[Foodprint Toronto logo.]

We were excited to catch word a while back now that the fine folks that cooked up Foodprint NYC - Nicola Twillley and Sarah Rich - were exploring future locales to extend the foodprint series. Thankfully, Toronto has proven productive enough territory in which to host the second edition. And even better is that it is now less than 48 hours upon us - starting promptly at 12:30pm on Saturday, July 31.

Foodprint Toronto is hosted at the Wychwood Artscape Barns (601 Christie Street, Toronto). For background, there are two great interviews of the organizers and their intentions over at Pruned and another at Azure.

The foodprinters continue their themes cultivated at the first edition including: zoning diet; culinary cartography; edible archaeology; feast, famine, and other scenarios. Though of course now it is applied to the Toronto / Canadian agro-context and food climate. So many possible discussions and conversations: How does the most multicultural city in the world respond to the challenges of food and diversity? How do food imports compare to other North American cities? With Ontario as the bread-basket of Canada, how does food movement infrastructure operate? What policies are in place to support the scope of that movement? Simply to understand a comparative geo-food pulse between NYC and TO would be fantastic.

Lola Sheppard will be on a panel, as well as several good friends and colleagues: Robert Wright (Associate Professor of Landscape, University of Toronto), Chris Hardwicke (urbanism.org), John Knechtel (Alphabet City), Shawn Micallef (Spacing / murmur)… in any case, here is the fantastic lineup of panels and speakers.

Below are some teaser images from a studio at University of Waterloo on the Toronto Greenbelt, called Productive Territories: Grey, White, Green Belts. The studio brief states:

In 2005, Ontario passed its Greenbelt Act, which protected 1.8 million acres of farmland and green space, with the intention of limiting sprawl, the destruction of green space and prime agricultural land. In the same year, the Places to Grow Act was passed, which identified 25 urban regions which must to achieve certain densification targets. In the context of the Places to Grow Act, one might read within the Greenbelt Act a somewhat nostalgic vision of the relationship of city and nature, the former threatens the latter. Nature is seen as something to be preserved, while the city evolves.

[Agriculture / Livestock locative and quantitative map from University of Waterloo, Greenbelt studio.]

There is no doubt that the Greenbelt Act was crucial, and that it has indeed been identified as one of the most successful Greenbelts in the world, both because of its scope and the because of the quality of lands it protects. And, there can be little doubt that Toronto’s suburban sprawl indeed continues to threaten our open landscapes, and in this regard is socially, economically, and infrastructurally unsustainable. The question arises, however, is any development in, or at the margins of the greenbelt, conceivable? Most significantly, many of the cities targeted in the Places to Grow Act contain what is known as the White-belt, rural lands within each community’s jurisdictional boundaries, that are not protected. Most of the cities have slated these lands for development, with the exception of a few such as Markham, which have declared the desire to protect a large percentage of these lands to maintain a food-belt. The studio’s investigations will position themselves precisely at these boundaries, between urban and rural, between domesticated landscape and one less so – between the grey, white and green-belts. The studio attributes new roles to the architect – not simply problem solver, but cultural, environmental and spatial detective, bringing to light the forces (economic, cultural and environmental) at work within a given geography, and the physical networks at the service of these forces.

[Hydrology of the Greenbelt, from University of Waterloo, Greenbelt studio.]

[Soils and soil transfers, from University of Waterloo, Greenbelt studio.]

[Other Greenbelt characters: Quarries and Gravel pits, from University of Waterloo, Greenbelt studio.]

And here is a great map made by Ingmar Mak in a 2007 studio we ran (click for larger size):

[Subway map replacing stops with primary food items in that area, by Ingmar Mak.]

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