-- Fadi Masoud is an Assistant Professor of Landscape Architecture and Urbanism at the University of Toronto and the Director of the Platform for Resilient Urbanism at UofT’s Centre for Landscape Research. Trained as a planner and landscape architect, his research, teaching, and design work focuses on establishing relationships between dynamic large-scale environmental systems, landscape design, and the instrumentality of planning methods and tools. Prior to joining the University of Toronto, he held teaching and research appointments at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design and Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s (MIT) Department of Urban Studies and Planning, where he co-led research and design projects on coastal urbanism, urban codes, and the Future of Suburbia. He currently sits on Waterfront Toronto’s Design Review Panel as well as on Resilient Toronto’s Urban Flooding’s Working Group.”
Lecture Description Click Here to view the recording of this lecture
In spite of the prevalence of contemporary discourse around resilient urban planning and design, traditional planning standards and codes continue to enable normative urban forms that shows little regard for the threats posed by climate change. This talk will uncover the underplayed link between ecological paradigms and systems of urban codification over the past century, while asking why powerful land use regimes continue to remain static when we know that landscapes are dynamic? The pressures of accelerating change demand a new responsive and flexible design-driven zoning paradigm that introduces time, flexibility, and innovation into land use regulation. In doing so the talk also traces landscape architecture’s contributions to 19th and 20th century comprehensive planning models and suggests the need for design to reinsert itself in that milieu in order to enable more resilient and adaptable 21st century urban fabrics.