Downsview Park, Toronto: Addressing the Changing Relationship Between Society and Nature in Designed Landscapes

By Erica Owens

Chair of Committee: Kristina Hill
2001

It is becoming increasingly important that landscape designers look critically at the worldviews that influence current perceptions of nature and its relationship to culture as new research and studies are increasingly supporting connections between human health and the health of the land, the presence of nature and decreased stress levels in medical patients, and of course, between cultural activities and the health of the environment. Definitions and perceptions of nature change across both time and culture influenced by science, religion, economics, politics, and all those forces that make up the value systems of our worldviews. Worldviews, such as romanticism or modernism, in turn, influence how we as a culture relate to, interact with, and alter nature. The Downsview Park Competition of Toronto, Canada in 1999 called on the design teams to address the changing relationship between society and nature (1999, p. 28). It is the intentional statements of landscape designers about nature and culture voiced in design proposals for the Downsview Park Competition that are of interest in this paper.

Worldviews that uphold outdated views of nature do not help, encourage, or support us in addressing current understandings of the connections between nature and culture. Worldviews such as romanticism, modernism, and many postmodernist movements promote a sense of separateness between nature and culture, instead of connectedness. There is an emerging worldview, acknowledged by Charlene Spretnak, author of The Resurgence of the Real: Body, Nature, and Place in a Hypermodern World, that she calls ecological postmodernism (p. 6), with which I believe landscape architects can easily identify. This emerging worldview, if adopted, can help promote a healthier relationship between nature and culture and help us more effectively develop the Park's potential as a new landscape; one capable of supporting new as well as old ecologies and an array of public uses and events (1999, p. 6). It 1) supports contemporary views of nature and its relationship to culture, and 2) sets up an appropriate framework using the values of body, nature and place through which to analyze designed, intentional statements about nature or culture within landscapes.