spreading roots

Many of you know me as a people mobilizer. As Manager, Volunteer and Community Engagement at LEAF, I don’t often get a chance to really dig in (pardon the pun) to the concepts and difficulties landscape architects face when working to beautify our urban spaces. But I often walk by parks and only see the final product... we “tree people” may even get upset with chosen species or how the trees are planted. What we don’t see is all of the difficult trouble-shooting that’s required in urban planning. So at this years Spreading Roots conference I was excited to listen to Greg Warren talk about designing with trees.

Noel Harding is a Canadian artist with a colourful career spanning over 30 years. You may recognize his large-scale pieces of public art as infrastructure, such as Windsor’s living bridges, Toronto’s free standing wetlands, and Mississauga’s trees planters growing three stories above city hall (represented Canada at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics, but never re-erected). His work examines the intersection of complex social, environmental and urban planning issues and during the Q and A, I asked him to define his form of functional social environmental design.

The keynote speaker at the Ontario Urban Forest Council (OUFC) conference last week was Cecil Konijnendijk, a professor from the University of Copenhagen. He gave a talk on urban forestry in Europe - something I was very interested in because it was a chance to see what the Europeans are doing differently than we are here in North America. It was also a chance to gain ideas of where we can improve canopy cover in our own urban environments.