What can students of landscape architecture imagine for the excess of abandoned spaces across Canada?
How are studio projects framed by studio professors across the country?
Are we thinking critically about the ecology and economy of these places in Canada?
The studio examines the complexity of landscape issues associated with the notion of abandoned spaces, considered individually but penultimately, as a collective across the country. These spaces may be of different scale and nature: an ancient quarry, a railway wasteland, un- or under-used shopping centres, sites of resource extraction, former industrial sites, etc. The sites are all in a state of transition or bordering between two conditions of occupation, giving them a look that seems, at first view, abandoned by the past. Engaged in a life-cycle process, they carry a history or use linked to economic activity. They are embedded in the imaginations of those who have worked on the sites or who have experienced them and, necessarily, they have the biodynamic activity. A sharp eye and attention to the past and present state of the site, in all respects, is necessary to detect clues of its past to project a situation that might reactivate and transform it.