Education Sessions

Across Canada and globally, cities are expanding and densifying to meet growing housing demand while grappling with climate change and shifting socio-economic conditions. In Canada, the pressure of the housing affordability crisis has shifted focus from quality and sustainability toward efficiency, standardization, prefabrication, and speed - treating housing almost as a mass-produced consumer product. The resulting urban transformation is eroding qualities that make cities livable, including access to nature, public space, sunlight, views, and comfortable microclimates, with troubling implications for future quality of life.

Housing is more than buildings or shelter. It is the complex network of relationships between homes, public spaces, parks, institutions, jobs, and community that together create livable neighborhoods as human habitat. The public realm, interrelated with the built form that frames it, plays a critical role in the success of dense urban environments. As cities continue to densify, Landscape Architects are essential to advancing a holistic, relational approach to housing as part of a living system, supporting long-term sustainability, ecological vitality, and quality of life.

This presentation summarizes key findings from the travel research of the 2024 LACF Allsopp Fellowship, highlighting the role of public realm design in shaping livable new housing districts across European cities.

Held on islands in the St. Lawrence River, Expo 67 marks a milestone in design and architecture. It showcased modernism and urban planning at the frontier of innovation. Yet part of the Expo site is also Montreal’s first public park (1874), shaped by renowned landscape architect Frederick G. Todd. This duality makes the site an exceptional laboratory for urban landscape transformation as Jean-Drapeau Park advances its ambitious 10-year master plan (CSLA 2023 National Award, NIPPAYSAGE).

Today, Saint Helen’s Island reveals a complex layering of histories: natural ecosystems, Indigenous occupation, military history, public parkland, and major cultural event infrastructure. These histories coexist with decades of neglect and intense public use, while still offering remarkable potential for reinvention. This complexity enriches our design process and challenges contemporary approaches to conservation.

This presentation shares our experiences, uncertainties, and hands-on learning from the restoration of man-made ponds located near the island’s 1824 Gunpowder Magazine. What began as a straightforward technical task quickly exposed overlooked contradictions and long-buried design rivalries.

As the sun sets on nearly a decade spent working on this $13.5 million project, we reflect on the hidden tensions and untapped potentials that shape our profession within an increasingly complex world.

This presentation examines the key research findings of plazaPOPS, a Toronto-based tactical urbanism initiative that transforms under-utilized strip-mall parking lots into temporary public gathering places. Situated in highly diverse neighbourhoods where much of the public realm is privately owned and access to high-quality public space is limited, the project offers a pragmatic model to deliver social infrastructure where it is needed most.

plazaPOPS focuses on strip-mall sites because many small, immigrant-owned businesses function as important cultural “third places,” supporting everyday social life despite highly auto-oriented conditions. plazaPOPS extends this existing vibrancy into adjacent parking areas, creating accessible shared spaces that amplify social connection and cultural expression, contributing to individual and community wellbeing. Supported by more than $2M in funding, twelve installations were created between 2019 and 2024.

The presentation focuses on the project’s interdisciplinary research program that involves landscape architects, sociologists, students, and community based researchers. Using public life study methods— observation, mapping, and time-based counts—alongside ethnographic interviews, the research documents unique patterns of use and user perspectives. Illustrated through compelling visualizations, the findings demonstrate how integrated public space design research can strengthen design outcomes, support spatial justice and public health policy, and expand the edges of landscape architecture practice. 

The importance of northern landscapes is widely recognized across various disciplines, including climate science, natural history, and landscape architecture. As climate change trends continue, the most immediate and severe effects occur in Arctic and sub-Arctic regions. The north is important due to its natural resources and as a part of the global climate system. However, northern landscapes are also important for their ecological diversity, cultural significance, and beauty.

The North, The Land, The Snow Goose: An Interpretive Framework for Goose Creek and Wapusk National Park, is a practicum submitted to the Faculty of Graduate Studies of the University of Manitoba for the degree of Master of Landscape Architecture by Emma Dicks. The practicum explores the northern ecosystems of Wapusk National Park and Churchill, Manitoba, adversely affected by anthropogenic factors, including climate change and the exponential growth of the lesser snow goose population that breeds and nest in the fragile coastal salt marshes and sedge meadows. Over the past 50 years, these vulnerable landscapes have become degraded to the extent that revegetation may take centuries.

Protecting, preserving, and presenting endangered and damaged northern landscapes begins with education and awareness, environmental stewardship, and fostering a personal connection to the land.

Understanding Stanley Park is the first and foundational report of a Comprehensive Plan and 100-year vision for one of the most visited and top rated parks in the world. Unlike traditional inventory & analyses, Understanding Stanley Park provides a deeper journey through lesser known but painful events, examined in partnership with the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) people who have called this place home for thousands of years, and the Vancouver Park Board, whose governance exists due to dispossession.

This work brings to light sustained patterns of impact leading to a cycle of infrastructure demand and burden, environmental entitlement and a tourism paradox. The blurring of technical analysis and Indigenous perspectives highlighted the ongoing existence of systemic patterns, building a rationale for changing the status quo and making Stanley Park ground zero for reconciliation in Vancouver.

Redefining the word “park”, this work raises questions about nature in cities and if, in the push to create more livable communities, parks have actually been holding us back by drawing boundaries around nature and creating more edges. Attendees will see landscape architecture for what it truly is meant to do, and get a sense of how deep the profession can go. 

The landADAPT Project Wrap-Up Workshop reflects on the CSLA program’s outcomes and future direction after the project's completion in the Fall of 2026. This session will provide an opportunity to assess its overall impact on strengthening professional capacity to address climate adaptation: what worked well, where challenges emerged, and how the program has influenced practice, partnerships, and advocacy.

The workshop will also highlight the outcomes of two other NRCan-funded initiatives that have contributed to advancing capacity within the profession: the University of Waterloo’s Accelerating Climate Change Education for the Next Generation of Professionals program and the Climate Risk Institute’s Professions Advancing Adaptation Competencies (PAAC) initiative. Together, these discussions will help ensure that landADAPT’s legacy is both measurable and actionable, informing future climate education initiatives and strengthening the profession’s leadership in resilience, decarbonization, and biodiversity conservation.

landADAPT is generously supported by Natural Resources Canada’s Climate Change Adaptation Program.

The generational transition of a practice comes with a complex mix of anxiety, excitement, hope and fear, which can get in the way of the sober work of planning, financing, and navigating big decisions and real risk - often without a luxury of time. These were part of the transition of hats from the founder Claude Cormier to the four new heads of CCxA.  The roller coaster of legal, financial, and organizational urgencies combined with the emotions of loss and hope for the future was manifest between nights of sleepless worry and moments of celebration . The four CCxA partners will share the story of this roller coaster ride, from a path that began in confusion that ultimately lead to clarity and confidence. This wasn't a transition of sudden breakthroughs, but rather a steady pace of trust and patience through an honest assessment of individual personalities, working styles, and strategies to create a roadmap based on strengths and compatibilities. Many allies and inputs came from colleagues sharing their own experience of transition to outside agencies with planning advice and financial backup. Thoughtful preparation and empathetic leadership can turn a daunting generational shift into an exciting and bold opportunity for renewal and rebirth.

Each of us had questions. Each of us had curiosities. We came together with these and spent one year collaborating on what could be done better in the realm of designing the built environment. Initially focused on Indigenous engagement, we swiftly had to broaden our focus to consider the many facets of how we come to shape our environment and what that looks like when considering (re)conciliation, Indigenous perspectives, and cultural inclusion.

Through experiential and land-based learning, interviews with practitioners in various fields, and conversations with Indigenous consultants, designers, musicians, and artists, we discovered what David Garneau refers to as ‘the third thing.’ That is, how collaboration between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Peoples can create something that is beyond, or more-than, either and to the mutual benefit of all voices that engaged in that collaboration.

This led to our first attempt at creating a list of Calls to Action for design firms and individuals. These actions encourage an array of considerations, from cultural inclusion and safety for Indigenous practitioners, to various statements of positionality and allyship, to economic reconciliation, and non-colonized methods of practice.

Throughout North America, many parks have become outdated, underutilized, and often forgotten by the communities they serve. As cities struggle to balance budgets and keep up with aging infrastructures, the idea of adding new open spaces is infeasible.  It is critical that these underutilized spaces be repositioned into the community’s daily experiences to ensure equitable access to nature, recreation, and the overall physical and mental wellness these spaces afford.   The session will explore three unique examples of repositioning parks through nature-based interventions to enhance diversity, resiliency, access, and use patterns, activating the everyday and bringing new life back to these spaces.

From a selective, surgical insertion of new programming into Black Bay Park in Idaho, to restoring a living St Patrick's island in Calgary, to more extensive rehabilitation and renewal along the St Jonh’s River in Metropolitan Park, Jacksonville, each represent how place specific nature-based solutions revitalize underperforming parks to become active and engaged community spaces leading to transformational change. Each represents an intentional remapping of an existing park into the community’s memory, returning meaning and purpose to forgotten spaces and reducing capital expenditures through sustainable, resilient approaches.

Hurricane Fiona struck Newfoundland’s southwest coast in 2022, devastating the Town of Channel-Port aux Basques and the Grand Bay West Trail —boardwalks, trails and dunes were swept away overnight. The damage exposed the fragility of coastal infrastructure at the edge of land and sea.

The Town responded with a Renewal Plan led by Mills & Wright Landscape Architecture, reframing trail reconstruction as resilience and adaptation. Rather than rebuild in place, the plan relocates paths inland, gives wetlands and dunes space for regeneration, and repurposes storm-torn footings as interpretive markers of loss and renewal. Community engagement revealed deep emotional ties to the trail, making the process one of collective healing.

Phase 1 of the trail construction was completed in 2025, marking the first step toward adaptive coastal recreation. At the intersection of climate adaptation, inclusive design, and cultural preservation, the project shows how landscape architects can guide communities through transformation—turning blurred edges into opportunities to celebrate resilience, coexistence, and evolving relationships between people and place.

Recent initiatives in Toronto’s largest waterfront parks demonstrate different landscape approaches to managing change in urban centres.  This presentation compares Biidaasige and Toronto Island Parks, projects united by commitments to address climate change and foster reconciliation yet shaped by distinct contexts and design ambitions.

Biidaasige Park in Toronto’s PortLands, redefines the mouth of the Don River through the integration of flood protection measures, ecological restoration, and urban park design. Over 40 hectares, the park incorporates adaptive landscapes and managed succession to enhance biodiversity and resilience. Named through an Indigenous-led process that advances Toronto’s Reconciliation Action Plan—Biidaasige meaning “sunlight shining toward us” in Anishinaabemowin—the park reflects inclusive planning and cultural recognition.

In contrast, Toronto Island Park is an oasis within the inner harbour, attracting over 2 million visitors annually and home to around 700 residents, critical infrastructure and cultural heritage assets. Planning and project delivery on the Island relies on ongoing iterative engagement with various communities and “light-touch” design, to protect its environmentally sensitive areas and preserve its unique cultural landscape amid resource constraints and environmental pressures.

Together, these parks illustrate how site-specific strategies can achieve shared goals of sustainability, reconciliation, and community and Indigenous engagement in park planning and design. 

In densely developed urban sites, every cubic metre counts, both above ground and below. Developments on constrained lots and in infrastructure-heavy sectors demand precise spatial planning where root systems, soil volumes, and canopy deployment must be calibrated alongside structural requirements, utilities, and circulation networks.

Landscape architects bring critical expertise to this three-dimensional puzzle. We read sites for their potential uses, understanding how people move, pause, and engage with space, all while assessing structural constraints, soil capacity, and microclimate conditions. Working alongside biologists and foresters, we translate this layered analysis into calibrated strategies that balance appropriation and vegetation, allowing each sector to reveal its optimal role.

Place des Montréalaises exemplifies strategic decision-making in extreme constraints: a major public space over Autoroute Ville-Marie where load limits, metro tunnels, and utilities left minimal flexibility. The project required calibrating across varying conditions, each zone demanding different solutions.

This presentation examines decision frameworks for constrained sites: how to assess spatial trade-offs between appropriable and planted areas, communicate root zone requirements, and deploy adapted vegetation strategies that maintain resilience goals. Participants will explore approaches for asserting landscape architecture expertise in early project phases and navigating the technical conversations that determine whether vegetation thrives or merely survives.

This panel explores a unique three-year collaboration between the University of British Columbia's School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture (SALA) and four prominent landscape architecture firms: Hapa Collaborative, PFS Studio, PWL Partnership, and Space2Place. Supported by MITACS, this initiative bridges academia and private practice, providing student research internships to address complex regional challenges through a collaborative, non-competitive framework.

The project investigates water quality impacts on First Nations livelihoods, salmon health, agriculture, and infrastructure within the Lower Fraser River. Specifically, it focuses on Hope Slough (Xwchíyò:m/Cheam territory) and Maria Slough (Sq’éwqel/Seabird Island territory). To counter fragmented flood governance and jurisdictional gaps, the team completed site analysis, spatial design investigations and visualizations to evaluate the trade-offs of various flood adaptation strategies.

Beyond technical solutions, the partnership seeks to advance reconciliation and decolonization within landscape architecture—a field that has historically contributed to the erasure of Indigenous presence. By partnering with local Nations, the project reconsiders traditional design approaches, centering land-based practices and the wisdom of stewards who have inhabited these waters since time immemorial. This initiative offers a replicable model for how the design professions can collectively address environmental crises while honoring Indigenous sovereignty.

Coastal squeeze due to sea level rise means shrinking parks and public spaces along Vancouver’s shorelines. At the same time, ambitious densification has increased Vancouver’s downtown population and heightened demand for parkspace and amenities. Vancouver’s iconic West End Waterfront, which includes English Bay Beaches and Sunset Beach, plays a crucial role within the city, and is also a highly visited international destination. Sea level rise and intensifying weather events such as king tides, atmospheric rivers, extreme wind, heat domes and drought have impacted the park through flooding, erosion, infrastructural collapse, loss of biodiversity, and medical emergencies.

The West End Waterfront Vision Plan leverages climate adaptive nature-based design solutions that increase resilience throughout the park while also solving multiple other environmental, social and economic challenges common to urban parks across Canada. These include the need for Truth and Reconciliation and visibility of the Host Nations, heritage buildings in flood zones, ecological degradation, failing infrastructure, competing interests for open space in densifying cities, accessibility, equity and inclusion. The project centers Coast Salish values and expression, while increasing overall park space, and creating high performance, equitable urban parks that reconnect the community to much richer shoreline experiences.

Climate-resilient, equitable, and environmentally just approaches emerge from understanding places as evolving entities. Rather than working as agents of erasure, Snøhetta approaches design by first listening—both to the stories embedded within the landscape and to the voices of those most connected to the site. We aim to thoughtfully reveal what is overlooked or unseen rather than simply overwrite what exists. Each challenge is an opportunity to reflect before reacting and to find the right questions before offering solutions. This approach cultivates a shared vision between designers and stakeholders, rooting our projects in collective goals and adaptive criteria.

Michelle will share how Snøhetta brings together perspectives from various design disciplines and collaborates with others to shape their work. She will describe examples of adaptive transformations of complex sites across North America as a means of revitalizing not only buildings, but entire sites. A detailed walk through the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library project will provide a look at how projects can honor the past while preparing for a resilient, inclusive future. A close look at the design decisions will show how the project offers an opportunity for visitors to learn both about, and from, Theodore Roosevelt.

"Living Legacies" explores how landscape architectural practice can meaningfully integrate Indigenous worldviews, not as add-ons, but as foundational principles in shaping place. The presentation introduces Living Legacy as a place-rooted, and evolving, heritage approach which moves beyond static preservation. It honours both tangible and intangible forms of memory, built structures, oral histories, ceremonies, restored waterways, and plantings as active participants in community life.

Indigenous understandings of time, space, and memory are foundational in this framework   Rather than preserving heritage in a static way, story, protocol, and reciprocal relationships become integrated into the co-creation of dynamic and continually unfurling legacies. By embedding intergenerational knowledge, traditional practices, and cultural naming into design, Living Legacy offers a pathway to more inclusive, accountable, and responsive public spaces.

Through case studies and reflective prompts, the session will challenge attendees to see heritage not as something fixed, but as something continually made and remade in relationship. The presentation invites designers, planners, and allied professionals to consider how what we build can reflect where we’ve been, who we are, and the future legacies we choose to create together.

As climate change intensifies coastal erosion and permafrost degradation across northern Canada, Tuktoyaktuk stands at the forefront of one of the country’s most complex climate adaptation challenges: planning for adaptation and the potential relocation of an entire community. This presentation argues that landscape architecture has a critical role to play in shaping equitable, culturally grounded, and future-oriented responses to this unprecedented transition.

Drawing from ongoing participatory design and adaptation planning work in Tuktoyaktuk, this project demonstrates the discipline’s unique capacity to integrate ecological processes, cultural knowledge, and lived experience into long-term planning and highlights the importance of designing with communities to ensure that adaptation pathways reflect Inuit values, land relationships, and aspirations for the future.

By examining adaptation and community relocation planning as both a design challenge and a social-ecological opportunity, this presentation positions landscape architecture as essential to imagining and implementing climate adaptation strategies across Canada. The presentation shows how our profession can extend beyond conventional project boundaries to engage with governance, cultural stewardship, and transformative change—offering lessons for practitioners confronting similar climate pressures nationwide and highlighting opportunities to better support adaptation in the north.

How can decision-makers ensure infrastructure projects are delivered efficiently while achieving long-term social, ecological, and cultural benefits? Infrastructure in housing, mobility, and climate defence is often driven by economic and engineering priorities, overlooking opportunities for meaningful community engagement and integrated environmental solutions that support human and ecosystem wellbeing.

Mélanie Glorieux, Emily Bowerman,  Sonja Vangjeli,  Amy René and Katie Black—members of the Canadian Society of Landscape Architects Committee on Climate Adaptation—have authored a position paper advocating a reformed approach to infrastructure that positions landscape architects as leaders and places landscapes, sustainability, nature, and communities at the centre.

This presentation draws on case studies from the paper to demonstrate the proven benefits of landscape-led infrastructure. Examples show how housing intensification initiatives can enhance neighbourhood quality, the public realm, and access to parks and green spaces; how transportation infrastructure can incorporate wildlife corridors that support the movement of people and other species; and how green infrastructure can provide cost-effective, long-term resilience to climate-related risks such as coastal flooding and wildfires. Together, these cases show how architects shape infrastructure that strengthens social and ecological systems while supporting climate adaptation. 

Mention Canada and the great American landscape architect, Frederick Law Olmsted Sr., and almost everyone in the profession (and beyond) will invariably think of Montreal's Mount Royal Park. It is after all, one of Olmsted’s most successful landscape designs…and the only large public project executed north of the border.

However, Olmsted’s true Canadian legacy has another genesis- three Canadian practitioners, referred to here as Olmsted ‘disciples’: Frederick Todd, Rickson Outhet and Gordon Culham. Working independently across early to mid-20th century Canada, they were the true translators of Olmstedian design and planning principles.  Consequently, they left an indelible, Olmsted-inspired legacy, but distinctly Canadian imprint, on this country and its landscapes.

A forthcoming book from UofT Press redefines this legacy manifest in public and private landscapes, coast to coast.  The result is a clarification of what is now a blurred understanding of the Olmsted influence through three pioneers who trained with his firm and later set up early practices in Canada.  The hope is that this contribution will be seen as the “threshold of change” in how we as a country and profession think about the origin of so many of our treasured landscapes.