Thesis Defence: Srinidhi Sridhar

‘The Creek and the Garden’ is about actively preparing Toronto for the surge for 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 the 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 this 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 these possible spaces and giving these parks a dedicated space for food production, the thesis project aims to review the overall park system with regards to food production, and to study in detail the Christie Pits site with the end in creating a framework for the food infrastructure system to support this complex park emergence. Identifying the significant topography of the buried Garrison Creek as a special characteristic, it is turned into an opportunity to reinterpret the existing condition and to offer a new spatial vision for those sites as a whole.

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