Event Guide: TSA Discussion — Landscape Infrastructure as Renewal

WHAT: Landscape Infrastructure as Renewal — a Toronto Society of Architects discussion
WHEN: Wed Apr 8th @ 6:30pm
WHERE: Arts & Letters Club, 14 Elm Street, Toronto, in the club’s Great Hall

Join the Toronto Society of Architects tonight as they discuss Landscape Infrastructure as Renewal — Ecologically, Socially and Economically.

Over the past five years, the emerging discipline of Landscape Infrastructure has been mapping the role that natural and man-made infrastructures have had on society. Its research has uncovered the growing “differed maintenance” and “planned obsolescence” of many of the man-made, civil engineering works from the turn of the century. It has also revealed the natural systems that these civil works attempted to mechanize, bury or erase and proposes that they could be re-examined as integrated systems in our urban world, returning part of the city to the natural cycles that have been long lost.

With our current economic reinvestment calling for broad-based infrastructural renewal, how can these lessons be applied to create the social and ecological infrastructures for the next 50 years? Can this infrastructure investment cycle be different than the previous cycles of “roads and pipes” infrastructure? How can communities be involved in small changes that effect large systems, like community food production and down-spot disconnection?