Insurgent Ecologies :
Given the multifaceted evolution of our built environments,
( Re )Claiming Ground in Landscape
and Urbanism
Nina-Marie Lister
Ecology has come of age. In the past two decades, designers of
landscape projects have become increasingly fascinated with
the science of living systems as both instrument and meta-
phor. From the large, performative, operational landscape de-
signs for brownfield and derelict sites to the “designer ecolo-
gies” 1 being deployed in smaller city parks, ecology is now
central to the vocabulary and language of the contemporary
landscape.
In the strict sense, ecology is a branch of the biological sci-
ences; it is the study of the complex relations between organ-
isms and their environment.2 More broadly, ecology is often
used in a metaphorical context for the relationship between
humans and their various constructed environments, from
social-cultural to political-economic.3 In the realm of critical
social science, ecology is used in the vernacular plural to de-
scribe human relationships with everything from urbanism,
culture, and religion, to food, fear, and pizza.4 Yet as the shape
and form of our physical, constructed environment changes
with the political-economic and social-cultural forces of glo-
balization, decentralization, and post-industrialization, the
ground plane of the contemporary metropolitan region has
reshaped the paradigm of ecology. This coupled and rein-
forcing relationship between ecology and landscape hinges
around design: All of our ecologies—multiple, layered, com-
plex, and insurgent — collectively inform the design of our
urban and urbanizing landscapes. And these emergent land-
scapes, in turn, continue to shape the ecologies that define us.
In the context of the rise of ecology as science, strategy, and
speculation within the growing confluence of landscape and
urbanism, two case studies in Toronto highlight the chang-
ing role(s) of ecology in design: River + City + Life, a proposi-
tion to remediate and transform the Lower Don Lands on To-
ronto’s waterfront, and Evergreen Brick Works, a master plan
to reclaim and reinterpret an abandoned quarry and brick-
making industry on the Don River. These cases are testimony
to the prominence of not one but several distinct ecologies
of design, each of which is relevant to the challenge of post-
industrial landscape design, and more broadly, to an “ecologi-
cal urbanism.”
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Landscape and Urbanism
design for the bounded and bifurcated notion of “city” and
“landscape” is now both outmoded and insufficient. Rather,
design for the contemporary metropolitan landscape is the
challenge ahead. This blurred continuum from urban, subur-
ban, and exurban to rural demands both a fundamental and
contextual reengagement of culture and nature.
The emerging theory of landscape urbanism5 is evidence
of this broader trend toward a confluence—or if we consider
the historical evolution of the disciplines, a rapprochement—
between ecology, planning, and landscape architecture, in the
context of contemporary urbanism. Prior to industrialism,
“city” and “landscape” were neither dualistic nor opposing
forces. It is only through the industrial era that city, country,
and landscape (and their attendant disciplines of practice)
became isolated, discrete zones of practice. It is widely ac-
cepted that this separation was driven by Cartesian, deter-
ministic planning and design, underwritten by a Newtonian
mechanistic worldview, and rooted firmly in the ideals of or-
der, prediction, and control. However, new understandings
in ecology 6 have fundamentally challenged the assumptions
of predictability and control of living systems. This evolved
understanding of ecology, coupled with the increasing forces
of globalization and decentralization, has leveraged the open-
ing of the post-industrial landscape to the deployment of
a new breed of urbanism—one that is characterized by multi-
plicity, plurality, diversity, and complexity.
A variety of recent projects for post-industrial sites7 bear
witness to the primacy of landscape as a new medium of ur-
ban order, and a number of these involve a progressively more
sophisticated reading and use of ecology in design. As various
designers have observed, post-industrial reclamation and re-
mediation projects involve a trajectory of strategies in repur-
posing, transforming, and eventually recalibrating the site.
Each of these progressively complex strategies is defined by
the use of ecology, both grounded in science and inferred in
speculation and representation. As Jane Amidon notes, “These
designers remarried the idea of nature with the real thing—
working ecologies—mending centuries of divorce.”8
The implications of landscape urbanism are principally
concerned with engaging processes that facilitate design in
the context of complex and dynamic cultural-natural systems.
In this respect, landscape urbanism is necessarily more than
just another “new” urbanism; it is concerned with more than
merely urban form, and centers on a more complex problem-
atic; it is a multiscaled and multilayered urbanism involving
525
 cultural, social, political, economic, infrastructural, and eco-
logical conditions that are layered, tangled, and mutually de-
pendent. The dynamic metropolitan landscape is no longer
a tabula rasa; it is a living field that has been and will con-
tinue to be reinvented many times over, from pastoral green-
fields to post-industrial brownfields, at times engaging and
other times ignoring the history and context implicit in Sola-
Morales Rubió’s notion of the “terrain vague”: those places
characterized by “void, absence, and yet also promise, the
space of the possible, of expectation.” 9 These are the voids
that Georgia Daskalakis and Omar Perez have called the “post-
urban residual spaces of the abandoned industrial city.” 10 In
these spaces—whether made, remade, created and recreated,
or remediated and reclaimed—each unfolding emerges with
new ecologies yet to be identified and validated. Indeed the
potential for synecologies, or synthetic, integrated cultural-
natural ecologies that emerges from forgotten landscapes, is
an impetus to fundamentally reconsider the notions of both
landscape and urbanism.
James Corner has offered “landscraping” as another tactic
for post-industrial landscape design.11 These sites are often
contaminated and can accept no new construction until they
are cleared, remediated, and literally scraped clean. In so do-
ing, the post-industrial landscape represents a new palette
for designers: one characterized by landscapes of potential,
awaiting the recognition of insurgent ecologies that, despite
degraded environments, have emerged or may yet emerge in
the interstitial spaces of past uses and current conditions.
These too are apertures for the creation of new hybrid ecolo-
gies, open to multiple interpretations in the evolving context
of the future city.
Similarly, Charles Waldheim has observed that landscape
is more than just the lens of representation; it is a medium of
construction.12 In this context, landscape is a layered, synthetic
phenomenon, encompassing more than a two-dimensional
surface. If our collective analyses of site and context shift
beyond the ground plane and embrace the social-cultural and
political-economic dynamics of landscape, new typologies
of infrastructure necessarily emerge.13 Indeed, contemporary
urbanism requires a multifocal perspective, one that encom-
passes the notions of form, function, field, and flows 14 across
and between the dynamic layers. In this sensibility, aspects of
“culture” and “nature” are neither separate nor confused, but
woven together throughout the metropolitan landscape.
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Adaptive Design for an Ecological Urbanism
But how do we design effectively, meaningfully, and responsi-
bly in the dynamic context of an ecological urbanism? Clearly,
the complexity inherent in post-industrial metropolitan sites
demands strategies that move past the static notions of resto-
ration and rehabilitation to some pristine state. Underscoring
contemporary strategies in recent landscape projects that
span a spectrum of interventions, from remediation, reclama-
tion, and restoration to transformation and recalibration, is
a progressively more sophisticated notion of adaptive design.
Adaptive design is a term15 coined by me, and evolved
through research based on the work of C.S. Holling,16 to refer
to an integrated, whole-system, learning-based approach to
the management of human-ecological interactions, with ex-
plicit implications for planning interventions and resulting
design forms. These interventions and their forms must be
both adaptive and resilient to sudden, discontinuous environ-
mental change—change that is normal, but cannot be predict-
ed with certainty or controlled completely.
Long-term sustainability and health of landscape systems
demands the capacity for resilience—the ability to recover
from disturbance, to accommodate change, and to function
in a state of health—and therefore, for adaptation to environ-
mental change that, while normal, is often limited in predict-
ability and “surprising” in effect.17 Adaptive design (or prop-
erly, adaptive ecological design) draws on current ecological
science and is a response to urbanizing landscapes that are
under pressure from competing resource demands and land
uses. Adaptive design is, by definition, sustainable design;
the long-term survival of human and other species demands
adaptability, which is predicated on resilience. But resilience
and therefore sustainability must not be limited to merely
“surviving” in an ecological context. Indeed, resilient, adaptive,
and thus sustainable design means “thriving,” and therefore
must necessarily include economic and ecological health and
cultural vitality as planning and design goals.
Recent insights from the ecological and complex systems
sciences have challenged decision makers, planners, and de-
signers to become less concerned with prediction and control
and to move toward more organic, adaptive, and flexible plan-
ning, design, and management strategies.18 In the absence
of ecological certainty and predictability, the implications
for decision making and ultimately, design, are that an inte-
grated and whole-systems approach to landscape is neces-
sary: a single discipline or expertise cannot solve complex
ecological problems that occur at multiple scales. Where the
notion of expertise is challenged in the face of ecological
Insurgent Ecologies 527
Graffiti at Toronto’s Brick Works
( 2007 ) prior to the plan for its
adaptive reuse as an environmental
learning center
Post-industrial decay and displace-
ment on the Toronto waterfront :
The squatter community of Tent City
was evicted and the site bulldozed
while awaiting the revitalization
promised by WATERFRONToronto
with the new “ Lower Donlands ”
community.
Awaiting realignment into a new
estuary as part of the Lower
Donlands master plan, the mouth
of Toronto’s Don River and
Canada’s largest urban watershed
“ drains ” into Lake Ontario through
a cumbersome 90-degree turn.
uncertainty, meaningful community engagement in the plan-
ning and design process is therefore necessary—decisions
must be discussed, debated, negotiated, and ultimately learned
rather than predetermined by rational choice. Adaptive design
thus constitutes decision making that is inclusive of multiple
perspectives, adaptive to regular but unpredictable environ-
mental change, and both resilient and responsive to these
changes, responding, for example, to new ecological informa-
tion in a timely way, before critical and irreversible thresholds
are crossed. In this way, adaptive design emerges from a de-
liberative, integrative, cyclic, and continuous—rather than
deterministic and discrete — approach to planning, design,
and management. The adaptive context is one where learning
is a collaborative and conscious activity, derived from empiri-
cally monitored or experientially acquired information, which
in turn is transformed into knowledge through adapted be-
havior. This tactic relies on continuous learning through
scale-appropriate experiments in community-appropriate de-
sign—experiments that are responsive, responsible, and ulti-
mately “safe-to-fail” (rather than “fail safe”).
What then might adaptive ecological design look like, in the
context of an ecological urbanism? The following two project
examples depict early efforts at adaptive ecological designs in
practice, applied to post-industrial sites in Toronto, Canada.
River + City + Life : A Design for Toronto’s Lower Don Lands
Located in the Great Lakes Basin, on the north shore of
Lake Ontario in the industrialized heart of North America,
Toronto is a city-region of 5 million and is one of the five
fastest-growing metropolitan areas in North America.19 It is
also one of the world’s most ethno-culturally diverse cities,20
and its social ecology is as complex as the native riparian
ecologies of the lakeshore and the ecologies of the Great-
Lakes/St. Lawrence-Lowland forest that characterize its land-
scape. At the intersection of these ecologies, on the Toronto
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waterfront, the design emphasized resilience, weaving these
ecologies through-out the plan.
River + City + Life is a design proposal led by Stoss Land-
scape Urbanism, a finalist in an international design compe-
tition to remediate and revitalize 40 hectares of post-industri-
al Toronto waterfront, at the mouth of the Don River.21 A key
part of the city’s multibillion-dollar waterfront revitalization
plans, the site is potentially prime real estate, yet suffers
from a legacy of contamination and a complex pattern of land
tenure, shared between private and public sector holdings,
further complicated by multi-agency oversight.
The Don River flows from its headwaters in a glacial mo-
raine north of Toronto through the heart of Canada’s largest
city, bisecting the region into a series of forested ravines be-
fore reaching Lake Ontario. The Don River watershed is the
largest urbanized watershed in Canada, draining an area of
227 square miles. At its outflow, the Don is significantly de-
graded, having been channeled for the final one-and-a-half
miles of its journey to the lake. Suffering from oxygen deple-
tion, high turbidity, poor flow, and seasonal contamination by
sewage effluent, the river is effectively stagnant, polluted, and
choked with debris. As such, the Don is characteristic of many
post-industrial waterfront sites: derelict and forgotten as the
armature of the city has all but subsumed it.
As a response to the challenge to remediate and revitalize
the lower Don Lands, River + City + Life is a radical and bold
exploration of the creative tension between “nature” and “cul-
ture” in the urban condition. This complex urban project
challenged design teams to renaturalize the mouth of the Don
River, while simultaneously reengineering the floodplain and
creating a new urban edge to the city’s downtown. Working at
the confluence of the urban core and the derelict Port Lands
on the city’s waterfront, the Stoss team explicitly adopted an
adaptive design concept, based on the primacy of the river
and its dynamics. Centered on the notion of resilience, the
Insurgent Ecologies 529

River + City + Life : The Stoss
master plan and competition finalist
scheme for Toronto’s Lower
Donlands community on the city’s
east-central waterfront
Bird’s-eye view of the proposed
River + City + Life master plan for
Toronto’s Lower Don and the
waterfront : Engineered river spits
and braided channels provide
the armature for a flood-adapted
waterscape that fluctuates with
the seasons, changing lake levels,
and storm events.
plan recalibrates the mouth of the river and its floodplain,
resulting in a new estuary. Importantly, this is not a restored
estuary but a landscape transformed through the creation of
a new river channel, supported by several secondary channels
to accommodate seasonal inundation, and defined by the “riv-
er spits”—sculpted landforms, able to withstand changing
lake levels, seasonal flooding, and multiple recreational, edu-
cational, and residential uses.
The Stoss plan effectively proposes a new set of integrated
cultural and natural ecologies for the site, organized prin-
cipally by the river and its own self-organizing hydrology.
The engagement of a complex ecological, social-cultural, and
economic system rests squarely on “putting the river first,”
reversing the convention of the last century and a half. In
hinging the design on “renewal” rather than “restoration,” the
Stoss team made explicit and central the bold (but essential)
notions of adaptation to occasional flooding, mediation be-
tween “natural” and “alien” species, and a thick layering of
habitats and ecotones—some cultural, others natural; some
seasonal and others permanent. The result is a design that
weaves a resilient waterfront: an urban tapestry of public
amenity, urban edge, and ecological performance. This pro-
posal reconceives the city as a hybrid cultural-natural space—
a signature step for landscape urbanism and its operational
ecologies.
Evergreen Brick Works
Some 4 miles upstream of the Lower Don Lands, on the Don
River, is a different emerging example of the intersection of
ecology, landscape, and urbanism. This 40-acre site is located
in the geographic core of downtown Toronto, on an arterial
road off a major expressway, and is a designated cultural and
natural heritage site. Evergreen, a Canadian national charity,
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commissioned a master plan to transform this post-industrial
site into an international showcase for urban sustainabil-
ity and ecological design, centered on the reclamation and
reinterpretation of the abandoned quarry and former brick
works.
The project is an innovative public and nonprofit develop-
ment partnership in which the city and the regional conserva-
tion authority own the land and manage the restored quarry
(now a 28-acre wetland), while Evergreen has proposed and
won a long-term lease for the 12-acre industrial pad and heri-
tage buildings. Adjacent to the historic Todmorden Mills (ca.
1790), the site was home to the Don Valley Brick Works, a brick-
making facility that produced, at its peak, 43 million bricks
per year—the majority of brick used in urban construction
across Canada for almost a century, from 1889 to 1984.22 Over
the years, the quarry exposed layers of extraordinary quater-
nary geology, resulting in a UNESCO World Heritage designa-
tion for the site. The quarry was filled in and restored as
a wetland during the 1990s and is currently managed by the
city as a recreational park and by the regional Conservation
Authority as a natural heritage conservation site. To redevelop
the industrial buildings and remediate the site, Evergreen is
raising the $55 million (Canadian) project budget, of which
$32 million has been invested to date.
Evergreen’s mandate—to deepen the connection between
people and nature by bringing nature, culture, and community
together in the city 23 —is central to the site plan and design
scheme. At its core, Evergreen Brick Works is a year-round
learning center for citizens. The master plan proposes Cana-
da’s first large-scale environmental discovery center integrat-
ing cultural and natural heritage, and ecological and social
services, through a wide range of features. These include sus-
tainable “green” buildings; a native plant nursery; a demon-
stration kitchen and children’s gardens; a local farmers’ mar-
ket; an organic restaurant; conference and event facilities;
children’s camps; and family, youth leadership, and youth-at-
risk programming.
The Brick Works project departs from other urban ecology
endeavors in that it is not principally about restoration.
Rather, in recognizing Evergreen’s urban constituency and its
place at the heart of the urban landscape, the project centers
on establishing a relationship between nature and culture.
Interestingly, at its inception in 1991, Evergreen’s core mis-
sion was to “bring nature back to the city,” achieved primarily
through naturalization and restoration efforts. The past de-
cade has seen Evergreen’s mission evolve to a more sophis-
ticated reading of urban ecologies and the means by which
Insurgent Ecologies 531
 these are expressed in the urban landscape. This shift in
thinking mirrors the evolution of other post-industrial reme-
diation projects. The brick works master plan reflects this
paradigm shift, as is evident in the four themes underpinn-
ing the project: Innovation & Discovery, showcasing innova-
tive technologies and programming to help citizens integrate
sustainability into their lives; Food & Community, focusing
on nutrition programs for family and youth-at-risk, and the
promotion and support of local, sustainable food sources;
Natural & Cultural Heritage, conserving and protecting ar-
chaeological, industrial, and natural heritage through adap-
tive reuse of heritage buildings and landscape resources;
and Gardening & Greening, providing opportunities for learn-
ing about local foods and cooking, native plant recognition
and gardening, green design, and local habitats.24
As a learning center explicitly geared toward the integra-
tion of culture, nature, and community, situated in the heart
of Canada’s largest city, Evergreen Brick Works is an inno-
vative plan for the deployment of several ecologies within
a complex urban landscape. Although juxtaposing elements of
wild nature with groomed gardens, and arts and cultural ac-
tivities with the old industrial buildings, the Brick Works does
not suffer from conflicting land-use goals, as one might ex-
pect. Instead, the site is engaging creative ecological design
as a manifestation of both cultural and natural heritage with-
in the urban context. Not unlike Latz + Partner’s Duisberg
Nord Park in Germany, the Brick Works site moves past the
convention of ecology-as-nature preservation and into the
realm of cultural and political ecologies, both as metaphor
and program for learning and teaching ecological literacy. Yet
the project still manages to give traction to operational ecolo-
gies of remediation and reclamation, both in its landscape
plan for native habitats and in its adaptive reuse and “green”
building. In all its complexity, the site offers a wide array
Garden in the city : Adaptive
reuse of the Evergreen Brick Works
turns a postindustrial brick-
making plant in into a native plant
nursery, farmer’s market, and
environmental learning center.
ADAPT 532
of contemporary interpretations of ecologies in the context
of landscape and urbanism—from the artful juxtaposition of
creative performance in an abandoned factory to urging the
community to “rethink space.”
Reflections
The last decade of large-scale post-industrial urban projects
has seen landscape and ecology become primary vectors in
contemporary urbanism, and indeed, in city building writ
large. In a “coming of age” moment, ecology has gone from
subservient science to design partner in shaping global cities.
From the vantage point of ecology, this is no small achieve-
ment, especially as it originates through the practice of land-
scape architecture, and to a lesser degree, through urban
planning. As such, this new role for landscape offers concom-
itant fresh perspectives on, and roles for, its related and sup-
porting disciplines, in particular, ecology. The (re)engagement
of these disciplines signals a timely reinvigoration of both
landscape architecture and planning, underscoring their cen-
trality in the making of contemporary cities.
In this context, the Toronto examples are only two of a grow-
ing number of projects across North America that reflect a
catalytic moment in the evolution of the metropolis. In these
and other similar cases, the post-industrial landscape is less
concerned with restoration than remediation: casting back to
a precolonial ideal of nature is neither feasible nor desirable.
Rather, a new synthesis has emerged, seizing the niche be-
tween culture and nature, manifest in the insurgent ecologies
of our time.
Yet that quintessentially human act of intentional mani-
pulation25 —the design of space and place—is nothing if not
intimately connected with other species and the context in
which we dwell. In the dynamic landscapes that character-
ize the modern urban region, the act of designing and thus
Winter city : Adaptive reuse of
the Evergreen Brick Works
shifts with the seasons — summer
greenhouses become winter
ice pads and outdoor snowscapes,
with the exposed steel structure
open to the sky and the elements.
Insurgent Ecologies 533

Evergreen Brick Works, Toronto,
begins the process of adaptive
reuse with a simple paint job, urging
passersby to “ Re-Think Space. ”
11 James Corner, “Landscape Urbanism,” 17 Ibid.
affecting and ultimately shaping both new and existing ecolo-
in Mohsen Mostafavi, ed., Landscape 18 Lister, “Sustainable Large Parks,”
gies must therefore be born of an intimate understanding of Urbanism : A Manual for the Machinic and Waltner-Toews, Kay, and Lister, eds.,
place—of scale, context, and history. This is not a manifesta- Landscape ( London : Architectural The Ecosystem Approach.
Association, 2003 ), 58 –63 . 19 City Mayors’ Statistics, “The World’s
tion of ecological modernism, but rather, an evolution into an 12 Charles Waldheim, “Landscape as Largest Cities and Urban Areas in 2006 ,”
ecological urbanism. To design ecologies that sustain vibrant, Urbanism,” in Waldheim, ed., The Land- http ://www.citymayors.com/statistics/
scape Urbanism Reader, 37–53 . urban_2006_1.html ( accessed October 27,
healthy, and self-organizing urban landscapes, our interven- 13 The infrastructures of ecology, trans- 2008 ).
tions must necessarily be contextual and deliberative. To do portation, fuel, waste, water, and food 20 See Statistics Canada, Annual
so demands both fundamental renegotiation of our relation- are but a few of the extensions of surface Demographic Report 2005, catalog no.
conditions into the realm of urbanism. 91-213 -XIB ( Ottawa : Ministry of Industry,
ship with what we perceive as “nature” and our place with/in This concept was explored by a variety of 2006 ); and Elizabeth McIsaac, “Immigrants
it, and a consequent reengagement with culture. Good (and landscape scholars at the symposium in Canadian Cities : Census 2001 — What
“Landscape and Infrastructure,” convened Do the Data Tell Us?” Policy Options
thus necessarily ecological) design that results from this con- by Pierre Bélanger, Associate Professor ( May 2003 ), 58 –63 .
text, as I have articulated here and elsewhere,26 is adaptive, in Landscape Architecture at the University 21 The international design competition
of Toronto, October 25 , 2008 ( publication was sponsored in 2007 by WATERFRON-
resilient, and reflective; it is born of place, and it honors the
forthcoming ). Toronto, a government agency charged
land that sustains us. 14 With thanks to Professor Brian Orland, with overseeing the revitalization of
who offered the addition of “flows” to this the Toronto waterfront. See : http ://www.
line of logic, following my Bracken Lecture waterfrontoronto.ca. The Stoss-led
1 I have used the term “designer ecolo- htm ); the new research journal, Ecology on September 23 , 2008 , at Pennsylvania team was comprised of Stoss Landscape
gies” to refer to the largely symbolic of Food & Nutrition ( published by Taylor State University, Department of Landscape Urbanism ( Boston ), Brown & Storey Archi-
gestures designers use to recall or repre- & Francis ); SAFE — Society for Agriculture Architecture. tects Inc. ( Toronto ), and ZAS Architects
sent a relationship to nature, often out and Food Ecology, a U.C.-Berkeley stu- 15 For a detailed development of adaptive ( Toronto ) with Nina-Marie Lister, pLand-
of necessity at relatively small scales or dents’ group ( http ://agrariana.org/safe-s- ecological design, see Nina-Marie Lister, form, and Jackie Brookner, Brookner
in conditions that are constrained. See mission ); Mike Davis’s The Ecology of Fear “Sustainable Large Parks,” and “Ecological Studio NYC.
Nina-Marie Lister, “Sustainable Large ( New York : Vintage Books, 1998 ); and San- Design for Industrial Ecology : Opportu- 22 Evergreen, http ://evergreen.ca/
Parks : Ecological Design or Designer dra Steingraber’s The Ecology of Pizza nities for ( Re ) Discovery” in Ray Coté, rethinkspace/?page_id=12 ( accessed
Ecology?” in Julia Czerniak and George ( http ://www.motherearthnews.com/Real- James Tansey, and Ann Dale, eds., Linking October 30 , 2008 ).
Hargreaves, eds., Large Parks ( New York : Food/2006 -06 -01/The-Ecology-of-Pizza- Industry and Ecology : A Question of 23 Evergreen, http ://www.evergreen.ca/
Princeton Architectural Press, 2007 ), Or-Why-Organic-Food-is-a-Bargain.aspx ). Design ( Vancouver : UBC Press, 2005 ), en/about/about.html ( accessed October
31–51. In a similar but more pejorative 5 See Charles Waldheim, ed., The 15 –28 . For a broader socio-ecological 30 , 2008 ) and http ://www.evergreen.ca/en/
context, William Thompson uses the Landscape Urbanism Reader ( New York : systems context, see David Waltner-Toews, brickworks/pdf/EBWCampaign_2008 .pdf
term “boutique ecology” to refer to the Princeton Architectural Press, 2006 ). James Kay, and Nina-Marie Lister, The ( page 3 ) ( accessed October 30 , 2008 ).
often superficial ecological representation 6 The evolution of ecological science Ecosystem Approach : Complexity, Un- 24 Evergreen, http ://evergreen.ca/
in landscape projects in which designers in relation to planning has been traced by certainty, and Managing for Sustainability rethinkspace/?page_id=12 ( accessed
brand their projects “ecological” but avoid N.M. Lister, in “A Systems Approach to ( New York : Columbia University Press, October 30 , 2008 ).
the challenges of dealing fundamentally Biodiversity Conservation Planning,” Envi- 2008 ). 25 While it may be argued that other
with ecological complexity. See William ronmental Monitoring and Assessment 49, 16 C.S. “Buzz” Holling, “The Resilience species ( social mammals in particular )
Thompson, “Boutique Ecologies” no. 2 /3 ( 1998 ) : 123 –155 . See also Brad of Terrestrial Ecosystems : Local Surprise also shape their habitats, it is generally
Landscape Architecture, April 10 , 2006 , Bass, R. Edward Byers, and Nina-Marie and Global Change,” in W. C. Clark and accepted that only humans and the higher-
2 As defined by Eugene P. Odum and Lister, “Integrating Research on Ecohydrol- R. Edward Munn, eds., Sustainable Devel- order primates do so with intention — not
Howard T. Odum in the classic text ogy and Land Use Change with Land Use opment of the Biosphere ( Cambridge : merely instinct.
Fundamentals of Ecology ( third edition ) Management,” Hydrological Processes Cambridge University Press, 1986 ), 26 Lister, “Sustainable Large Parks,”
( Philadelphia : Saunders, 1953 [1971] ). 12 ( 1998 ) : 2217–2233 . 292–320 . 35 –57.
3 As used in this broader context, for 7 For example, Field Operations’ design Hands-on experiential learning
example, by Gregory Bateson, Steps to for Fresh Kills, New York; OMA, Bruce at the Children’s Discovery
an Ecology of Mind ( Chicago : University Mau, and Inside Outside’s design for Parc Centre, Evergreen Brick Works,
of Chicago Press, 1972 ). Similar examples Downsview, Toronto; Latz + Partner’s
Toronto
can be found in the scholarship of John design for Landschaftspark Duisburg
Dryzek, Tim Forsyth, Roger Keil, Sian Nord; and Stoss’s design for the Lower
Sullivan, Adam Swift, and Paul Robbins Don Lands, Toronto.
( and others ) in political ecology, and 8 Jane Amidon, “Big Nature,” in Lisa
Murray Bookchin, Ramchandra Guha, Tilder and Beth Bloustein, eds., Designing
and David Pepper ( and others ) in social Ecologies ( New York : Princeton Architec-
ecology. tural Press, 2009 ).
4 Among many examples are : Harvard 9 Ignasi de Sola-Morales Rubió, “Terrain
University Graduate School of Design’s Vague,” in Cynthia C. Davidson, ed.,
new seminar in Ecology as Urbanism ( see : Anyplace ( Cambridge, MA : MIT Press,
http ://www.gsd.harvard.edu/academic/ 1995 ), 120 .
upd/maudmlaudrequirements.htm ); 10 Georgia Daskalakis and Omar Perez,
York University’s Faculty of Environmental “Things to Do in Detroit,” in Georgia
Studies curriculum stream in political and Daskalakis, Charles Waldheim, and Jason
cultural ecologies ( http ://www.yorku.ca/ Young, eds., Stalking Detroit ( Barcelona :
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