Symposium

Natura Naturata: The Civic Stewardship of Urban Nature
Val Rynnimeri
University Of Waterloo School Of Architecture
http://www.architecture.uwaterloo.ca/frameset/staff-rynnimeri.html

Summary
The Huron Natural Area Co-operative Project (HNA) is a four hundred acre ecological education park on the periphery of the City of Kitchener, developed with the intent of preserving the headwaters of the Strasburg Creek watershed, one of the few remaining biologically diverse natural landscapes within the boundaries of the rapidly urbanising Kitchener periphery.

Surrounded by a business park and expanding residential development, Strasburg Creek, the natural spine of the HNA, is a cold-water trout stream. Off this spine, ponds, woodlots, and wetlands bring diverse landscapes into the territory of the park. Begun in the early 1990s by an ad hoc group of Kitchener partners – the City of Kitchener, the region’s two boards of education, the University of Waterloo, and other private sector agencies and companies – The HNA process plan’s goals have been to integrate a complex natural ecosystem into the surrounding urban areas, maintaining it both as a viable, resilient urban ecosystem and an ecological education resource for the community.

Since its inception, the HNA planning group has used a Self Organising Holarchic Open-ended (SOHO) systems approach. The SOHO approach comprises a scientifically-based hierarchic model of the ecosystem combined with a similar framework for discussing social and political concerns and setting particular goals within an institutional context. The role of project actors in monitoring the ecosystem, interactions of governing agents, and developing project management strategies, is, in a SOHO approach, part of the execution of self-organising scenarios. Design is a crucial step in the SOHO process and is very important in tying the SOHO methodology to the practices of urban development; similar to a SOHO approach, design paradigms are open-ended practical reiterative processes of initiative and critique. HNA site management concentrates on the relationship between humans and natural ecosystems. Developing a new design paradigm based on its SOHO ecosystem description, the HNA master plan guides the human side of the relationship.

Biography

Val Rynnimeri, Associate Professor at the University of Waterloo School of Architecture, is the HNA Master Plan Design Coordinator and Planner.