00:01I'm a teacher of landscape architecture at the University of Toronto with the Center for Landscape Research…

00:06…and I thought I'd lead with a project that I've been spending the last five or six years working on…

00:12…using the geodesign tools we've built over the years.

00:16In this case, it comes from the premise that I was always finding in first professional MLA program…

00:21…that we were teaching philosophers how to be landscape architects in a year.

00:26So I was interested in and being effective coming up with design.

00:30So the last few years I've been experimenting with the community I live in, because they approached me and asked me…

00:35…what could we do with the community?

00:37This plan you're seeing right here is result of using those tools to create a new community plan…

00:44…that's six or seven times denser than anything the planners were saying they should do.

00:50And I think it's a really interesting aspect when people can negotiate this for themselves with their own language…

00:56…so I'm really interested in all of these tools as a form of spatial literacy that people can engage…

01:02…not in one-way communication but in dialog.

01:06So this came about through a two-year conversation, taking what used to be a half-million dollar computer system…

01:12…and doing it on a netbook at a kitchen table.

01:15So I think there's room for optimism.

01:18The project I'll try to focus on here is one that began by bringing together people in engineering…

01:26…and in our field around the greater Toronto area.

01:30And what it's facing, a whole series of demands, a hundred thousand people a year immigrate to the city.

01:36On top of that, Canada's moved from a country of 20 percent urban to 80 and about to be 90 percent urban.

01:44But we weren't used to living in cities in that way.

01:48Most of our cities, 80 to 90 percent of them are post-World War II.

01:52So the places, the province tried to step in. It's been saying densify.

01:57But it's whole thing is hinging on urban design and the quality of the microscale.

02:02So for Carl's scales, I have to operate at 1 to 50 and up, and it's going to be a bottom-up meeting top-down strategy.

02:11So I've been experimenting from the bottom up.

02:14The complete streets ideas, my colleagues, but we have to operate from the complete street to this scale to solve this problem.

02:21And one of…another vexing component is that Toronto is a nineteenth-century city, is the part that everyone loves.

02:28And cities are now places for the Jan Gehl showing, not places of work but places of recreation.

02:34So the middle class and all of us have moved into the nineteenth-century city and have started to gentrify it and displace the populations.

02:43So the traditional immigrant staging neighborhoods have shifted from these areas into these areas.

02:50And, they now have to find…we have to find ways of retrofitting the post-World War II landscape at the detailed scale…

02:58…and employment patterns, so on.

03:00So this…this is the challenge we've been working at, but I'll focus now on a case study we were working…

03:06…which is focusing on urban design towards the others.

03:09How do we retrofit these environments, looking at spatial patterns?

03:13The key is the tool that I've had the privilege of having people…in my lab build for me over the last 25 years…

03:20…is linked to many of the same kinds of things that you're starting to see now.

03:24The key is parametric information, viewshed analysis.

03:28Anytime we've got two different apples and oranges that we can systematically link them…

03:33…it totally changes the negotiation approach to the whole process, and as much immersive, full-range, peripheral vision…

03:44…engaging the whole visual cortex in helping to come through this and allowing people to do it themselves.

03:50And it all stems back to early work we were doing in the '90s of using ArcInfo as the driver to automate tools…

03:56…with Eckert Lange, Willie Schmidt at ETH, and Ziggy Lange, and we collaborated for a number of years…

04:05…in bringing these tools together to automate getting the representations that were adequate.

04:09Then we needed them to work parametrically. We needed to be able to integrate all of these tools.

04:15And we've got those now.

04:17And lately, I've been working on places that we reinforced the urban forest in Toronto for urban heat island change.

04:24The team right now is really exciting, because now I get to work with the best transportation modeler in our region…

04:31…Eric Miller, and Stephen Sheppard at UBC is doing a similar thing in this study through GEOIDE...

04:37…which is the National Center of Excellence in Canada for geomatics.

04:41So we're trying to link these things together.

04:44The specific case I'll show you right now is one that came up in this project.

04:49Esri is one of our partners in…industrial partners in the project.

04:53So our focus right now, and we need as much help in this as possible, is adapting…

04:58…taking from our prototyping environment the lessons we've learned about doing these things…

05:02…and taking three key areas of parametric and modeling approaches.

05:07One is the traditional urban design one that I've worked in.

05:11The other is taking carbon analysis and energy analysis models in Excel spreadsheets.

05:18And, the third one is taking Eric Miller's agent-based, microagent-based simulation models…

05:25…of predictive behavior of people in the region in their transportation.

05:29So this…this is the thing that Bill Miller's group and Matthew Baker helped us put together about four weeks ago…

05:37…and we're right in the midst of trying to bring this together for the West Don Lands.

05:41It's this classic area on the waterfront international competitions.

05:45It's been designed from that urban design approach.

05:49But at the same time, they did this carbon energy analysis.

05:52So we're taking the elements of traditional CAD models. No one's done this parametrically yet…

05:57…bring the parametric models together with these types of information, and with Eric led part of that work…

06:04…developing the spreadsheet, the Clinton Foundation has been behind part of this.

06:08So part of our hope is to take that, that model and integrate it with ArcGIS 10 and cross these scales that we're looking at.

06:16The information that each of these elements of the model requires come to us from different scales.

06:23So that…that's the one component I mentioned there. I'm adapting that work.

06:25Eric Miller's taking his traffic model, and what you see here is the first bit we got out of that test of using the physical model…

06:33…to drive some of the area parameters and the population in the development, and then this is the prediction of where those…

06:41…we would expect those people to be working…

06:43…and what part of the transportation network in the region they would be going to.

06:47So these are the downtown people who are actually living across the region in order to have their work patterns.

06:54And then this key…really interesting energy…energy and carbon analysis tool that Eric put together…

07:01…and linking that into the model is our…is where we're at at this point, and that's the next stage is linking these together.

07:10So, and that's this model here of the workflow we're working on at the moment.

07:14And this is one of our first stages of elaborating that.

07:18The 3D model is now at the point where it will drive the numbers feeding to the spreadsheet, or vice versa…

07:25…and then the trans…and you're seeing some of the impact of populations and…

07:30…household users in the…the 3D model applied across the region.

07:36And then we add the Flex dashboards we've been doing in the heat island work applied to provide some of this kind of feedback to us.

07:44And the other case we'll do more work on after is the Pearson Airport zone, heat island applied across industrial zones…

07:51…and an urban agricultural strategy for mitigating that heat island effect is one of the schemes as an example we're working with.

07:59And then, again, the dashboards for that scale.

08:03I think those…that's sort of the stage our work is at, and I came in part to get as much input from other people…

08:09…that we might have at the break sessions about what we do next in adapting from our research prototypes and…

08:15…trying to bring the lessons we've learned in these three areas together around the latest tool sets. Thank you.