Jennifer Chau Tran |
The Versailles Landscape Planning Organization

Environmental racism can be defined as the unequal distribution of environmental benefits and pollution burdens based on race. The New Orleans neighbourhood of Versailles, home to the densest Vietnamese diaspora population in America, has historically been a passive receptor for the environmental repercussions of industry and extraction. This thesis proposes an operational framework for the Versailles Landscape Planning Organization, which introduces an environmental monitoring system that can continuously sense the health of the neighbourhood moving forward. The new framework creates a system of landscape programs that challenge the requirements of the extractive industries that have negatively affected residents’ wellbeing.

Project Website: https://www.jenniferchautran.ca/vlpo

Jiazhi Yin |
‍Reimagining the Aquascape of the Wuchuan Littoral Zone

By analyzing a land reclamation plan in Wuchuan, a coastal city with a disaster-prone, economic-fringe, and aquaculture-focused identity, this thesis reimagines a response to the typical coastal land reclamation practiced in Chinese littoral cities, such as Shenzhen and Hong Kong. The design proposes integrating aquaculture and urban growth as resilient aquaculture armor. In so doing, the project aspires to support and expand the roles that aquacultures play in building resilient coastlines, urban ecologies, and a cohabited public realm. 

Hamed Nadi |
‍P-P-P: Popup Parks and Parking

How will COVID-19 reshape Toronto? This pandemic has changed the way we operate — and, with schools and offices sitting empty, some of these changes are here to stay. In the past, health crises helped create new urban amenities like alleyways, freshwater reservoirs, and large city parks. As the city’s population rises, Torontonians are in need of more open space, so that they can escape their tiny apartments and take care of their mental and physical health, now and in the future.

Bonnie Chuong | Shifting Manhattan's Shoreline

Over the last three centuries, New York City’s shoreline has expanded in response to development pressures. Today a network of hard infrastructures and hundreds of piers have replaced the original shoreline and its marshes. The most vulnerable areas are ones that were filled and correlate directly with the flood plain.  This has made Manhattan especially vulnerable to sea level rise, storm surge, and pluvial flooding. After Hurricane Sandy and the 14’ storm surge that put half of Manhattan out of power, the city has begun efforts to protect itself. New York’s response ranged from a US$10 billion berm, a US$119 billion sea wall, to more innovative strategies like the “BIG U” from the Rebuild by Design competition.  The first two strategies are criticized for their ineffectiveness and damage on marine ecology. The costs of these projects show New York’s monetary capabilities and willingness to invest in flood protection. Conversely, the “BIG U” was criticized to be exclusive to public-private partnerships. This shows complex social, political, and economic realms the designs must acknowledge.  

These issues create an opportunity to reconsider Manhattan’s shoreline as a continuous system of public green infrastructure, one that is connected to the rest of the city’s greenspaces. This thesis aims to reclaim spaces between existing piers to form a continuous new edge of wetland marshes, parks, promenades and programmable public surfaces in response to climate change. The strategies utilized follow Nature-Based Solutions (NBS) that highlight ecosystem processes such as restoring riparian zones, beach nourishment, and barrier islands. NBS emerged during discussions at the United Nations Convention on Climate Change and they are to protect, sustainably manage, and restore natural or modified ecosystems.  

Ambika Pharma | On Thin Ice

2020 Heather M. Reisman Gold Medal, John H. Daniels Faculty, University of Toronto

Maritime chokepoints are congestive pathways that define some of the world’s most frequented shipping routes. Located at fixed geographies, these critical junctures of international trade result in unique spatial considerations born from an influx of port urbanization, global security risks, increased traffic, and cross-border conflicts. In addition to being a high intensity passage, major geographical characteristics of straits are the presence of unique ecologies, terrain, and natural resources. Offshore installations, extractive industries, fisheries, subsea internet and gas operations all occur along rich productive zones within chokepoint extents. Newly emerging passages, made viable by changing climate and terrain, will give rise to unexplored opportunities inspired by emergent social dynamics, big infrastructure, and tightly bound logistical and ecological regional systems.

Due  to sea level rise and ice melt, the extension of disruptive trade routes through the Poles are increasing. As Arctic sea ice retreats, the Bering Strait’s emerging role as a major maritime chokepoint threatens this fragile landscape. New pressures brought upon by the shipping industry, political investment, and global security are poised to clash with one of the world’s most productive marine ecosystems and indigenous subsistence populations. This project proposes a reinvention of nautical systems that wraps economy, trade, and ecology around a new formulation of logistical landscapes and time. The bending of the international date line around the Diomede islands dividing the Strait creates a “time-exclusion-zone” and an arctic bio-reserve as the passage evolves. The proposed bioreserve is imagined as a device for political and ecological innovation in this tenuous region. A series of multi-scalar landscape interventions and infrastructural systems re-imagine how shipping routes, urban development, and shifting terrain in a future Arctic could ultimately benefit the vulnerable ecological systems they transverse.

Waiyee Chou | Community, Agriculture & the Karez

2019 ASLA Honor Award and the John E. (Jack) Irving Prize, John H. Daniels Faculty, University of Toronto

Turpan Prefecture is recognized as an area with serious ecological degradation, which is viewed as a threat to its local heritage. A combination of natural-environmental and social-economic factors, such as desertification, acid rain, soil salinization, agricultural activities and tourism have been identified as contributors to ecological and heritage degradation, in which 75% of heritage sites in the region are threatened. Agricultural activity is identified as having major impact, and the need to change the approach to which water is managed within Turpan was recognized by the World Bank, which identified that use of water resources in the area was not sustainable, causing increasing ecological degradation. Turpan's Kumtag Desert is also home to the critically endangered Camelus Ferus, the only surviving wild camel species, and is one of the last remaining habitats for wild camels in the world. Coupled with the region's dilemma of disappearing plant species, in which over 30 of the 104 endangered species are harvested for medicinal use, conservation of living species has been identified as urgently needed, especially with only 3% of medicinal plants responsibly harvested through cultivation.

Approximately 50,000 households rely on Turpan's karez system as a source for drinking water, in which restoring this water system offers an opportunity for local communities to take part in creating a new trajectory for community based resource management, rooted in local culture and the sharing of traditional ecological knowledge for human survival in an ecologically fragile region, where water resource concerns are exacerbated by rapid development of commercial agriculture and population growth.

The continued practice of heritage based rituals, researched through anthropological, ethnographic and medicinal sciences were investigated to offer insight into how the dynamics of mediating heritage identities exist for culture and how design can contribute to enabling the continued practice of heritage within the landscapes in which local traditions are rooted in. Cultural practices with heritage designation were investigated; wherein their intrinsic ties to landscape and defined spatial geographies were examined to understand how Turpan operates and can be sustained as a place for living and healing.

Hadi El-Shayeb | Land-Coast-Deep Sea: GBR Mass Ecological Collapse

2019 John E. Irving Award
2019 ASLA Certificate of Merit

The rate at which anthropogenic disturbances and climate change are impacting the Great Barrier Reef, in Queensland Australia, is surpassing its regenerative capacity with up to half of the 2300km coral system succumbed to death in the last decade. The project transcends the narrative of independent coral restoration study and dives into deeper examination of Queensland’s manufactured landscapes from; unregulated carbon intensive mines (contributing to climate change and coral bleaching) to tree felling (at a rate of 1000 rugby fields a day) in lieu of coastal industrial agriculture and ocean poison runoff.

The narrative advocates for a new regenerative connection across a transect of sites which are emblematic of the larger regional issues. This includes; land (reforestation of Goonyella Riverside mine for carbon sequestration), coast (coastal restoration of Haypoint Coal Terminal and rerouted network of waterflows from industrial agriculture), and deep sea (regeneration of Molar Reef corals). The novelty of this design research is in its capacity to propose a layering of existing to novel landscape architectural strategies for regenerating massive degraded landscapes. While coral restoration remains at the heart of this narrative, the morals extracted prescribe the need for ho­listic examination, healing, and healthy human agency across a wider landscape for true restoration.

Niloufar Makaremi | In Between Walls

2018 ASLA Award of Excellence in General Design Category
2018 Rosa Barba School Prize Finalist, Barcelona International Landscape Architecture School Prize

For the past 5000 years, the Hamoun lakes have been a major source of food and shelter for people in central Asia. This complex system of wetlands other than having a high ecological value, also holds both cultural and historical significance for indigenous people of the region.  

These transboundary lakes border Iran and Afghistan. River system originated from Hindu kush in east of Afghanistan discharge into an inland depression which forms the Hamoun Lakes. Iran and Afghanistan had an agreement since 1870 on how to share the water. However, over time a long series of events such as a civil war, Taliban power struggles in Afghanistan and revolution in Iran, rendered the agreement disregarded. Tension between the two countries has persisted ever since.  

These political conflicts in conjunction with drought, climate change and local mismanagement in the region have caused the lakes to dry up and generate both dust and sand storms. The storms impact both Iran and Afghanistan alike. With socio-economic and environmental issues effecting the livelihood of residents in either country.Serving as proof in how meaningless the borders and boundaries are when it comes to environmental issue that can directly affect human wellbeing. The strategy contends with the issue by addressing dust at its source. Hamoun lake. Working with environmental forces such as wind patterns and wetland systems the strategy harnesses the sites existing potential.

Maintaining vegetation cover in the lake bed instead of the reed harvesting and grazing that currently takes place, will help to retain water in the lakes deepest region for longer periods of time, changing the ephemeral nature of the lake. This will ultimately contribute to the suppression of dust in the region. For the places that are still dry and generate dust storms, Based on the physics of dust storms, dust particle and wind velocity and with the objective of ecological improvement as part of a functional landscape, my project proposes a physical dust-mitigation armature in the landscape.    

By identifying the dust source and composition, as well as behavior, I placed a series of strategically located walls with varying heights, apertures and distances that work with the natural forces and act as wind break for sediment capture before the dust reaches the nearby cities and towns. In addition to their strategic location in relation to the predominant wind direction in the lake dried bed, 7 series of walls have been proposed, that stretch 13kms across the site with a high cultural and historical value.  

Dune ecology…There is also a sensor and monitoring technology embedded in these walls for scientists to measure the amount of dust and air pollution. The series of walls stretch perpendicularly along a major road terminating in a mountain located in the heart of Hamoun lake. The mountain is of importance to the three ancient faiths of Zoroastrianism, Christianity and Islam and considered as a holy place for the residents of the region.  

This mountain which is also called rustam mount, is the birth place of one of the most celebrated heroes in Persian epic literature, named Rustam. Famous for a story in which he has to go through seven challenges to reverse a curse that had blinded the people in Persia. Moving through this series of 7 walls reflects and evokes the emotions and thoughts that allude to the story of rustam which is deeply embedded in the culture of this region. The walls have cuts and gates that frame views to this mountain guide and direct people to a spectacular view of the landscape beyond.  

While the arrangement of these walls, their height and distance are based on the scientific rationale of particle physics, to protect the region from dust storms.  The seven segments of the walls weave a narrative that connects the locals to a site and a landscape of significant historical and cultural value.  

In a world where walls are seen as dividers, my proposed walls help to create a functional landscape that brings people back to a site which seen as blighted and damaged. The walls in this proposal are meant to connect different groups of people and allow them to inhabit places that they have been pushed out of.  

These Walls act as a unifying agent between people and the landscape and hopefully we can still find beauty in between walls.

Qiwei Song | Topographic Urban Expansion: A Landscape Amateur on the Hillsides of Mexico City

2018 ASLA Honor Award, Student Award in the Analysis and Planning Category
2019 Shortlisted, UnIATA (Architecture Thesis Award) Competition
2020 National Urban Design Award/Award of Excellence in the Student Category
2020 Top 3 Finalist, Spring World Campus Master
2020 Special Mention, ArchiStart Architecture Thesis Award
2020 Honorable Mention, Design and Innovation Competition

This project introduces a pre-emptive approach, a topographic landscape strategy that acts as an open space armature for future development on the hillsides of Mexico City. It proposes social, ecological, economic, and cultural amenities that support and sustain the inevitability of informal growth pattern by connecting and planting hydraulic buffers along steep slopes and introducing topographic interventions in connected bands of open space.

As Mexico City continues to increase its population, geologic, economic, social, and historical factors and constraints are pushing developments to the hillsides of the city's peripheries. Most of these developments are self-built irregular settlements.

Because of the incompletion and unsustainability of current informal urbanization model on hillsides, people frequently lack basic services, such as water supply, sanitation, accessibility, and other amenities. Six case study sites are analysed and ranked to find the priority site to be further urbanized soon. Among them, Cerro el Pino would be the priority to be intervened because of its best access to public transportation and services. Based on current development model, irregular settlements will further creep up and cover the mountain, lack of trees put this place at high risk of mudslides during the rainy season. People need to pay a quarter of their salary relying on trucks and donkeys to transport water due to poor water supply. All these issues plague hillside neighbourhoods and make it inconvenient and unsuitable to live.

In response to this informal urbanization pattern lacking infrastructural provision and open space which increases social inequality, the project introduces a topographic landscape framework that acts as an open space armature, manages informal growth and addresses needs of people in existing and future neighbourhoods through insertion of social-economic and ecological amenities. This project strives to find a pre-emptive way to support and sustain the inevitability of future informal growth and create an landscape armature system that would be beneficial to self-built neighbourhoods and the mountain ecosystem in the long run.

Ihab Daakour | Water Sensitive Urban Design

Water Sensitive Urban Design examines links between urbanism and water, specifically, the effects of floods. It creates a series of guidelines which encourage integrating water into design instead of avoiding it, when building on floodplains. The projectproposes new typologies, and the adaptation of existing typologies, of buildings and outdoor spaces that vary in terms of density and can adapt to different water levels and flooding conditions. These redeveloped typologies are integrated into the design of a new development proposal for the Lower Don Lands area.

Nancy Mengyi Zhang | Metabolic Suburban Forms on the Edge of Saskatoon

Rapid urbanization is directly correlated with a form of global suburban expansion. Most rural hinterlands on urban peripheries are now rapidly becoming developed into single-use residential subdivisions. This normative suburban development poses serious challenges to both agricultural production and ecological conservation. Although suburban sprawl is a universal problem, comprehensive frameworks for agency and intervention on suburbia remain absent in theory and few large-scale design and planning projects have been completed.

However, this rapid investment in suburban growth and expansion provides an opportunity to rethink the typical approach to expansion. This thesis intends to reconcile the competing interests among ecological preservation, agricultural production, and suburban development on the fringes of Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, bringing new typological forms for resilient growth and capturing existing prairie wetland as ecological infrastructure.

The three constituencies highlighted in this project are ecological preservation, agricultural production, and sub-urban development

Adeline Yingqian Hu | Resilient Neighbourhoods: A Landscape Approach to Waterlogging

The lack of land and pervasive urban expansion in metropolitan cities has inevitably expanded city fabric into ecologically sensitive and hydrologically dynamic areas such as lakes and rivers. The intensive urban development along water edgeshas reduced urban lake sizes,decreasingtheability to contain water during heavy rain seasons, and as a result builtareas around lake edges often suffer from the prevalence of natural hazards, such as flooding.

This thesis project studieshow landscape architects can strategically redesignproblematic urban edges around lakes and rivers to be more resilient, livable,and dynamic by introducing new open space networks that mitigate the negative impact of urban water logging and runoff. The study area of thisproject is the City of Wuhan, a central city suffering from floods and urban waterlogging in China. Wuhanis a medium-size Chinese City, capital to Hubei provinceandhas sufferedfrom water-related disastersthroughouthistory. Lake Tangxun is the biggest and most affected urban lake.Like many city edge lakes, Tangxun Lake used to be a natural landscape only partly occupied by local farmers and fisherman, the lake is now fully developed by real estate.

Locals claimedge land as fish farms,lower land for agriculturaluse, and construct their home on higher ground. This settlement pattern allowslocal farmers to transform the lake edge to productive land and reduce the impact of flooding on people’s property. With city development and capitalism, this self-sustaining development pattern has been broken. By the 2000s existing development maps, we can identify that developers poorly and rapidly claim the lake edge land and constructed neighborhoods without any considerations of either the resiliency of the area or matching facilities.

The project outlines four major strategies and design steps torevitalize neighborhood:

1.Bringingback the dynamic lake edge and dynamic social-culture structure
2. IntroducingBlue/Green open space
3. Support building pattern
4. AddingSocial Connections

Andrew Hooke | The Island Section

The island of Dominica has one of the lowest GDPs in the Caribbean and some of the most mountainous terrain. This project examines the limiting role that topography has played in the country’s economic development and aims to reimagine the landscape into a productive terrain. A slope strategy is outlined with the goal of optimizing economic gain through risk mitigation and economic diversification.

The design interventions display possible resolutions of this strategy in three high risk but culturally significant sites. Since Dominica does not have a legally binding land-use strategy in place, this project has the potential to significantly impact the island’s development.

Shaine Grace Wong | Constructive Deconstruction

2020 Award of Excellence, WLA Awards for the Student, Analysis & Planning Category

The Constructive Destruction, rethink the issue of unexploded ordnance (UXO) in Cambodia — from a deadly threat to a potential resource for development. What if the demining of UXO is piggy-backed with local infrastructural development? Can we redesign the demining effort to shoot two birds in one stone, and mitigate other environmental issues that are also threatening post-war Cambodia? This project explores strategic ways to restore the Cambodian landscape to safe grounds while developing critical infrastructure for future development and environmental issues mitigation. The proposed interventions also create cultural landscapes and experiences that tell the unique war history of the country.

‍Cambodia has more active buried explosives than people living above. During the Vietnam war, 2.7million tons of ordnance were dropped in Cambodia; more than half remained unexploded. The immense amount of UXO and high economic cost of removal creates an insurmountable challenge to Cambodia. Demining remains today a highly inefficient, low incentive, and poorly organized activity. Every week, 3 innocent lives are lost.The research was inspired by the way locals repurpose the bombshells into daily commodities like canoes and house foundations, and develop bomb craters into fish farming ponds. It explores design opportunities that capture the action of demining to serve its highest potential for future development, and repurposes the bomb-scapes for productive applications.

The research started with the methodology of studying the types and spatial distribution of the UXO, and their relationship with other environmental issues. Issues such as deforestation, flooding, water pollution, and development pressure of arable land. In Stung Treng, the excavated demined landscape are proposed to develop into a waterway that serves as an irrigation canal, providing irrigation water for the development of rice paddy inland, functioning as a waterway to transport crops to markets for sale, and serving as aquaculture ponds. The excavated soil from demining can be reused as fill materials for flood levees along the Mekong river. In Kampong Cham, demined craters are proposed to develop into rainwater harvesting ponds for irrigation/livestock water, and others to develop into flood diversion channels for excess river flow, mitigating the effects of flooding to the surrounding agricultural area. For craters that are outside of the flood zone, they are proposed to be preserved and grow into nature reserves, providing habitats for a new landscape ecology to thrive. Eco-tourism can be promoted, educating visitors on the impact of war and allowing a new experience to the post-war landscape. The demining of unexploded ordnance may seem insurmountable — but when demining is strategically designed to be capitalized as long-term and high-return investment, it attracts investments and provides higher incentives for demining. This results in the efficient removal of UXOs, the safety of people, and the economic recovery and prosperity in the country of Cambodia.