URD2013Y F
Instructor: Angus Laurie and Mariana Leguia
Meeting Section: L9101
Synchronous
Tuesdays, 9:00am - 1:00pm, 2:00pm - 6:00pm

Toronto has the world’s largest greenbelt, created to protect important ecological areas including the Oak Ridges Moraine, the Niagara Escarpment, and some of Canada’s best farmland. At the same time, it acts as a policy instrument with the explicit objective of constraining urban growth, and the intensification of development within the city.

Since the inception of the greenbelt in 2005, however, Toronto’s urban growth has followed a similar pattern to other North American cities, characterized by indiscriminate, car dependent sprawl along the urban fringe. Over the next 20 years, the Greater Golden Horseshoe is expected to nearly double its population, reaching a total of 13.5 million residents.

The Research Studio will centre on a question posed by Michael Hough, in his book Cities and natural process; “Can development enhance rather than detract from the quality of the landscape?” It uses the greenbelt as an entry point to speculate about the future of cities, taking into consideration ecological, mobility, social, and economic systems, in relation to built-form. It will focus on how can we frame growth within a discourse that moves beyond a binary vision of urban and rural towards a more dualistic one, building on other urban frameworks including Ebenezer Howard’s Garden City, Patrick Geddes’ City Region, and the Horizontal Metropolis of Paola Vigano.

The studio will be held virtually, but we plan to meet for a series of walks, allowing us to get a sense of place, and to get together. We will use top down and bottom up research methods to help understand Toronto at the city-region scale. The second half of the course will focus on the neighbourhood scale, using both a quantitative approach to understand urban patterns, density, ecological and morphological characteristics of place, in parallel with exercises to understand the genius loci through experiential documentation.

Based on the outcome of their research, in the second semester, participants will develop an urban scale project. This could be a new idea of a neighbourhood or town, a systemic urban design proposal (not related to a specific location), or a project that combines urban and ecological infrastructures. The projects should share a recognition of the preexisting conditions.