THESIS: The Creek and The Garden

THE CREEK and THE GARDEN
An insertion of Community Garden System in a Neighborhood Park along the Garrison Creek

Abstract by Srinidhi Sridhar

‘The Creek and the Garden’ is about actively preparing Toronto for the surge of gardening and food production within the city and developing a strategy to ensure the future’s growing need for urban food garden space. The disconnected relationship between food production in rural areas and food consumptive urban areas has to be reconsidered and transformed into a more hybrid condition requiring innovative use of the city’s urban spaces. If successfully implemented, the thesis strategies will offer the promise of urban transformation, sustainable production of a safe and diverse food supply, and the eventual repair of urban ecosystems, all while simultaneously yielding complex habitable environments that explore the relationship of public space to our personal and collective ecological footprints.

Considering the present urban parks along Garrison Creek as possible sites and giving these parks a dedicated space for food production, the thesis aims to review the overall park system with regards to food production, and to study in detail Christie Pits with the objective of creating a framework for food infrastructure to support this complex park system. The significant topography of the buried Garrison Creek as a identified as a special characteristic and is turned into an opportunity to reinterpret the existing condition and offer a new spatial vision for the sites as a whole.

The thesis objective is thus broadened to the creation of a system that negotiates the valued use of parks as urban breathing space, recreational playscape, and active food production landscape in which food and recreational infrastructures are operative and intertwined.

The examining committee is as follows:

Supervisor: Val Rynnimeri University of Waterloo

Committee Members: Rick Andrighetti, University of Waterloo

John McMinn, University of Waterloo

External Reader: Chris Pommer, PLANT Architect Inc.

The Defence Examination will take place on Tuesday June 2, 2015 at 1:00 PM in ARC 2003

A copy of the thesis is available for perusal in ARC 2106A.