What does it mean to be Indigenous in the city? This question, expressing the experiences of a majority of Indigenous peoples in Canada today, is largely overlooked. Indigenous youth, who have grown up exclusively in the urban space of Winnipeg, with limited to no connection with the reserve or rural community of their families, define the contours of this thesis. My own personal and family history as having Cree-Métis roots in the Red River area as well as Scottish-English settler roots will tether along with the main narrative, if only to tell a parallel while also divergent story of the complex historical threads that inform many identities and collectivities today. In the days where Indigenous groups are struggling and fighting to maintain their histories and cultures against the legacy of colonialism that has been trying to rob Indigenous peoples of their history and culture for hundreds of years, the politics of identity are a highly charged scene where historical conflicts are waged. As lines are drawn, however, the complexities and richness of identity are often deadened at the expense of urgency and expediency. It is my contention that the youth tell us something about the complexity of individual and collective identity, living as they do in an environment that contains cultural, political, and material paths laid down by both traditional Indigenous and settler-Canadian historical processes. The youth remind us to ground our intellectual and political work in the everyday, the place where our bodies make sense of the world we live in. The practice of storytelling is a unique source of making sense of this world that is grounded in the everyday. I will utilize the storytelling practices of a wide range of authors, and will also seek to expand the practice of storytelling beyond its discursive, literary, and oral forms to that of embodied practice and movement, as well as a primary mediator or our relations with the land. Storytelling helps us see that the youth are on Indigenous land and articulating a dynamic identity that helps us (re)conceive the divisions between the rural/reserve and the city as well as see differently the historical continuities and discontinuities of Indigenous identities. Storytelling becomes the basis in this project for me to seek how our political and intellectual commentaries can become accountable to our everyday experience while also putting the everyday in to dialogue with the political and intellectual concepts we rely upon to guide us.

Contemporary outreach services focus on prevention as a means to ending homelessness (Averill, Keys, Mallet, & Rosenthal, 2010; Gaetz, 2010; Higgitt, Ristock & Wingert, 2005). As a result, services are commonly aimed at youth to provide alternatives to street-life before negative patterns are ingrained; the emotional effects of homelessness are also starting to be addressed. Drop-in facilities are proving useful by responding with greater flexibility toward the inconsistent lives of homeless people (Bantchevska, Dashora, Garren, Glassman, Slesnick & Toviessi, 2008). Art programming offers an environment addressing both emotional concerns and technical skill development (Higgitt, Ristock & Wingert, 2005). In Winnipeg, MB, urban, youth street-culture has responded positively to drop-ins embodying Hip-Hop culture as the unifying theme (B. Veruela, personal communication, November 7, 2012). Hip-Hop provides a context for art and learning that incorporates belonging and growth - the identifiers of a playful space. Play spaces offer a positive environment for dealing with emotionally charged topics such as homelessness (Apter, 1991; Kerr, 1991). This project presents the adaptive reuse of one of Winnipeg’s industrial buildings as a modern drop-in centre where emotional care for youth is accommodated through play theory.

This work is a compilation of ideas intended as a framework for an alternative approach to engaging ‘site’ in the design process, an approach that maintains and explores the complexities and subtleties of a landscape, of a place. Through two parallel explorations - one that considers an expanded and inclusive interpretation of landscape as the frame through which we engage with, and design, our surroundings, and one that examines the specific nature of this engagement as exchange between the self and the milieu - such an approach has been developed. This approach is called RECONNAISSANCE. Through encouragement of explicit, conscious consideration of how we perceive and experience a landscape, how this contributes to an understanding of a particular place and how this relates to and informs the practice of landscape architecture (both the process and the outcome), RECONNAISSANCE contributes to a strengthening of our abilities and actions as landscape architects.

This practicum paper looks at the work of contemporary artists: Char Davies, Jen Southern, Wolfgang Laib, Pierre Huyghe and Max Neuhaus. From examining the artists ideas on perception many links and ideas are drawn out. From this examination the author plays with the idea of perception and the training of the senses. Sound becomes an important element. In the end the author designs a strike walk. The strike walk is focused on the Winnipeg General Strike of 1919.

This project examines the spatial relationships that exist between Winnipeg, Canada and Tokyo, Japan, with the intent to develop an understanding of the preciseness of the world. Different site-specific systemic conditions were used as critical tools to explore the implication of distinct design catalysts and inhibitors. I have concentrated on the relationships that exist between time and space, to identify and displace localized, momentary events that exist in one site to the other. Familiarities of my local surroundings were deliberately obscured to make explicit a heightened awareness of my position on the planet. This helps to facilitate discussions. I have created a space that is dissembled through abstract understandings of displaced elements in the environment. It is my intention for this space to be experienced in a different way each time we come across it, by shifting and changing ones perception of their character in the world.

Criminalized women are a segregated population in society due to their few numbers and it has only been recently that the correctional system has responded to their gender-related needs and has orchestrated programs and services to rehabilitate them for society. Many criminalized women are mothers. Many criminalized women are Aboriginal. Many criminalized women have no safe place to go after release from prison. It is here that this practicum intervenes by offering transitional housing for a woman released from a correctional institution, reuniting with her children, and hoping to succeed and sustain herself and her family. By designing a therapeutic landscape that offers play, solace, and community, the bond between a mother and child can strengthen, many of the needs of a woman can be met, and the development of a peer group of neighbours can identify, support, encourage, and share their own personal experience, during this time of transition.

In recent years, Winnipeg’s ethnocultural profile has been diversifying due to historic levels of international immigration, especially from Asian, Middle Eastern and African places of origin. In spite of these changes, little is known about the ways in which the City's planning processes are addressing the needs of people living the experience of being new to the city, or how the needs and preferences of these emerging ethnic groups are affected by planning decisions. This research examines the City's response to ethnocultural difference by analyzing municipal planning policy, and by conducting focus groups with City of Winnipeg planners and with key informants from organizations that serve newcomers. This research explores what Winnipeg’s Planning and Land Use Division, and organizations that serve newcomers, each hope to accomplish with respect to planning for ethnocultural difference, compiles their aims and methods with those suggested in the literature, and develops recommendations for change.

A better understanding of people’s attitudes to housing is fundamental to attracting new residents and retaining those who already live in or close to the central city. As such, this study operating in a Canadian context adopts Hägerstrand’s model for the process of innovation diffusion. The study draws on the findings of an online survey and interviews with city planners in both Edmonton and Winnipeg to explore the demand and supply dimensions of city-center living and attitudes towards different types of housing and neighbourhood design. The study shows that the central area in Winnipeg and Edmonton are at different stages regarding housing. Prospective home owners who are interested in housing in the central area share a number of environmental attitudes. These attitudes were related to the care for recycling, the importance for eating organic food, the use of public transportation, volunteering in non-profit organization to help the community and the interest in attending cultural activities. Based on the results of the study, it can be expected that housing types such as apartments, townhouses and even loft housing can be more common in the future and especially in Winnipeg since apartments and townhouses are already common in Edmonton.

This practicum focuses on the issues of the overlapping boundaries between Student housing and downtown redevelopment. Can graduate students find a place in the downtown to meet their need for off-campus housing, and simultaneously help build a healthy, vibrant, downtown community; ensuring the housing facility represents a quality space for both graduate students and the local community? The following is an investigation of related issues including: Richard Florida’s notion of the Creative Class, multi-purpose development, the university as an urban catalyst, and adaptive reuse. The combination of graduate housing and the city’s downtown redevelopment will create new design typology that benefits both graduate students and downtown community. The practicum project consists of a live/work space for Winnipeg in the Waterfront area by adaptively reusing the James Ave Pumping Station building. The renovated building includes a bookstore, a coffee shop, a daycare, and an urban grocery store. However, the design focuses on the informal learning space and the quality of graduate students’ living experience through aspects such as accommodation, study space, meeting and casual spaces.

ABSTRACT The modern day City of Winnipeg is situated on the poorly drained floor of pro-glacial Lake Agassiz, one of the flattest regions on earth. Within the area now bounded by the Perimeter Highway sixteen major streams and at least twenty small coulees once emptied into the Àssiniboine and Red Rivers. Behind the levees of these rivers large areas of marsh existed providing detention storage of surface waters. The overflow from these wetlands fed many of the streams. The first settlers in the region mimicked the natural drainage regime by damming the waters of the streams to drive grist mills. Later agricultural settlers, occupying the uninhabited but marginally drained lands behind the levees began to drain the wetlands. During the explosive growth period of the City (1880-1910) the drainage regime was radically altered and an expensive and inadequate conduit system was substituted in it's place. Serious flooding episodes have occurred from the first alterations up to the present day. In an attempt to solve the flooding problems, overcome the expense of conduit systems and add amenity, a series of stormwater retention ponds was introduced by private developers in 1965. Functually these impoundments imitate the original hydraulic relationship between the ponds, wetlands and streams of the native landscape. Approximately on hundred years after the elimination of the natural drainage regime, Plan Winnipeg 1981 calls for the preservation of all natural watercourses in recognition of their high value for storm drainage and recreational amenity. Of the original thirty-six streams and coulees only nine exist today. All wetland storage areas have been eliminated. This practicum traces the historical progression of land drainage in the City of Winnipeg, summarizes the design criteria for future urban stormwater management, and outlines the present condition and rehabilitation of the historic water features.