A Total Environment: Re-Activating the Rural Town and Landscape

Abstract

The purpose of this work is to help rural Canada retain its relevance in an increasingly urban world by developing an analysis and design strategy for growing established (static) settlements into the kinds of places that attract new people, businesses, and opportunities. Using Haliburton, Ontario as a test site, this thesis aims to identify and define a place’s landscape element(s) which inform its built environment, so that new growth will remain of the place, enriching its form, rather than diluting it. Understanding Haliburton’s landscape, and the inherited rules that come with it, will inform an approach to creating a new kind of settlement center that orients future settlement, connects existing centers, and introduces new-old ideas about dense and diverse rural living: a center where all of life’s complex and distracting programs can exist together (living, working, playing) in harmony, rather than competition.