Toronto's Urbanism Headlines: Wednesday - Spacing Toronto

One comment

UofT lawn a “heritage landscape”? This is ridiculous. Look, this is supposed to be a playing field for students. Have you played sports on the field? I did, many times. The uneven field can make it very easy to get injured. On wetter season it is just a muddy puddle. Of course those do not affect a poet staring at it in admiration, but deeply affect students and other people who play sports on it. Astro turf is even, smooth, weather resistant, not only it provides a much better and safer surface to play on, but it also significantly prolong the playing season (you can easily play on it on a nice winter day). Environmental benefit of the lawn is also dubious. I bet a dozen mature trees would provide greater environmental benefit than all the grass. The only real concern is that regular student could lose significant amount of play time to elite sport teams. The school should make sure that does not happen.

Here is my proposal, leave a stripe of real grass around it so that whoever inclined to can still spread themselves on grass, plant trees around it to offset the loss of green, then go ahead and tear up the rest and put in astro turf. Game on!

Yu

11 years ago

UofT lawn a “heritage landscape”? This is ridiculous. Look, this is supposed to be a playing field for students. Have you played sports on the field? I did, many times. The uneven field can make it very easy to get injured. On wetter season it is just a muddy puddle. Of course those do not affect a poet staring at it in admiration, but deeply affect students and other people who play sports on it. Astro turf is even, smooth, weather resistant, not only it provides a much better and safer surface to play on, but it also significantly prolong the playing season (you can easily play on it on a nice winter day). Environmental benefit of the lawn is also dubious. I bet a dozen mature trees would provide greater environmental benefit than all the grass. The only real concern is that regular student could lose significant amount of play time to elite sport teams. The school should make sure that does not happen.

Here is my proposal, leave a stripe of real grass around it so that whoever inclined to can still spread themselves on grass, plant trees around it to offset the loss of green, then go ahead and tear up the rest and put in astro turf. Game on!