Social learning interventions have been implemented to develop coaches in many contexts, however are yet to be applied to coaches of athletes with disabilities. The lack of knowledgeable coaches prevents people with disabilities from participating in sports. The overall purpose of this doctoral research programme was to enhance the learning capability of the Canadian wheelchair curling coaches’ landscape. To achieve this overall purpose, the study was divided in three phases (i.e., pre-intervention, framing, and assessment). The pre-intervention phase aimed at understanding the disability sport coaches’ landscape; the framing phase aimed at building on the pre-intervention findings to frame a social learning space intervention for disability sport coaches; finally, the assessment phase, as the name suggests, assessed the value created through the intervention. More specifically, the four articles presented in this dissertation illustrate the work done to achieve the overall purpose of enhancing the learning capability of Canadian wheelchair curling coaches. The pre-intervention phase includes Article 1 and Article 2. Article 1 is a literature review of the two major areas addressed in this dissertation, which are disability sport in Canada and coach development. Article 2 introduces the metaphor of a landscape to create a visual representation via a map that includes the major elements of the Canadian wheelchair curling coaches’ landscape. Semi-structured interviews with 16 participants were thematically analyzed and helped create the above-mentioned elements, such as the coaches’ pathways, the types of learning structures, and the barriers. Moreover, Article 2 provides three considerations for systems conveners who seek to lead social learning space interventions in landscapes. Next, the framing phase took place concurrently with the assessment phase. Common to both phases, the intervention included a series of face-to-face and online interactions through the use of four online tools. Multiple data generation techniques (e.g., in-depth interviews, focus groups, observations) were employed during a 13-month period and resulted in 615 single-spaced pages of data. Thematic and interpretative analyses were used to make sense of the data. The framing phase, as presented in Article 3, includes the process through which the researchers (N = 3) made use of collaborative inquiry to co-construct the intervention with the participant coaches (N = 16) and Curling Canada technical leaders (N = 6). Additionally, Article 3 built upon the considerations from the pre-intervention phase to report how the intervention managed the limitations of the landscape, prioritized meaningful learning, incorporated influential people, as well as produced reflections on the consequences of the lack of enabling conditions. Article 4 expands the landscape metaphor and presents four composite vignettes of the participants according to their wheelchair curling coaching experiences. The vignettes vividly illustrate major contextual factors of the landscape common to all participants and the range of values created in the intervention. Overall, the findings of this dissertation contribute theoretically, methodologically, and practically in several ways. From a theoretical perspective, it is the first study to date to make use of landscapes of practice and the value creation framework to increase the learning capability of disability sport coaches. From a methodological perspective, the articles included in this dissertation made use of multiple and longitudinal data generation techniques to provide a broader perspective of the values created. Finally, the use of visual representations like the map and the vignettes, while unconventional, might facilitate the knowledge transfer for coaches and coach developers willing to frame social learning space interventions.

Shelterbelts were established in the Canadian Prairies as a means to protect soil from wind erosion. Knowledge gaps remain about shelterbelts' ecosystem services to the agro-landscape, hence hiding farmers' trade-offs in a changing agriculture. This research first investigated shelterbelts' effect on soil biological activity and fertility. Soil samples were collected in September 2012 from sheltered and non-sheltered fields in the Rural Municipality of Stanley, Manitoba. Results showed that shelterbelts promote higher soil biological activity, potentially correlated to the enhanced organic matter and micro-climate adjacent to shelterbelts. A survey was then conducted to explore shelterbelts' cultural services to the local community. Results indicated that while shelterbelts were perceived to significantly benefit community well-being, they were mainly recognised for agricultural functions. We conclude that shelterbelts are a significant element of both supporting and cultural ecosystem services, contributing to the prairie agro-system resilience. Further research and quantification of shelterbelts' socio-ecological services is recommended.

Master of Landscape Architecture / Department of Landscape Architecture/Regional and Community Planning / Stephanie A. Rolley / Economically insecure times require reduction of energy and land consumption, enhancement of socio-economic and environmental quality of life, and reutilization of neglected existing structures and sites. Traditional planning and design dictates through top-down policy and ordered master planning. In contrast, interactive smart technology simulating human cognitive reactions offers an alternative design framework - an intelligent, adaptive environment – capable of redefining contemporary public open space design. Traversing through the neglected Fifth Ward north of downtown St. Louis, the adaptive reutilization of the abandoned Iron Horse Trestle interurban elevated railroad and subway applies the Sense Respond Adapt Mutate Emerge conceptual framework (the S.R.A.M.E. Strategy) by utilizing existing resources to create an interconnected, emergent open space network. Ten unique sites along the Iron Horse Trestle are initially embedded with sensory devices capable of gathering and synthesizing learned information. The real-time actions translate into physical structural responses. The site specifi c reactions extend outwards as structural adaptations to indeterminate changes from trail users. The evolving structural form connects and mutates the existing structure. Similar to a Choose your own adventure gamebook, the Trestle’s open-ended and reactive programmatic strategies emerge as a series of potential options for future inclusionary, interactive designs. By selectively enhancing, creating, or enabling an open space system reacting to real-time actual user needs over time directly along the Trestle line, the S.R.A.M.E. Strategy offers a potential alternative framework for the indirect revitalization of neglected infrastructural and economic conditions, a residential rejuvenation catalyst, and future socio-economic and ecological sustainable living patterns education tool. The Trestle’s revitalization serves as an education tool critiquing contemporary landscape architecture and general design practice - the static, dictated, and consumptive. Intelligent adaptive environments offer an alternative framework enabling interactive design decision making capabilities to the users as options evolving over time.

A large and growing body of research exists on how the design of the environment can positively or negatively affect people’s health and well-being, as well as influence their behavior. Researchers in this field, known as “environmental design research,” have long acknowledged the challenge of translating their findings into formats that are accepted and used by practitioners. This study explores how environmental design research on urban open space and the practice-oriented translations of it are used by landscape architects who have been recognized in the profession for their designs of parks, plazas, and streets in urban areas. Through interviews with practitioners, an understanding emerges of the impact of environmental design research on contemporary practice, leading to recommendations that could enhance it in the future. Key findings of the study indicate that translations of the research, specifically in the form of design guidelines, while intended to inform practice, are not widely used by designers. Rather, to understand how design impacts human behavior, practitioners rely primarily on what they refer to as intuition, largely informed by their own direct observations of people in public space. The quality of their personal observations, therefore, is critical to their depth of understanding of human behavior and the environment. The study concludes with recommendations that could improve the skills of design students and practitioners to conduct, interpret, and apply their own direct observations in their designs, using methods and findings from the field of environmental design research to inform and enrich this process.

While documentation of the work of a select group of modernist landscape architects of the mid-twentieth century is available, little is known about the professional contributions of transitional landscape architects active in the period following World War II. Using selected projects framed by existing literature covering contemporary social, economic, political, and artistic influences, this study examines the career of one such transitional figure, Sidney Nichols Shurcliff (1906-1981). Project descriptions and analysis measure the scope of Shurcliff's work and the degree to which he contributed to the discipline and its transition to modernism, thereby augmenting the history of landscape architecture practice.

Since the 1990s, urban cultural policy in the UK has been bound to the cause of urban regeneration. Much has been written in examination and critique of this relationship, but what happens when the direction of strategic attention is reversed and civic leadership seeks to regenerate culture itself? The city of Glasgow, having made capital of culture over many decades, has moved towards a strategy for the development of literary Glasgow. This thesis documents a search for those factors crucial to that strategy. The research focuses on literary Glasgow as one aspect of the city’s cultural sector; identifies and examines gaps in the relationship between the civic cultural organisation and literary communities; and highlights those elements vital to the formation of a strategy for development of the literary in Glasgow. An extended period of participatory ethnographic research within the Aye Write! book festival and Sunny Govan Community Radio, is supplemented with data from interviews conducted across the literary sector and analysis of organisational documentation. Through these a gap has been identified between the policies and operations of a civic cultural organisation, and the desires of those engaged within the literary community. This gap is caused, in part, by the lack of a mechanism with which to reconcile contrasting narratives about the cultural essence of the city, or to negotiate the variations in definitions of value in relation to cultural engagement. The interdisciplinary approach builds upon insights from existing work within publishing studies, cultural policy, complexity theory and organisational studies to construct an understanding of the dynamics of Glasgow’s literary sector. This reveals the need for a framework in support of a landscape of practice, a desire for the placement of boundary objects to facilitate engagement, and the significance of value in relation to participation in literary activity. This work informs a strategy for literary Glasgow and contributes to conversations on strategies for cultural development in other cities.