Restoration of the Don Valley Brick Works: Whose Restoration? Whose Space?

Abstract

Social identities, ideologies and values may be expressed through urban landscapes as spatial practices that appear chaste, moral and beneficial to society as a whole. As nature conservation is increasingly absorbed into the rhetoric and practice of sustainable urban design, it is often assumed to be honourable endeavour that slows the pace of environmental destruction and bestows the critical environmental functions upon which urban fabric depends. However, conservation practices often conceal, produce and reinforce hegemonic social relations. This paper considers the recent transformation of Toronto's Don Valley Brick Works from an industrial complex to a ‘naturalized’ urban park, illustrating how socially exclusionary practices may be expressed through ecological restoration and environmental aesthetics.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Anders Sandberg, Susannah Bunce, Liette Gilbert and Mark Higgins for comments on an early draft of this paper.

Notes

1. All currency cited in Canadian dollars.

2. For example, Hough Stansbury Woodland twice won the Canadian Society of Landscape Architect Awards. In 1990 the firm won for the Don Valley Brickworks Master Plan (Hough Stansbury Woodland Limited, 1990) and in 1992 for the publication Healing an Urban Watershed: The Story of the Don River (Hough Stansbury Woodland Limited, 1992).

3. Some prominent awards include: the 1991 Award of Excellence from the Canadian Institute of Planners for the Task Force Report, ‘Bringing Back the Don’; the 1996 The Canadian and United States Consuls General—Award for the Task Force's contribution to Great Lakes ecosystem improvement; and the 2001 Ontario Association of Landscape Architects Award for Service to the Environment.