News

June 13-14, Professor Cecelia Paine, FCSLA, FASLA, OALA, served as a design juror for the 2013 Toronto Urban Design Awards. In addition to Paine, the jury included an urban designer, two architects and a journalist from across Canada.   In total, the jurors reviewed 90 professional entries and 30 student entries. The purpose of the awards is to recognize designers and developers who contribute to the creation of great public spaces.  The Awards Ceremony will take place the evening of Wednesday, September 11, 2013.

Desiree Valadares (MLA 2013), advised by Nate Perkins and Sean Kelly, has been accepted to present her graduate thesis at the 2013 ECLAS (European Council for Landscape Architecture Schools) Conference this September in Hamburg, Germany.  Her thesis involved the compilation of a landscape biography of Ontario Place, a neglected modernist landscape along Toronto's post-industrial waterfront.

Mark Harrison (MLA 2012), advised by Associate Professor Sean Kelly, recently published a mountain recreation landscape article entitled: "Powder to the people: Can the back-country experience be designed?" in Ski Area Management, May 2013 Vol. 52. No. 3 (page 46).

http://www.saminfo.com/magazine-archives

Jim Taylor FCSLA FASLA FCELA, is an invited keynote speaker for the IFLA Africa Symposium to be held from October 14 to 18, 2013 in Logos, Nigeria.  The symposium theme is People and Landscapes and will receive papers on environmental philosophy and theory; productive regional landscapes; urban landscapes; cultural landscapes; and politics, policies and landscape development.  Professor Taylor has served as the Chair of the IFLA Africa Committee responsible for advancing the profession on the continent. 

Nadia Amoroso, Adjunct Professor at the School of Environmental Design and Rural Development and Co-Founder of Datascapes, will be teaching a one-week professional development credit course "Landscapes of Information - Mapping the Invisible" in Las Vegas, Nevada from August 3-9, 2013.  For more information please see vist the CELA website.

Nadia Amoroso, Adjunct Professor at the School of Environmental Design and Rural Development and Co-Founder of Datascapes, will be teaching a one-week professional development credit course "Landscapes of Information - Mapping the Invisible" from August 3-9, 2013 in Las Vegas, Nevada.  For more information please see the Council of Educators in Landscape Architecture website.

SEDRD faculty member, Helen Hambly, will be in the Democratic Republic of Congo in early July to collaborate with College d'Alfred's project "Makala Renouvelable-DRC" which works local partners in Ibi-village to support smallholder agriculture and forestry for poverty reduction. DRC has one of the lowest Gross Domestic Project (GDP) per capita in the world, but has some of Africa's most extensive natural resources.

Dr. Helen Hambly will present a paper entitled "Participatory and Citizen Approaches to Video-Mediated Communication for Social and Environmental Change in Rural and Northern Canada" to the practitioner's forum "Our Media" which leads the annual meeting of the International Association of Media and Communication Research held in Dublin, Ireland, June 23-29, 2013.

https://sites.google.com/site/ourmediaweb/noticias/omdublin2013

SEDRD Post-Doc, Dr. Ataharul Chowdhury presented his work at the 2013 SSHRC Congress.  Social media, such as Facebook and Twitter, are widely used for community engagement, but in a presentation to the Environmental Studies Association of Canada during the SSHRC Congress on June 3, 2013, in Victoria, BC, results from his research suggest that social media for agri-food innovation in Ontario can be vastly improved.

The School of Environmental Design and Rural Development (SEDRD) is known for its collaborations with community groups, rural organizations and associations. Providing a critical service for many in Ontario and across the world, the school is often sought out to perform research, evaluation and provide helpful data to enhance these groups’ offerings, services and program delivery. A great example of this service is a recent collaboration between SEDRD researchers and the Rural Ontario Institute to strengthen the programming of their Advanced Agricultural Leadership Program (AALP).