Sylviculture Potential
We see downtown Sudbury as a future hotbed and centre for research into the architectural and urban potentials of silviculture, employing interventions at different scales leading to a framework of care through the understanding, reading, using, living with, and learning from, woods.
In the short period since confederation, the primary motivation of Canadian development has been to turn Indigenous lands into territories for extraction and export. Canadian municipalities, as "creatures of the Province", are administered by the same jurisdictional authority that oversees resource extraction. Violently disciplining opposition to the extractive sector, employing a logic of the grid, and the introduction of the railway provided the infrastructure to divide the land, and a cultural project recasting this frontier violence as "wilderness" followed for the sake of a legible settler-Canadian identity. Canadian cities remain settlements established alongside colonial strategies of policing, mining, & genocide.
While Sudbury has a strong cultural and educational sector --often in creative opposition to settler-colonialism-- it will flourish as a city once the colonial assumptions inherent to Canadian masterplanning are overturned, and those most often left outside the planning processes are instead allowed to lead. And while we position our work against extractivist growth models, we recognize the rich heritage of mining labour in Sudbury, and present instead an entirely different way of imagining how urban design policy is generated.
We work from the premise that a new urbanism for Sudbury's downtown will not result from changes to the built form alone. Sudbury's downtown is a result of a colonial project that is ongoing, and to look 30 years ahead is a move away from short-term developmental, extractive, and political cycles. We call for a timescale even more responsive to the moment: 153 years, or several million. Our proposal takes the next three decades as a challenge to establish a method of urban sustainability and the promotion of impacted voices. As Sudbury has an opportunity to transform itself, it can act as a catalyst and a leader for others to follow, moving towards an urbanism of regional care.
Towards a City Centre, Wood as Teacher
Reimagining downtown Sudbury allows for an inquiry into a healthy transition away from an overdependence on mining. The Canadian extractive project as a whole has eaten into forests that have sustained ecosystems for millennia and this continued activity contributes to global health and climate risks. We find in these same woods relations that help us establish a more resilient future. Sudbury has been the venue for a number of silvicultural interventions and research projects, including a very successful urban regreening program, and we look to leverage these works. We take this as an opportunity to interrogate the economic, social, and cultural potentials of wood, to see wood and its production as a tool to do away with obsolete planning and design approaches meant to first foster extractive settlement. Wood urbanism, to be truly transformational, necessitates a move toward reconciliation and social justice. If not, it is to repeat a violent past through a different material.
Trees, from species to species, offer us means of addressing significant urban design and architectural challenges, at multiple scales simultaneously. This proposal finds wood as a material with multiple benefits, from capturing carbon in service of human and non-human lives, to providing thermal adaptations made to increase sustainability both at the building, site, and even regional scales. Best of all, working with wood's material potential allows us to understand the city as an open-ended metabolic process, one which advances our understanding beyond binaries. But wood also implores us to understand what anthropologist Anna Tsing describes as "weedy landscapes": not singularly categorized as a part of nature, or conservation, or extractive development alone.1
Working intentionally with wood as we do goes against single-use Euclidean zoning as the monolithic ideology of North American land use. As we find in the promotion of Canadian settlement countless false binaries, weedy landscapes expose the fallacy of idealized states: at once either resource or pristine nature. Architect Daniel Ibañez is clear, "Given all its ramifications, wood has the potential to transform the way in which urbanism is developed today."2
As an open-ended process, our intervention evokes a myriad of possible futures and a confrontation with the histories that have brought us to our current environmental crisis. In that these crises are married to environmental and economic dispossession, situating our analysis in downtown Sudbury provides a much needed context in which research into silviculture, until now largely speculative at the urban scale, can take root. In this proposal therefore we look to build out a method of learning from, and following, woods. Using the lens of wood and its products to establish a new downtown for Sudbury, we critique ongoing colonial institutions, and propose envisioning an alternative weedy urbanism.
1 Anna Tsing. The Buck, the Bull, and the Dream of the Stag: Some unexpected weeds of the Anthropocene. Suomen Antropologi.2017;42(1):3-21
2 Daniel Ibañez in Ibañez, Daniel, Jane E. Hutton, and Kiel Moe, ed. Wood Urbanism: From the Molecular to the Territorial., New York, NY : Actar Publishers. Print: 313.
(From competitor's text)
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