For the longest time, Toronto had been accused of turning its back on the waterfront. The hulking Gardiner Expressway cut the downtown core off from Lake Ontario, and the surrounding Port Lands were mostly relegated to industrial uses. But over the past 25 years, slowly but surely, the landscape has changed, and landscape architecture and ecological engineering were in fact the driving forces behind all the new development — commercial, residential and park space — that has not only remade the waterfront into a thriving urban ecosystem but also reshaped the city. Where Toronto’s waterfront was once compared unfavourably to Chicago’s, the two are more evenly matched today: We don’t have The Bean, but we can enjoy a growing network of inspiring public spaces, from the Bentway beneath the Gardiner to the WaveDecks on Queens Quay Boulevard, from Sugar Beach across from the Redpath Sugar Refinery to Corktown Common in the West Don Lands. We can marvel at the rerouting of the Don River and how that massive undertaking has unfurled new landscapes like Biidaasige Park and the Ookwemin Minnising development to come.

The 25th anniversary of Waterfront Toronto, an agency formed by all three levels of government to steer the revitalization, is an auspicious moment for discussion and debate. “Leading With Landscape,” a conference and exhibition taking place at the University of Toronto’s Daniels Faculty (One Spadina Crescent) from October 1 to 3, brings together the main players in this ongoing project. It includes Waterfront Toronto’s Chris Glaisek and Pina Mallozzi alongside longtime ecology advocates Ken Greenberg and Nina-Marie Lister; landscape architects and urbanists, like Adriaan Geuze and Shelley Long of West 8 and Emily Mueller De Celis of MVVA, who have been involved from the beginning, as well as those who will shape the next phases, like Rasmus Astrup of SLA, and Angie Jim Osman and Alfredo Caraballo of Allies and Morrison; the cultural leaders who have been animating the spaces in and around the Gardiner, like the Bentway’s Ilana Altman; and the Indigenous practitioners, like Matthew Hickey of Two Row, who have guided new connections to place rooted in Indigenous ways of knowing. The event kicks off with the book launch of How to Build a River by Ryan Walker and Vid Ingelevics, who have documented the Don River’s transformation up to the present moment. (You can see the full program here: leadingwithlandscape.daniels.utoronto.ca/program)

Fadi Masoud, director of both the Master of Landscape Architecture program at U of T’s Daniels Faculty and the Centre for Landscape Research, is the main organizer of the conference along with Nina-Marie Lister and Rob Wright as co-chairs. He explains that the organizing structure of the event follows the narrative landscape of the waterfront itself: “a tapestry of transformational, regenerative, and socio-culturally resonant landscapes. The exhibition [in Larry Wayne Richards Gallery] showcases Toronto’s waterfront parks and public realm projects in thematic and typological clusters, communicating the value of these investments to the public.”