Weddings and funerals are some of the most universally profound events of our lives. Both acts, however disparate, ultimately celebrate life. This thesis draws on themes of life and regeneration in its reading of a neglected yet historically significant site in the port lands of Toronto. The changes that have occurred at the mouth of the Don mirror the changes that have occurred in Toronto from settlement to post-modernity. It is here that the thesis proposes a place that simultaneously reclaims its roots and creates a new identity for the port lands. As a means of reinhabiting this site, the design uses the power of weddings and funerals to generate a collective point of gathering that reflects the multicultural nature of Toronto today.

Human-dominated landscapes often have habitat loss and fragmentation. These characteristics described at the landscape scale, called landscape elements, influence species diversity and distribution. These landscape elements include such descriptions as the amount of habitat in the landscape and the degree of fragmentation of the habitat. "Optimization of landscape pattern" studies which landscape elements will maximize species diversity and/or distribution. Some general conclusions have emerged from this research. For example, for some bird species the size of the habitat patch in which a species nests has been found to be more important than landscape variables. However, preliminary research suggested that landscape elements such as the matrix are important urban areas. My study addressed this problem by asking: which elements of the landscape are most important for predicting avian species richness and abundance in the Greater Toronto Area? A literature review revealed a number of variables that have been found to influence bird species diversity within a landscape: area of habitat in which the species nests, amount of habitat within the landscape, degree of fragmentation, vegetation characteristics of the habitat patch, and area within the landscape deemed urban in municipal land-use designations (amount of urbanization). From this literature, I formulated four hypotheses describing the most important variables for avian diversity: (1) the area of the habitat patch is most important, (2) only variables describing the habitat patch itself are important, (3) the area of the habitat patch is important, but landscape variables should also be considered and (4) urbanization is most important. These hypotheses were considered competing explanations of bird species diversity at the landscape scale. <br /><br /> A database of breeding bird data and landscape information, in a geographic information system platform, was used to investigate the comparative strength of the competing hypotheses for the Greater Toronto Area. A mathematical expression with a Poisson model format was created to represent each hypothesis. The model selection technique based on Kullback-Leibler information using the Akaike Information Criterion was deemed most appropriate for the comparison of the models. Four separate Poisson model competitions were completed using two habitat types and two response variables: species richness and total abundance. In three of the four competitions, the best model included the habitat area and the amount of urbanization in the landscape. In the forth competition, this model was considered as strong as another model which included habitat area, amount of habitat in the landscape and degree of fragmentation. The results from the model competition support the hypothesis that habitat area is important, but landscape variables must also be considered to explain avian richness and total abundance. It appears that maintaining native bird biodiversity in the Greater Toronto Area should focus on preserving and possibly increasing habitat area and decreasing adjacent urbanization. Exploration of the best model in the forest analysis with the richness response variable found that a 10% increase in habitat area cause approximately a 10% increase in species richness, and a 10% increase in urban area caused approximately a 20% decrease in species richness. Consequently, current natural heritage planning in Ontario should consider urban development as an important negative effect on native birds.

Contemporary criticism of the North American urban public realm has reached an unproductive state of exhaustion. For some time, it has painted a rather bleak portrait of public space attributed to the impacts of global private economic forces, the disintegration of traditional civic ideals and an increasing uncertainty in its ideal (or even relevant) spatial form. If a productive and meaningful dialogue about the public realm and architecture’s contribution to it is to emerge, a more complete definition of this realm must include the impacts of its informal others. This research-based thesis examines the city’s spaces and actors of hidden appearance as a contribution to that expanded definition. In so doing, it finds a more appropriate means for their description in what Henri Lefebvre terms the urban blind field. Just as the human eye’s blind spot is subjective, the urban blind field too is dynamic and shifting. Looking from multiple viewpoints is necessary to the blind field’s exposure and more genuine portrayal. The research centres around a series of blind fields encountered during field research undertaken across Toronto, Canada. Each is reconceived and foregrounded through participant actions upon them, rather than by professional design alone. Three fundamental urban acts — play, exchange and cultivation — serve as a loose framework for the theoretical, photographic and discursive explorations thereof. This thesis asserts that blind fields possess within them the seeds of active urban democracy — challenging contemporary criticism’s bleak claims. Therefore, their maintenance is paramount to a rich and active ongoing public realm. As a relational concept, the blind field also exposes a fertile means of reconsidering architectural praxis and its relationship to space, material, time and participatory hierarchies.

In the last one hundred years Toronto’s cultural identity has been completely transformed. Once a quiet and thoroughly conservative Anglo-Saxon town, Toronto has become a thriving and dynamic multicultural city. Today a majority of the city’s residents are visible minorities and almost half are foreign-born; the largest of any city in the world. Never before have so many ‘different’ people shared place. While successive waves of immigration have had a profound and measurable impact on Toronto’s cultural and social character, the impact on its public spaces and institutions remains more illusive. This thesis proposes an architectural design for an intercultural library and language centre that seeks to give voice to the principles of diversity that have energized Toronto, while acknowledging the city’s history of divisiveness and political indifference to immigrants. Set adjacent to the Bickford Centre, an existing ESL school dedicated to serving new immigrants, the proposed intercultural library and language centre will face the Christie Pits Park, the site of Toronto’s worst race riot. Three lines of inquiry structure this thesis. The first is an in-depth sociodemographic investigation of immigration to Toronto. This is followed by an analysis of the meaning and significance of critical intercultural gathering spaces in the city. Finally, the thesis, through the design of the language centre, seeks to explore the capacity of architecture to simultaneously unite and provide amenity for a multicultural city population.

According to the United Nations’ report, State of World Population 2008, humankind has come to a turning point; more than 50% of the earth’s population now lives in urban centres. Along with considerations for housing, employment, and public health, this shift changes the way we design roads and streets; it escalates the number of automobiles in urban areas with finite room for road expansion. Space constraints, along with intense development of alternative transportation fuels, and the burden of sprawling suburbs on municipal infrastructures suggest the hypothesis that before we run out of energy alternatives for personal mechanized transport, we will run out of space in which to use it. This thesis explores how Toronto, a city largely designed for automobile use, is being re-adapted into a city wherein public and active transportation can once again be the primary means of urban mobility and the opportunities inherent in the development of interregional multi-modal transit stations for the cultivation of civic space, local commerce, urban form, and commercial transportation.

Welcome to CityPlace. Thirty-five hectares of formerly unoccupied rail-lands in downtown Toronto are currently undergoing a transformation into an instant neighbourhood. Eventually, CityPlace will be the home to over 15,000 people within 23 buildings, sequestered by the Gardiner Expressway on its southern border and by the still functioning rail-lines on its northern border, it is truly an island of suburban stacked living which is at once surrounded and yet at a distance from downtown Toronto. In CityPlace we are witnessing what the Belgian philosopher Lieven De Cauter describes as the rise of the capsular civilization. Impossible to ignore, condominiums have become the dominant form of new housing in the city of Toronto; a process that has been driven by demographics, political imperative and most of all by the pursuit of profits in the high-stakes game of real-estate development. But lost in this torrent of development is a genuine dialogue about the city we are building. This thesis explores the current state of condo development in downtown Toronto; from the myriad of political, economic and physical factors that have led to Toronto’s vernacular condo typology to the marketing onslaught that targets the base consumerist hyper-individual within all of us and aims to hide the fact that these buildings are more similar than distinct. From the optimistic aims of a city council which seeks to achieve civic benefits from increased density, to the cynical de urbanizing and social polarization that the type typically brings into the downtown. The thesis explores the promise of downtown condominium living and the hybridisation of programme that accompanies the rising real estate values of the downtown core. Programmatic promiscuity and complexity are exploited to bring different user-types from the outside city into the tower. With its unique vertical properties and inherent density, the residential high-rise tower presents new opportunities for urban collective spaces. From introvert to extrovert, the new condo becomes a catalyst for urbanity in the instant neighbourhood of CityPlace.

“It seems to me that Canadian sensibility has been profoundly disturbed, not so much by our famous problem of identity, important as that is, as by a series of paradoxes in what confronts that identity. It is less perplexed by the question ‘Who am I?’ than by some such riddle as ‘Where is here?’” - Northrop Frye Canada is the only country in the world that knows how to live without an identity. – Marshall McLuhan As Canadians we struggle with issues of identity. Our land is so vast that it can never be simply categorized and our culture is so diverse and rich that it can never be reduced to a single group or ancestry. In Ontario, the question of identity is equally complex. Larger than many counties, Ontario is made up of three distinct geographic regions, its edges defined by borders on five US states and two provinces, and it is home to one of the most culturally diverse populations in the world. Ontario holds 40% of Canada’s population and Toronto, it’s capital, is the largest city in the country. Sitting at the very centre of Toronto’s educational and ceremonial core is Queen’s Park, home of the Provincial Legislature the place from which Ontario is governed and the place which is tasked with embodying and representing all of Ontario. Composed of a 19th century building and a generous public landscape, Queen’s Park is easily recognizable at a distance, yet it suffers from a deficit of meaning and identity. The park may ‘work’ in the most basic sense but leaves much to be desired for one of the most prominent, and symbolically significant places in both the city and the province. Over the course of its 150 years of history, the park has seen the disappearance of Taddle creek, various alterations in the landscape, the accrued collection of monuments and memorials, the demolition and construction of several buildings and countless public gatherings. All of these manipulations, deletions, additions and events fail to suggest anything other than our society remains supplicant to greater powers, disconnected from its environment and unsure of its identity. Yet, in spite of all these issues, Queen’s Park is full of potential. The goal of this thesis is to test the capacity of architecture to give voice to a new vision for Ontario’s capital that more fully reflects the forces at work in society. Equally significant for this thesis has been my own parallel quest for meaning and identity as a woman in the 21st century who is both prospective architect and engaged citizen. I deeply felt a need to find architectural sources of inspiration founded on compassion, empathy and an engagement with the land. This desire for meaning has led me to discover the ancestral heritage of Ontario and to take ownership of my own roots. These two streams, one architectural and one personal are woven together to build a design approach for Queen’s Park. The thesis is organized in four parts, completing one cycle of design. Part 1: ‘Stories of Migration’ uses female voices extending back to the land’s geological formation in order to invent a mythology for Toronto and to engage with the voice of the other. Part 2: ‘Capitols of Identity’ uses case studies of civic architecture and public space in Ontario to explore the relationship between power, landscape and place in cities. Part 3: ‘Messages of Queen’s Park’ recovers the lost identity of this urban artifact by forging more meaningful connections to its physical and metaphorical context. And finally, Part 4: offers a concluding vision to the building and landscape which create memorable spaces for civic engagement and play for the people of Ontario.

Once the founding site of the city of Toronto and its second largest watercourse, the Garrison Creek and its original landscape of dense forest and deep ravines have disappeared beneath an aggressive process of development and growth. Yet, despite attempts to subdue the creek, it continues to reveal itself through a collection of buildings, sites and structures, here collectively referred to as artefacts, that mark its path. This thesis presents the lost stories of the Garrison Creek as an investigation into the circumstances surrounding its burial and the city’s futile attempts to control its wilderness. Recounted as an historical narrative through the pairing of archival photographs and stories, this thesis exhibits a catalogue of the politics, betrayal, confusion, characters, voices, lessons and synchronicities that have emerged through the burial of the creek. The structure of this thesis is intended to draw out a definition that describes the tenuous, conflicted and complex relationship between a major North American city undergoing rapid change and the wilderness from which it emerged.

Thesis (M. Ed.)--York University, 2000. Graduate Programme in Education. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 179-189). Also available on the Internet. MODE OF ACCESS via web browser by entering the following URL:. http://wwwlib.umi.com/cr/yorku/fullcit?pMQ59196.

According to the United Nations’ report, State of World Population 2008, humankind has come to a turning point; more than 50% of the earth’s population now lives in urban centres. Along with considerations for housing, employment, and public health, this shift changes the way we design roads and streets; it escalates the number of automobiles in urban areas with finite room for road expansion. Space constraints, along with intense development of alternative transportation fuels, and the burden of sprawling suburbs on municipal infrastructures suggest the hypothesis that before we run out of energy alternatives for personal mechanized transport, we will run out of space in which to use it. This thesis explores how Toronto, a city largely designed for automobile use, is being re-adapted into a city wherein public and active transportation can once again be the primary means of urban mobility and the opportunities inherent in the development of interregional multi-modal transit stations for the cultivation of civic space, local commerce, urban form, and commercial transportation.