Absence of Water: Touring Toronto

Humanities at Large

Landscape architect Jane Wolff and Indigenous scholar Jennifer Wemigwans guide host Melissa Gismondi on a tour that explores how water is hidden in Toronto's urban landscape. They examine the city's relationship with water, from buried creeks to the impact of climate change and discuss the need to shift from controlling water to living in a reciprocal relationship with it, and to recognize water's spiritual and ecological significance. This episode highlights how cities can overlook or undervalue water, and the potential consequences of that absence. Jane Wolff was one of the JHI's 2023-24 Faculty Research Fellows and her activist research draws on her education in landscape architecture and documentary filmmaking; it uses drawing, writing, walks, and public installations to decipher and represent the web of relationships, processes, and stories that shape the everyday landscapes of the Anthropocene.