Urban Wilds Session 2: Habitat Creation/Reconciliation

The Faculty of Environmental & Urban Change (EUC) invites you to Session 2 Webinar on Habitat Creation/Reconciliation of Urban Wilds: The Ecological Evolution of Cities Seminar Series 2024-2025. 

The Urban Wilds series explores the ecological evolution of cities, focusing on wilderness as an ecological attribute that expresses freedom and possibility in urban spaces. How do cities function as ecologically dynamic and fertile terrain that produces novel assemblages?

Cities are in continuous and unending processes of habitat transformation, codetermined by the forces of natural succession, species invasion, intensive changes to abiotic conditions and socio-political forces. The practice of restoration ecology has risen in the past few decades as intentional actions that enhance habitat qualities and deepen human relationships with nature and each other. For many, ecological restoration as habitat creation is an act of reconciliation, an opportunity to think and act in ways that advance good relations with land, water and air, as well as with Indigenous peoples and among settlers.

Session 2: Habitat Creation and Reconciliation

A conversation with Gwen Lane and Sheila Boudreau from SpruceLab and cultivation activist Lorraine Johnson

Date and Time: Tuesday, Nov. 19, 1 to 3 p.m.

Sheila Boudreau is the Founder and Principal Landscape Architect + Planner at SpruceLab Inc., a  transdisciplinary planning and landscape architecture firm, based in Toronto and Edmonton. She has over 3 decades of experience following degrees in Landscape Architecture, Fine Art, and a Master of Arts in Planning. In 2020, she established SpruceLab to be collaborative and nature-based with a community focus, and the intention to prioritize Indigenous voices to honour her Mi’kmaq ancestors in this work.

Gwen Lane is the Indigenous Program Coordinator at SpruceLab. She is a member of the Sagkeeng First Nation and a Sixties Scoop survivor. She is a certified Permaculture Designer and her knowledge and experience with food and cooking has led her to an interest in food security and environmental justice.  She has worked as a Cook and Nutritionist, providing healthy meals to in-need communities for organizations. Her Reiki certification, a form of Japanese energy healing, allows her to heal her own spirit and help others.

Lorraine Johnson is a writer, editor and community advocate who, when pressed to describe what unifies her work, has settled on the term cultivation activist. The author of numerous books on growing native plants, gardening for pollinators, restoring habitat, and producing food in cities, Lorraine’s work focuses on people and communities growing plants, ecological health, and connection to nature and to each other. Through her books, articles and community projects, she strives to advance the understanding that everything and everyone is connected and that, through our actions, we all have a role to play in making this world a better place for all life.

Jennifer Foster, EUC Associate Professor is the organizer and moderator for this Urban Wilds: The Ecological Evolution of Cities seminar series.

Please register here: yorku.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_r-cVfPcKSSS-BxkAMgECZg.

EVERYONE WELCOME!