In a recent article in the Globe and Mail, Alex Bozikovic writes about one of Toronto's newest waterfront parks: Corktown Common, designed by Michael Van Vaulkenburgh & Associates.

"From Vancouver’s False Creek neighbourhood to Ottawa’s riverfront to disused port lands in New York, landscape architects are remaking marginal areas of major cities into parks with a combination of ecological, social and aesthetic purposes," writes Bozikovic.

Corktown Common, he argues, is an example of "a new breed of civic project, dubbed landscape urbanism, that combines landscape architecture, urban planning and infrastructure building with an open-ended, flexible approach to the future."

Toronto is a global centre for this way of thinking, says Bozikovic, thanks, in part, to the program in landscape architecture at the John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design. Students in architecture, landscape architecture and urban design are housed under one roof at the Daniels Faculty, and professors often teach students in each of the different disciplines.

Faculty member Assistant Professor Mason White — who, along with his partners at firm Lateral Office, will represent Canada at the 2014 Venice Biennale in 2014 — cited this as one of the things that drew him to teaching at the University of Toronto.

"The Daniels Faculty is quite supportive of strengthening these ties," he said. "Finding relationships between urban design, landscape and architecture is the way many innovative cities are going, too."