SUMMER CITIES 2018 // WORKING WATERFRONTS // FRESHWATER FICTIONS

To launch the first annual Summer Cities Symposium, we invited speakers whose work addresses the urban waterfronts of Ottawa-Gatineau, the Great Lakes, and the St. Lawrence River.

On July 13th and 14th of 2018, the Azrieli School of Architecture and Urbanism welcomed speakers, guests, and students from diverse disciplines to explore urban thinking and visualization techniques, and to discuss the implications of ways of imagining, drawing, and telling stories of water and cities. Panel discussions, tours, and workshops allowed participants to engage the variety of creative fictions used by different agents and agencies to describe and to shape river and lakefronts.

Carleton University acknowledges the location of its campus on the traditional and unceded territories of the Algonquin nation.

The Canadian Capital Region’s history is one of competing narratives and cultures, and the River that is the source of the city has shaped and been shaped by those stories. We welcome the perspectives of members of the Indigenous First Nations communities whose territories are the location and the inspiration for this symposium.

This event was co-sponsored by the Azrieli School of Architecture and Urbanism and the SJB School of Planning in Bengaluru, Karnataka.

Schedule & Themes

This international public symposium was centered on urban waterfronts, with a focus on 3 themes: equity, infrastructure, and environment.

This multi-day event was a step in creating a foundation and a framework for future international initiatives, expanding the conversations we are having about the shared challenges of 21st-century urban waterfronts.

Summer City 2018 Panels

Panel 01 – Edges and Equity

Panel 02 – Plans and Visions

Panel 03 – Power and Place

Panel 04 – Future Fictions

Summer City 2018 Speakers

Watch  My Path, My Water, My City


Josée is a very proud Algonquin woman from the Pikwakanagan reservation west of Ottawa. Her father is a 60’s scoop baby taken at 9 months old and her grandmother is a residential school survivor. Josée spent a very large part of her life training in professional dance as well as experiencing a successful career as one of Canada’s first native fashion models and traveled internationally from 1999- 2005. However, growing up in different neighborhoods in Toronto she learned quickly that one thing this city had in common with other major cities is the lack of representation of First Nations people, history, arts, and contributions. This led Josée, as a young woman, to make necessary changes in her life and ensure that she did what it takes to be a useful, contributing, successful, healthy and proud Algonquin life-giving woman.

Josée would later find herself studying College in Nova Scotia where she also gave birth to her son, Little Thunder, and graduated Valedictorian in 2013, she then went on to work full time at a Federal Women’s Prison as a Behavioral Counsellor and Social Program officer.

In late 2014 she was given her position on the Memengweshii Council, for the ZIBI project, by her communities Chief and Council. Josée also holds a part-time permanent position at the Wanaki Treatment Center in Kitigan Zibi as the Accreditation Coordinator. She also works as a Cultural Consultant for the French Catholic School Board of Ontario.

Watch  Working Fictions: Urban Edges and Imaginations


Professor Bonier teaches courses in architectural and environmental design, research, history, and theory. Her research spans from historical analysis to futuristic design visions, and centers on the shaping of the built environment around water, infrastructure, and ideas of health and balance. Bonier earned both her professional MArch and her PhD in Architecture from the University of Pennsylvania, and a BA in History from Harvard College. Her dissertation addressed historical ideas of equilibrium and democracy and their relationship to urban water, infrastructure, and landscape, and she has published on issues of urban water and remediation in both historical and contemporary contexts. Her current work centers on the consideration of democratic engagement, civic place, and personal delight in contemporary urban and infrastructural remediation projects. Professor Bonier is co-director and co-founder of the Carleton Urban Research Lab (c-url) with Professor Ozayr Saloojee. C-URL is engaged in collaborative interdisciplinary research, teaching, and design projects centered on the entwined issues of water, cities, and equity.

Sean Burkholder is a new Assistant Professor of Landscape Architecture at the University of Pennsylvania.  Prior to joining the School of Design he was an Assistant professor of Landscape and Urban Design at the University of Buffalo. He is also the director of the Landscape Affairs Group, a Landscape Research and Design consultancy focused on the human-entangled freshwater ecosystems of postindustrial regions. The relationship of these issues and their experiential understanding are being explored in a forthcoming book authored by himself and Karen Lutsky titled: Curious Methods (University of Pittsburgh Press 2019). Sean is also co-directing the $1.5m Healthy Port Futures project from the Great Lakes Protection Fund in close collaboration with a range of local and federal agencies. This project stresses the inherent value of landscape design research in the process of maritime infrastructure projects that typically aim only at single-value outcomes. Underpinning all of this work is a particular interest in the way in which substrate and ecology influence the urban landscape and how these systems are interpreted by others.

Watch  Architectures of Refusal


Eduardo Rega Calvo is an architect, urban designer and researcher based in New York. He is an architecture faculty at PennDesign at the University of Pennsylvania where he teaches graduate history/theory and research seminars and design studios. His most recent project, Architectures of Refusal compiles an atlas of social mobilizations that refuse capitalism, colonialism and human rights violations by revealing their spatialities, urbanisms and architectures. Eduardo is a PhD candidate at ETSA Madrid and an editorial board member of UrbanNext. He is a co-organizer of the recent Structural Instabilities conference at PennDesign and is co-editor of the forthcoming Structural Instabilities journal with e-flux. He holds a professional degree in architecture and urbanism from the University of Las Palmas and a masters of science degree in advanced architectural design from Columbia University. His work has been published and exhibited internationally, most recently at the 2018 Venice Architecture Biennale and at the 2016 Oslo Architecture Triennale After Belonging Agency. His research and design work focus on architecture’s capacity to translate, operate in, and contribute to insurgent social and political movements.

Watch  The untold delights of Duluth


Vincent deBritto is Senior Lecturer in the Landscape Architecture Department at the University of Minnesota. He has a B.Arch from California Polytechnic University San Luis Obispo and a MLA from Cornell University. He has worked as a freelance graphic designer and intern architect in California and London. His clients included Holland America Lines, Apple Inc., and the San Francisco Zoo. As a landscape architect, he has received a national honor award from the American Society of Landscape Architects for the Westminster Presbyterian Church Columbarium and a GSA citation for the US Port of Entry in Warroad, Minnesota. He currently teaches courses on representation, climate change adaptation and resiliency, and runs the Cities on Water study abroad program. From 2012 to 2016, he taught the Design Duluth studio with Ozayr Saloojee.

Watch  Toponymy Researcher


JeanLuc Fournier is a dynamic and effective educator, researcher, and communicator with an array of professional experience working with Indigenous organizations, institutions and community groups. His main area of research is Mamiwinini-Anishinaabeg Toponymy, History, Language (Mamiwininimowin), Culture, Traditional knowledge, Customary legal system, Traditional land tenure(s). Fournier holds a degree in Aboriginal Studies and Environmental studies from the University of Ottawa.

Watch  Re-imagining Waterfronts Development in Canada’s Capital


Chris Hoyt is senior architect with the National Capital Commission in Ottawa where he guides buildings and master plans through federal approvals. Over the course of a 20-year career, Hoyt has worked as an architect on noteworthy projects such as City Centre in Washington DC, the Bridgepoint Health Redevelopment, and the Bay Adelaide Centre, both in Toronto. He has taught architectural and urban design studios at Andrews University in Michigan and at Carleton University. 
 
Hoyt is a licensed architect in the District of Columbia and a member of the Ontario Association of Architects, the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada, and the American Institute of Architects

Watch  Civic Coproduction on the ‘island’ of Verdun


Nik Luka specializes in transdisciplinary approaches to understanding urban form and cultural landscapes with a particular interest in the everyday interfaces of nature and culture as experienced by individuals. Trained as an architect and planner, with a Ph.D. in urban and cultural geography, Luka works extensively on participatory planning and community-based design processes—including adaptive strategies for making infrastructure fit well into local contexts—as well as substantive interests in housing, residential mobility, and the dynamics of peri-urban spaces. He collaborates intensively with Montréal-based government agencies and civil society organizations. His project work also focuses on the Berlin-Brandenburg region, central Sweden, and various urban(ising) settings across Canada. Currently-funded research includes (a) transdisciplinary approaches to the coproduction of new infrastructure for landscape connectivity to support safe movement of humans (active transportation: walking and cycling) and other animals (wildlife corridors) in rural, periurban, suburban, and urban contexts; (b) action-research investigations into crowdsourcing for the deliberative coproduction of strategies for neighbourhood improvement through storytelling and participatory urban design, linking specialists (professionals in architecture, urban design, planning, engineering, public administration, and related filed) with nonspecialists (‘local experts’—citizens and other place-based stakeholders whose voices are rarely heard in meaningful ways); and (c) comparative studies with Swedish and Belgian colleagues on new transit-oriented development (TOD) strategies in Sweden, the Low Countries, and Canada, as well as joint projects with on patterns of transformation in the postwar suburban landscapes of the Swedish welfare state. Luka is an Associate Professor in the Schools of Architecture and Urban Planning at McGill University, where he is also affiliated with the School of Environment, the Institute for Health and Social Policy (IHSP), the Trottier Institute for Sustainability in Engineering and Design (TISED), and the newly-formed Centre for Interdisciplinary Research on Montréal (CIRM).

Watch  The Wedge: Reclaiming the Littoral Great Lakes


Karen Lutsky is an assistant professor of landscape architecture at the University of Minnesota’s College of Design. She has held teaching and design research positions in landscape architecture at a number of institutions including the University of Pennsylvania, Pennsylvania State University, the Illinois Institute of Technology, and University at Buffalo -SUNY. She also notably held the 2014/15 Miggs Caulkin Urban Visiting Professor Fellowship in the department of landscape architecture at the Ohio State University. Her current design research focuses on landscape architecture’s role in the future of the littoral zone of the Great Lakes and the potential of the lakes’ emergent land to address larger environmental issues and establish healthier relationships between people and the water. Karen is particularly interested in how landscape architecture, a design field that has long worked with issues of change and adaptation, may move the region to better celebrate and engage the dynamics of the shoreline in its efforts to establish a more resilient future. Karen received her BA in ‘Environment and Society’ cum laude from Brandeis University and her MLA from the University of Pennsylvania.

Watch  Memory, Erasure, Resilience

Watch  Framing New Narratives: Teaching Sustainable Urbanism


Ar. Smitha Mysore is a Professor of Architecture and Program Coordinator, Center for Smart and Sustainable Technologies at SJB School of Architecture and Planning (SJB SAP), Bangalore, India. At SJB SAP, context-sensitive design possibilities, equity, access and historical influences have been central to her teaching. Prof. Mysore has been leading and coordinating studio teams, which explore methods to incorporate larger concerns impacting built environments through analytical studies and design projects at the undergraduate level. In addition to teaching theory and studio courses, her academic engagements include international collaborations, faculty-curated international architectural tours and coordinating architectural research as the first recipient of a Science and Technology grant for architectural research from the Vision Group for Science and Technology, Government of Karnataka, India. Prof. Mysore’s efforts as an academic Planning Consultant for the Center for Sustainable Development, Bangalore, a not-for-profit organization, contributed to the ongoing review of the BIAPA (Bangalore International Airport Planning Area) Master Plan.

Watch  Civic Art Meets the Automobile on Cleveland’s Lakefront


Steven Rugare is an Associate Professor at Kent State University College of Architecture and Environmental Design, teaching courses in the history and theory of architecture and urbanism. Among his current courses are the graduate seminar “Forces that Shape Cities” and seminars on “World’s Fairs and Architecture” and Frank Lloyd Wright. From 1999 to 2009 he was a member of the professional staff of Kent State’s Cleveland Urban Design Collaborative, working on publications, events, exhibitions, and design competitions, and he continues to collaborate with the staff on programming. With Terry Schwarz, he edited the first two volumes of the CUDC-s Urban Infill journal.  He has presented his research on at the International Planning History Society, the Architectural Research Centers Consortium, and other venues. And he is currently working on a book on modernism in the communicative and planning context of world expositions. Before coming to Kent State, he taught at Oberlin College and the University of California at Santa Cruz. He received his bachelors in political philosophy from Michigan State University and an MA from the History of Consciousness Program at UC Santa Cruz.

Watch  Adaptive Archipelagos: Mapping Great Lakes Future


Professor Saloojee previously taught at the University of Minnesota’s College of Design, where he was an Associate Professor of Architecture with affiliate faculty status in Landscape Architecture and Religious Studies. Before moving to Minnesota in 2005, he studied, taught and practiced architecture here in Ottawa, receiving his B.Arch and Post-professional M.Arch (Theory and Culture) from Carleton University. He completed his Ph.D. at the Bartlett School of Architecture (University College London).

 

Professor Saloojee teaches courses in architectural design, urbanism, and history that explore themes and questions of water, landscape, infrastructure, post-coloniality in alternative urban and landscape futures. His research and academic interests include a focus on politically contested terrains through the intersections of architecture, landscape, and cultural geographies. He is currently working on a project called “The Incommensurate Archive,” an outcome of his doctoral work that explored the issue of the archival gap in South Africa’s colonial past and post-colonial present.

He continues to work with the interdisciplinary, multi-partner collaboration at the University of Minnesota – the Great Lakes Design Lab – with professors Karen Lutsky and Vince Debritto. At Carleton University, he partners with Professor Catherine Bonier on the co-directorship of the Carleton Urban Research Lab(C.URL) at the Azrieli School of Architecture and Urbanism whose focus centers on water, cities, and equity.

Watch  Waterfront Planning in Gatineau


Born in 1966 and holding a Master’s degree in environmental science, Mr. Tremblay started his career with Tecsult in Montréal before becoming the environment advisor for the city of Gatineau in 1992, a post he has held for various municipal and regional departments ever since.  In this capacity, he has participated in regulatory and policy work touching all spheres of municipal environment, including contaminated sites rehabilitation, land use in natural and industrial risk areas, waste management, water purification, mosquito control, health risk assessment, noise and nuisances, as well being the president for five years of the Association of waste managing municipal organisations (AOMGMR).  He is also, since 2004, a part-time teacher at the Université du Québec, University of Ottawa and La Cité Collégiale in various environmental science topics.  Married and the father of two, he resides in Gatineau.

Né en 1966 et détenteur d’une maîtrise en Science de l’environnement, Mr. Tremblay a débuté sa carrière chez Tecsult, à Montréal, avant de devenir conseiller en environnement pour la Ville de Gatineau en 1992, poste qu’il occupe depuis pour divers services municipaux ou régionaux.  À ce titre, il a participé à la préparation de règlements et politiques touchant à toutes les sphères de l’environnement municipal, incluant la réhabilitation de sites contaminés, l’occupation du territoire en zone de contraintes naturelles ou anthropiques, la gestion des matières résiduelles, le traitement de l’eau, le contrôle des moustiques, l’analyse de risque sur la santé, le bruit et les nuisances, tout en servant à titre de président de l’Association des Organismes municipaux de gestion des matières résiduelles (AOMGMR) pendant une période de cinq ans.  Il est aussi, depuis 2004, chargé de cours à l’Université du Québec, l’Université d’Ottawa et la Cité Collégiale dans divers sujets en science de l’environnement.  Marié et père de deux enfants, il réside à Gatineau.

Watch  Infrastructure and its Contribution to the Myth of Waterfronts


Dr. Mary Trudeau is a professional engineer with thirty years of experience in the development and implementation of environmental policy, programs and projects, with particular specialization in water resources and infrastructure management. She is the Director of Envirings Inc, an environmental policy and program consulting company. As a consultant to all levels of Canadian government and several not-for-profit organizations, she has undertaken numerous studies to inform policy and program development in the areas of water environment protection, sustainable urban water infrastructure, climate adaptation and science-informed policy. She is also a sessional lecturer at Carleton University and the University of Ottawa.

 

In addition to her consulting assignments, Dr. Trudeau recently undertook academic research on the effects of urbanization on surface water hydrology and associations of hydrologic change with negative effects on fish richness. Results are published in the Journal of Hydrology (2015 and 2016) and Ecohydrology (2017).

 

Prior to her career as a consultant, Dr. Trudeau managed several municipal water infrastructure portfolios with the City of Ottawa (then the Region of Ottawa-Carleton). One of these portfolios was to manage a surface water monitoring program, which included evaluations of stormwater infrastructure performance. Dr. Trudeau also initiated and implemented an environmental effects monitoring program to assess the effects of municipal infrastructure on receiving waters. Prior to this portfolio, she was responsible for maintenance of the central water purification facilities and operations as well as maintenance of municipal communal well systems. Other portfolios included management of an accredited laboratory, management of the potable water metering network and assessment of non-revenue water. Dr. Trudeau has successfully managed large, multi-disciplinary teams, public advisory committees, multi-stakeholder technical advisory committees, and staff groups of up to 70 persons.

Watch  Counter-mapping the City Treaty


Sarah Yankoo is Algonquin, Austrian, Irish, Romanian and Scottish and edge walks between the bush and the city that gathers in Pikwakanagan First Nation. Sarah is a graduate of York University’s Environmental Studies program where she focused on philosophy, arts, culture and communication, concurrent with an Indigenous Studies certificate and a minor in English. In her final year of study, Sarah worked with the Centre for Aboriginal Student Services as a programming assistant and community engagement liaison while serving in an executive role with the Aboriginal Students Association at York University (ASAY). Through this work, Sarah supported multifaceted events which featured A Tribe Called Red, Ryan McMahon and Sho Sho Esquiro, establishing/recognizing space, dialogue and engagement among communities in and around York U.

After graduation, Sarah worked with the Council of Ontario Universities (COU) on Aboriginal self-identification, a provincial gathering of Aboriginal Education Councils from both colleges and universities as well as a speakers series, “Research Matters”. Following her contract with COU, Sarah served as an appointee to the Premier’s Council on Youth Opportunities and began advisory and media work during the iteration stage of the Ontario Indigenous Youth Partnership Project (OIYPP). Now in its fourth year, OIYPP connects philanthropic partners such as the Circle on Philanthropy and Aboriginal People in Canada, Tides Canada, Inspirit Foundation and the Ontario Trillium Foundation with youth led projects and initiatives. Concurrently, Sarah worked briefly with the Algonquins of Ontario as a culture and heritage mapping assistant, facilitated workshops in schools as an artist supported by the Ontario Arts Council, advised on the eligibility committee for the Canadian Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences’ JUNO awards in 2014 and 2015 while developing and performing her own artistic works. Sarah currently works for the Algonquins of Pikwakanagan First Nation coordinating communications for the land claim negotiations.

Ottawa/Gatineau Tour

Part of the symposium included a guided tour through waterfront sites through Ottawa and Gatineau. Sites visited along the tour included National Holocaust Monument Chaudière Fallsthe Zibi development, & Théâtre de l’Île.

Workshop

Closing