LAN3702HS
Instructor: Jane Wolff
Meeting Section: L0101
Fridays 3:00-6:00 p.m.

This seminar will investigate the design and development of tools for building public landscape literacy about water and how it shapes Toronto.  

Contemporary large-scale landscapes are complicated, and because their circumstances don’t fall into conventional categories of nature and culture, they’re hard to decipher. Water lies at the centre of many pressing forces for change: the climate emergency, environmental injustice, sprawling urbanization, failing infrastructure, and the need for truth and reconciliation with Indigenous peoples. In North America, where planners and designers have limited power, landscapes’ futures rest on the aggregated decisions of individuals, markets, and governments, but the absence of nuanced, widely shared language for the hybrid conditions of the Anthropocene limits public discussion about values, choices, and ways forward.  

Vocabulary and Agency: Investigating Water springs from a question: what can design do in arenas designers don’t control? Using water as a way to explore current dilemmas, it will examine a possible course of action: the development of tools to support understanding of—and conversation about— people’s own roles in the ecosystem. Working across the boundary of public art and landscape scholarship, the course will examine recent precedents in and beyond our own city. It posits landscape literacy as a step toward agency for designers, citizens, experts and policymakers.