Designing Canadian Resource Landscapes: Two Histories of Double Vision

Research project
Politics of Building a Climate Crisis Symposium, Cornell University
2021

Over the part century, numerous resource extraction projects have been proposed in Canada’s northern boreal landscapes. Some of these projects have been built, although many have not; nevertheless, they have resulted in the accumulation of countless reports, studies, and maps which discursively produce the North as a landscape of resource abundance in contrast to (and fueled by) southern Canadian crises of economic scarcity and socioecological instability.

This project examines the political implications of these divergent northern narratives through visualizations of two resource development projects: the Mid-Canada Development Corridor, and the Boreal Corridor Boréale. I argue these projects are emblematic of an epistemological “double vision” in Canadian landscape representation, which I define as a persistent tendency to observe, visualize, and design environments terms of narrow technical and market-based perspectives which obscure the relational dimensions of landscape. This project traces the evolution of double vision through the design of Canadian resource landscapes, and demonstrates the longstanding complicity of architecture and landscape architecture in facilitating processes of spatial injustice in Canada’s north.