The Centre for Landscape Research is pleased to announce the release of the DVD for the Landscape Infrastructures Symposium held last Fall 2008 at the University of Toronto Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape and Design. For students, educators, researchers and professionals in the interrelated fields of design, planning, engineering and public administration, the disc set features edited recordings of the proceedings including lecture presentations by Stan Allen, George Baird, Pierre Bélanger, Julia Czerniak, Herbert Dreiseitl, Kristina Hill, Michael Jakob, Nina-Marie Lister, Kate Orff and Jane Wolff as well as plenary discussions with Rodolphe El-Khoury, David Fletcher, Ted Kesik, Robert Levit, Liat Margolis, Alissa North, Mason White and Robert Wright. The DVD also features a new afterword, and a full list of reference readings on the converging fields of landscape and infrastructure. For librarians and archivists, the DVD comes with CIP data, ISBN and UPC code for cataloguing purposes.
 
The release of the DVD coincides with a feature article entitled ‘Landscape as Infrastructure’ by departing CLR co-director, Pierre Bélanger, appearing on the cover of this Spring’s 25th anniversary edition of Landscape Journal, the scholarly journal dedicated to contemporary issues on design, planning and management of land.
 
From the sleeve:

“Responding to the growing inertia of urban planning and the unchallenged predominance of civil engineering at the close of the 20th century, landscape infrastructure emerges to redefine the conventional role of infrastructure in the future of urbanized regions. Foregrounding the dynamics of living, biophysical systems historically marginalized by the divide between the economy and ecology of big cities, this dual agency repositions landscape as a complex, instrumental system of essential services, resources and processes that underpin contemporary urban economies.”
 
Signaling a departure from centralized forms of urban development and the predominance of civil engineering in the design of cities, more flexible forms of infrastructure and design practices have begun to emerge during the past decade as a response to the increasing demand for renewable and integrative forms of urban development.  Strategies that combine landscape ecological principles with urban infrastructure are now rapidly becoming the dominant logic in the renewal of infrastructure systems for new industries as well as contemporary cities. 
 
Foregrounding the reciprocity between landscape and infrastructure, this one-day symposium gathers a series of influential thinkers and practitioners from around the world to discuss emerging practices, paradigms and technologies that are reshaping the contemporary urban landscape. Re-examining the historically divisive, technocratic nature of engineered infrastructure, the symposium aims at formulating a more synthetic vision of urban infrastructure as a landscape that combines ecological and economic imperatives of big cities and urban regions. The penultimate objective of the symposium is to reposition the agency of landscape architects, urban designers and architects vis-à-vis the design of urban infrastructures for the new economy of the 21st century.

Funding for the publication of the proceedings is provided by the John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design, the University of Toronto Connaught Fund, the Ontario Association of Landscape Architects (OALA), the Landscape Architecture Canada Foundation (LACF), the Canada Foundation for Innovation (CFI), the Social Sciences & Humanities Research Council (SSHRC), the Natural Sciences & Engineering Research Council (NSERC), the Canadian Institute of Planners (CIP) and National Research Council Canada (CNRC).

The DVD disc-set will be available for sale online (www.uoftbookstore.com/online/) and at the University of Toronto Bookstore (St. George Campus) starting July 15, 2009. For any further inquiries, please contact Dr. Ted Kesik, Professor of Site Engineering & Building Science (ted.kesik@daniels.utoronto.ca) or Pierre Bélanger, Director, Landscape Infrastructure Lab, Harvard University (belanger@harvard.edu).
 
DVD 439 min.
4-Disc Set
English NTSC      
ISBN 978-0-7727-8820-7
©2008-2009 University of Toronto – Centre for Landscape Research – Landscape Infrastructure Lab