of Toronto at Mississauga Campus Master Plan, OCAD’s Capital Master Plan, and the Port Lands Implementation Strategy for Waterfront Toronto. He led urban design components in “Making Waves: Principles for Toronto’s Waterfront,” City avenue studies for Lake Shore Boulevard and O’Connor Road, the Highway 7 Land Use Futures Study in Vaughan, and the subsequent York Region Urban Design Futures study that accompanied new rapid transit proposals.  As Director of Architecture and Urban Design for the former City of Toronto, Sterling led the development of civic improvement projects and new urban design and planning frameworks for several of the city’s most important districts. 

Sterling is actively involved in his profession as a founding member of the Inaugural Urban Design Advisory Panel for the City of Mississauga, a member of the City of Ottawa Urban Design Panel, a jury member of the Mississauga Urban Design Awards, and former vice-chairman of the Toronto Society of Architects.  He has been an adjunct member of what is now the John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design at the University of Toronto since 1987.

In recent years, the term “smart cities” has become increasingly ubiquitous. But despite it’s widespread use, for many, the concept remains fuzzy.

Last semester, we held a series of lectures that explore the contemporary rhetorics, histories and politics of the smart city phenomenon.

Looking to deepen your understanding of the issues, risks, and opportunities associated with smart cities in light of the release of Sidewalk Labs’ development plan for Toronto? Check out the keynote presentations and panel discussion from our Urban IQ Test symposium, available on the #UofTDaniels YouTube channel.

Spearkers include:

Orit Halpern, Concordia University (17:45)
Jesse Shapins, Sidewalk Labs (35:38)
Jesse LeCavalier, Daniels Faculty (49:48)
Michael Sorkin, Michael Sorkin Studio, City College, NYC (1:10:55)
–moderator, Richard Sommer, Daniels Faculty

Dr. Orit Halpern is an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Concordia University and a Strategic Hire in Interactive Design and Theory. Her work bridges the histories of science, computing, and cybernetics with design and art practice. She is also the director of the Speculative Life Research Cluster, a laboratory situated at the intersection of the environmental sciences, architecture and design, and computational media. You can find out more at: www.orithalpern.net | www.speculativelife.com | www.planetaryfutures.net.

Jesse Shapins has been a leading designer and entrepreneur at the intersection of media, technology and community-based placemaking for over a decade. Currently, Jesse is Director of Public Realm & 307 at Sidewalk Labs, where he leads vision, strategy, design and prototyping for the future of public space. In 2004, before smartphones, Jesse invented Yellow Arrow, one of the first platforms to globally connect physical locations, digital media, and communities. Before joining Sidewalk, Jesse was Director of Product at BuzzFeed — named by Fast Company as the most innovative company in 2016 — where he worked closely with journalists, entertainers and tech teams to push the boundaries of content and technology. Read more.

Jesse LeCavalier (LECAVALIER R+D) uses research, writing, and design to explore the architectural and urban implications of contemporary logistics. His book The Rule of Logistics: Walmart and the Architecture of Fulfillment (University of Minnesota Press, 2018), examines the activities of the international retailer to tell a larger story about the ways the logistics industry has developed at different scales and through the emergence of particular technologies. Read more.

Michael Sorkin is the principal and founder of Michael Sorkin Studio. His practice and work spans design, criticism and pedagogy. In 2005, Sorkin founded Terreform, and is currently its president. He is editor-in-chief of its imprint, UR (Urban Research), which was launched in 2015. He is on the board of several civic and professional organizations such as Urban Design Forum (Vice President) and the Architectural League of New York (Director). He is also a member of the International Committee of Architectural Critics. Read more.

In Toronto, 91% of residents agree that climate change threatens personal health and well-being. But while the vast majority of those in Canada’s largest city understand that more extreme weather is on its way, 48% of Torontonians don’t know what can be done to address it.
 
How do we as a city prepare for greater instances of flooding and extreme heat, as well as increasing inequality that can exacerbate our ability to bounce back?
 
To address this question, the City of Toronto has developed its first ever Resilience Strategy, launched June 4 at the Daniels Building. An exhibition highlighting the work of the strategy — and how design can contribute to building a city that is better able to adapt, survive, and thrive in the face of growing challenges — is also now on display in the first-floor heritage hallway of One Spadina Crescent.
 
Assistant Professor Fadi Masoud (MLA 2010), whose research focuses on coastal urbanism, adaptive climate planning, resilient infrastructure, and design responses to urban flooding, was part of the Flood Resilient Working Group that contributed to the Strategy. He also curated the Resilient TO exhibition on display until Aug 1st, 2019.
 
“We wanted to showcase what the physical city could do to increase resilience,” says Masoud. “Our exhibition showcases the elements of the strategy related to the built form of the city and how design can contribute to meeting the strategy’s goals.”
 
Masoud was among the many community members, organizations, industry representatives, and government leaders at the Daniels Building June 4 for the Strategy’s launch. Toronto’s Chief Resilience Officer Elliott Cappell emphasized the importance of breaking down silos within the city, connecting the dots, and leveraging partnerships to move forward on the actions laid out in the report.

He also emphasized that flooding in Toronto is a major issue. To this end, Masoud and other members of the Flood Resilience Working Group created and signed a Charter that details their shared vision for flood resilience in Toronto.
 
“Unlike cities that are coastal, Toronto isn’t affected by sea level rise or storm surge, and we know how to manage riverine flooding though our conservation authorities. Our issue is surface flooding,” says Masoud. “The faster our city is growing and the more we are paving, the fewer places there are for water to go. We also have episodic extreme precipitation, but our watershed and flood maps have not been updated for a long time.”

Anchoring the exhibit are two large models that represent two of the fundamental pillars of the Strategy: equity and urban flooding. One model shows the City’s increasing inequality based on research by U of T Professor David Hulchanski; the second shows Toronto's topography, the hills, ravines, and river systems that affect where water flows.

“A lot of people think Toronto is pretty flat,” says Masoud. “but the reality is that the terrain of our city, what is upstream and what is downstream, has huge localized impacts on the city.”
 
He says there is huge potential to design networks of greenspace, both public and private, to serve multiple functions and to act as water retention systems.
 
While the threats to our resiliency are well laid out, the exhibition also highlights possible solutions, including award-winning design ideas proposed by Daniels Faculty students for a county in South Florida; urban design research on Toronto’s apartment tower clusters, which make up 45% of the city’s market rental housing stock; and the Faculty’s Green Roof Innovation Testing Laboratory (GRIT Lab) research that has helped informed Toronto’s pioneering Green Roof bylaw.

When asked at the launch event about the key take-aways from the Resilience Strategy, Cappell stressed that although the city as a whole is getting hotter, wetter, and wilder, residents throughout the city experience these things differently. Understanding how inequity influences a community’s resiliency is key. Lower income neighbourhoods are likely to be harder hit.
 
How is the concept of resilience integrated into research and teaching at the Daniels Faculty?
 
“Resilience is a framework that should set the tone for everything,” says Masoud. “It means that a system, building, or landscape, has to be able to bounce back and bounce back better than how it was before it faced stress, whether economic, social, or environmental. As designers, we need to build in flexibility to make sure that whatever is designed can respond to various pressures. Resiliency should be something that describes all designs.”
 
Click here to read the full Resilience Strategy.

The Daniels Faculty would like to thank the following sponsored of the Resilitent TO exhibition: Canadian Urban Institute and ResilientTO, School of Cities, Faculty of Forestry, University of Toronto, Autodesk, and Jay Pooley Design Practice.

Photos by Harry Choi

Assistant Professor Erica Allen-Kim will be a featured speaker at the event: “City Building and Civics: Toronto’s Asian Heritage,” presented by The Toronto Asia Pacific Youth Council (TAPYC), in partnership with the University of Toronto's School of Cities.

Her talk, “Chinatown Futures: Shaping a Diverse Inter-generational Landscape,” will discuss the effects of changing demographics on the businesses, public spaces, and cultural heritage of Toronto's downtown Chinatown.

Within the broader context of urban gentrification and housing pressures, how can new migrants and second generation Asian-Canadians — as well as other stewards of Chinatown's social and built fabric — reimagine the neighbourhood's future in a rapidly transforming part of the city?

Erica Allen-Kim is an historian of modern architecture and urban design. Her work on global cities and cultural landscapes focuses on issues of memory and citizenship. She received her Ph.D. from Harvard University and was a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the Jackman Humanities Institute, University of Toronto. Her book project, Chinatown Modernism, situates the architectural and urban projects of American Chinatowns within the broader context of modern architecture and planning.

The event takes place at Urban Space Gallery, 401 Richmond Street West. Interested in attending? Register for a ticket via eventbrite.

Daniels Faculty Lecturer Alex Josephson and his partners in PARTISANS, an architecture and design firm based in Toronto, have partnered with firms RWDI and Maffeis Engineering, as well as Sidewalk Labs, to help create a new “smart awning” design, an experimental new exterior application of EFTE which they hope will create more useable outdoor space in cities with varied climates. Designed through extensive modelling and examination of local weather data, this is the first project in Ontario to utilize EFTE, a material chosen for it’s portability and utility in creating unique forms. PARTISANS says that their deployable “building raincoat” could potentially help to reduce then impact of extreme climate and help create more useable outdoor space in less than ideal weather conditions.

These systems can be attached to existing building exteriors, helping to address the perennial weather problems that impact Toronto. These units are designed to be installed on the exteriors of building entrances, and aim to help create a more comfortable transition from indoor to outdoor space. EFTE as a material is completely recyclable and can be customized to incorporate different patterns that affect light and overall opacity, meaning that this system can be used in a range of different applications and environments.

Josephson, speaking with Sidewalk Talk, said that the team was able to utilize computer modeling throughout the process to  find the best approach. “This is real experimentation where the scientific method meets design,” Josephson said (via Sidewalk Talk).

PARTISANS further describes their prototype tensile structure project in their press release:

Even when the conditions are right to promote vibrant street life, the weather plays a big role in determining how much time people spend outdoors. And while the seasons drive the character of public life in Toronto—from summer days spent on patios, to fall farmer’s markets across the city—it is no secret that outdoor activity is concentrated to the six-month period from late April through October, when the weather is pleasant. For centuries, cities have used architecture to moderate the weather and keep public life active on the street. In the late 1800s, Toronto was filled with a maze of awnings that extended from storefronts and glass arcades to cover alleyways; and many streets throughout the city are still lined with the porched homes that were once a hallmark of Toronto’s residential design.

In Spring 2018, PARTISANS was tasked with helping Sidewalk Labs answer the following question: how does one design an outdoor public space that is comfortable for Torontonians year-round? Toronto is famous for our snowy winters and incredibly humid summers, with temperatures ranging across a 70°F differential throughout the year. While we traditionally think of extreme weather as native to desert, arctic, and ocean climates, Toronto—is located on the edge of Lake Ontario—is an environment where it is only comfortable to be outside for approximately 30% of the year. PARTISANS and RWDI closely studied the wind and solar conditions of Sidewalk Lab’s lakeside headquarters 307 to develop the optimal shape and material design to increase outdoor comfort. The result is a Raincoat that reinterprets Toronto’s formal tradition of awnings and porches through the contemporary lens of responsive weather mitigation.

The project is currently viewable at Sidewalk Lab’s lakeside headquarters 307. Read more about the building raincoat in Archpaper and Archdaily.

A group of interdisciplinary researchers from diverse faculties at the University of Toronto and other instutions have come together to launch 6Place Toronto, a new working group which seeks to examine the intersection of media and architecture in public space. 6Place Toronto was co-founded by Petros Babasikas (Assistant Professor, Teaching Stream, at Daniels Faculty), an architect and writer whose work focuses on connections among architecture, storytelling, media and public space. The project is being helmed through The Faculty of Information’s McLuhan Centre for Culture and Technology, and includes Assistant Professor Charles Stankievech, Associate Professor Jesse LeCavalier, and lecturer Mark Sterling from Daniels Faculty, as well as contributors from U of T’s School of Cities.

Over the next year, the group will be conducting series of six “investigations” into various aspects of Toronto’s urban space, offering a deeper understanding of how we interact with places such as the downtown waterfront or Etobicoke’s industrial parks. 6Place Toronto elaborates on their website:

From the Portlands to South Etobicoke, these are contested, iconic, dormant places, currently subject to major speculation and diverse visions for the city of the future. This project investigates urban history, networks, image, building stock, landscape, infrastructure, data and meta-data. Engaging faculty and students in Architecture, Urbanism, Information, Art History, Politics, Anthropology, Media and the Visual Arts, 6PTo’s methods of documentation and dissemination include mapping, lens- and drone-based imaging, drawing, stratography, archival and media research, walks, talks, workshops and seminars. Each of the six investigations is a pilot for an interdisciplinary, layered urbanism and civic broadcast, ultimately testing the potential of Public Space in the North American Metropolis.

One upcoming investigation, "Work/Inventory" is scheduled for March 29-30 and includes a talk by Jesse LeCavelier & Shawn Micallef, moderated by Mark Sterling, as well as a walk and workshop in South Etobicoke. Read more about the work of 6Place Toronto.

Images by:
Timothy Neesam
Mike Falkner
Dieter Janssen

On January 18 and 19, the Daniels Faculty, with support from U of T's School of Cities, convened a group of scholars, academics, and professionals for a  symposium that explored the politics of the smart city movement.

The two-day event allowed for a deep dive into some of the contemporary rhetorics, histories, and politics of the smart city phenomenon. The presentations included lively and thought-provoking discussions on what we actually mean when we talk about “smart cities,” the tensions that this concept or approach to city building creates, and the implications of “intelligent technologies” for architecture and urban design.

Above are some photos from the symposium. For those who weren't able to attend, the video feed of the lectures and presentations are available on our YouTube page.

Click here for the January 18 keynote lecture, featuring Michael Sorkin, Orit Halper, and Jesse Shapins

Click here to view the presentations and discussions that took place January 19

Click here to view more photos of this event

All photos by Yvonne Bambrick.

Speakers at the Urban IQ test symposium included:

Orit Halpern, Concordia University
Jesse LeCavalier, Daniels
Jesse Shapins, Sidewalk Labs
Michael Sorkin, Michael Sorkin Studio, City College, NYC
Richard Sommer, Daniels
Marshall Brown, Princeton, Director CAUI
David Benjamin, Columbia, The Living
Helen Ng, Global Cities Institute
Michael Piper, Daniels
Sarah Williams, MIT, Director, Civic Data Design Lab
Sara Stevens, UBC
David Smiley, Columbia
Shannon Mattern, The New School
Anthony Acciavatti, Yale & Columbia
Gökçe Günel, University of Arizona

Click here for the full Urban IQ Test schedule.

A pair of Daniels Faculty alumni recently received an honorable mention from Eleven Magazine’s “Shaking Up Havana’s Malecon” design competition.

The competition posed a unique challenge: to re-imagine Cuba’s iconic Malecon esplanade road, which runs alongside Havana for five miles, serving as both a key piece of traffic infrastructure and vital defense against flooding.

Participants were required to consider the following priorities in their proposals: “protection in the form of a renewed sea defence, engagement in the form of new cultural social spaces along the Malecon, and identity in the form of resurrecting an old icon back to life and defining a new beginning for Havana in the 21st century.”

Master of Landscape Architecture graduates Xiru Chen (MLA 2012) and Stella Yuan Lin (MLA 2014) received an honourable mention for their submission “Malecon Rhapsody”.

The team explains their innovative and naturalistic approach to the challenge in the project summary: The MALECÓN RHAPSODY addresses Havana’s vulnerability to coastal flooding with a protective ribbon along Malecón. The 8 km-long landscape infrastructure incorporates public space with the storm and wave surge defense systems. This also creates architectural elements, amenities, energy generation stations, and food production hubs that provide the locally needed cultural, recreational, and socio-economic benefits.

Xiru Chen says that their interest in the project resulted from a meaningful trip to visit Cuba. “We were both fascinated by the colorful landscape, passionate culture and complex history of Cuba,” she explains. “The scope of the competition, to create a renewed sea defence, and act as new cultural social spaces, is also very attractive to us.”

She further explains that the process of working on the project helped them to recall the broader thinking learned during their time at Daniels. “This process reminded us of the days when we spent late nights in school working on studio projects,” says Chen. “We both graduated years ago, and the fast pace of real practices rarely allows for deep design thinking. Working on the competition has reminded us of the essentiality of critical thinking in the design process. This award encourages us to remain curious and keep learning.”