the Portico
“Our mission is to enhance the relationship between the University and its alumni and friends and promoted pride and commitment within the University Community.”
Patrick Morello admires Abu Dhabi’s
Grand Mosque. Opened in 2007, it is
the largest mosque in the
United Arab Emirates.
BLA grad leads a Guelph team to Morocco’s ‘green city’
They show us what it takes to LAND the big job: environmental expertise, sensitivity to local issues, bold ideas and perseverance
Story By Susan Bubak / Photo by Rich-Joseph Facun
In the Wizard of Oz, Dorothy follows the yellow brick road to the Emerald City, where she hopes to meet the Wizard who can help her find her way back home to Kansas. Plans are underway to build Morocco’s own Emerald City, a diamond in a rough part of the country that will provide homes for the homeless. And a group of Guelph grads are the wizards who can make it happen.
With an expected population of 300,000 people, the Nouvelle Ville de Zenata will be Morocoo’s first “green city,” but unlike most large-scale urban development projects, protecting the environment will be a top priority. LANDinc, a consulting firm specializing in sustainable community design, has been commissioned for the project.
“It’s not every day that you get to design a city of 300,000 people using your knowledge of sustainable development,” says project leader Walter Kehm. The retired U of G landscape architecture professor and former director of the School of Landscape Architecture established LANDinc in 2006 with alumni Patrick Morello, BLA ’94, Rob LeBlanc, MLA ’94, and Jeff Cutler, BLA ’94.
Building a big city in a foreign country doesn’t happen overnight. In 2006, Morocco’s King Mohammed VI signed an agreement to build Zenata. More than four years later, LANDinc won an international competition in September 2010 to plan and design the city on 3,000 hectares of land along 5.6 kilometres of Morocco’s Atlantic coast near Casablanca.
“We went up against some pretty big names,” says Morello. The Canadian company was a David among Goliaths, competing against larger, more established landscape architecture firms from the U.S. The Zenata project is currently in the planning stages. LANDinc will prepare five concept plans and a final plan will be selected in the New Year. Construction could begin as early as fall 2011.
Morello has been travelling back and forth between LANDinc’s Toronto office and Abu Dhabi for several years before moving to the latter city with his wife and two children in October 2010. His children, ages six and four, have adjusted well to the Middle-Eastern lifestyle, taking full advantage of year round outdoor swimming. Although the tropical climate is ideal for aquatic activities, the summers can be “unbearable,” with temperatures reaching a sweltering 50 C, says Morello. Like many locals, he seeks refuge from the summer heat in cooler climes. “The place shuts down over the summer,” he says, adding that he spends the hottest summer months in Toronto.
A Moroccan village in the
Anti-Atlas Mountains.
Morello is one of several Guelph grads working on the Zenata project, along with LeBlanc, Cutler, Jeff Bray, BLA ’88, Jill Robertson, B.Sc. (Env.) ’01, MLA ’05 and Karen Arnold, BLA ’05. He is the only team member living in Abu Dhabi.
Some of them were students in Kehm’s thesis class. “They’ve been working together from their student days to their professional days,” says their former professor, now employer. Knowing your colleagues since your university days ensures a professional relationship built on honesty and trust, adds Kehm.
Although Morello didn’t take any classes with Kehm, the professor left an impression on him as an undergraduate student. “I often found myself in his studio,” says Morello. “I remember even as a first-year student, I would go into his fifth-year seminar. He was just a very captivating person. He really changed my view of what landscape architecture was.”
Morello and his fellow classmates are now colleagues who are putting their education into practice. Whether they’re designing a small park in Guelph or a major city on the other side of the world, the design principles are the same, says Kehm, adding that the education they received at Guelph provided them with a strong foundation for projects like Zenata. “The School of Landscape Architecture has always been known for integrating ecological and natural science with built form,” he says. “There is always an environmental ethic behind the students’ work.”
That ethic will come into play as they design a city that balances the need for human settlements with environmental sensitivity. Priorities include restoring sand dunes on the beach, cleaning up plastic debris and collecting rain water for agricultural use. Solar energy, which is abundant in Morocco, will reduce the city’s dependence on a nearby oil refinery. Public transportation and pedestrian-friendly streets will be vital since most of the city’s future inhabitants don’t own cars. Plans for a university, medical facility and research parks are also in the works.
One of the keys to LANDinc’s success is its process-oriented approach to design and planning, says Morello. Planning a city like Zenata requires a multi-faceted approach that incorporates all aspects of design and construction.
“You can’t look at things independently,” Kehm adds. There’s more to building a city than bricks and mortar. Environmental factors such as the climate, soil, vegetation and wildlife are the building blocks of sustainable development. “How do you put everything together to create a new environment with the smallest footprint?” says Kehm. The project must balance urban development with protection of the environment. “We’re all living on spaceship Earth, looking for a manual,” says Kehm, quoting the title of Buckminster Fuller’s 1968 book, Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth.
Before a single shovel breaks the soil, LANDinc must survey the site to collect physical data regarding geology, hydrology, topography and solar aspect as well as the area’s cultural, historical and social background. A recipe that lacks even one of these ingredients is a recipe for failure.
When it comes to sustainable community design, Morello doesn’t use the term “sustainability” lightly. “It’s a set of values that come from Guelph,” he says. “We call it sensible design. Sustainability is a word that’s overused. We’ve pushed the limits on that.”
But not everyone shares LANDinc’s approach to sensible design. While assessing another project in Morocco, the client wanted to present an impressive proposal to the King without looking at the impact on surrounding villages.
“We said, ‘You’ve got 30 villages downstream from our site and each one of those villages depends on the water that runs through our site,’” says Morello. “We have to be very careful about the quality and the quantity of the water as we try to populate this area.”
Since a city’s future is deeply rooted in its past, cultural authenticity also factors into the design. A plan to build a city for 25,000 people on a plateau in Morocco’s High Atlas Mountains needed to take the local history into consideration. For the past 3,000 years, the Berber Nomads have travelled from the Sahara to the plateau, bringing their sheep and goats to graze.
The Zenata project also requires a multidisciplinary approach. “One of the areas of our strength is pulling other teams together,” says Morello. “This comes directly from the University of Guelph: the ability to look at the big picture. We’re always looking at the systems and how to integrate other disciplines and expertise.”
A rapidly growing bidonville
(slum) in Morocco.
Morello is part of a multinational team in Abu Dhabi, a cosmopolitan city with residents from all over the world, many of whom speak English. That blend of nationalities is reflected in the group of experts working on the Zenata project. It’s not unusual for Morello to attend meetings with team members from the U.S., Europe and Australia.
“They have hired the world around them to build their country,” he says. “We’ve got the top consultants from around the world.” They include a local architect and planner, social and physical scientists, an economist to create marketing strategies and a consultant to develop alternative transportation methods.
In addition to sustainable development, Zenata will also promote social integration. One of the King’s main priorities is to provide housing for low-income residents who currently live in a slum, also known as a bidonville, where crime is rampant, children don’t attend school and most of the residents are squatters who earn less than $7,000 per year. During a visit to the shantytown, Kehm and Morello were shocked by the living conditions they saw. Ironically, their client had been involved in some of the developments, so they risked biting the hand that feeds them.
“Walter openly criticised the way these things were being developed,” says Morello. “There was no site integration, no recreation, the buildings looked like prisons, there was no articulation in form, no urban design, and not even a hint of respect for integration of these communities with surrounding areas. It was totally segregated. It hadn’t been successful from a social point of view.”
Their criticism didn’t fall on deaf ears. When the governor found out, he insisted that the client allow LANDinc to redesign a low-income housing development that was already under construction. The end result could have been much different had the governor not been as receptive to a Westerner’s constructive criticism.
“A lot of times, it’s an uphill battle,” says Morello. “You get this kind of response from the governor in Casablanca, and you just think, ‘Wow, this is great. You’re really going to have a chance to make a difference here.’”
