Evergreen | Connecting People, Natural & Built Worlds to Make Cities Flourish
Heidi is Evergreen’s Senior Design Lead with a focus on the design of child friendly urban environments. She works with Evergreen’s national and international networks of educators and design professionals to strategically advocate for the design of healthy places for children. Her work places a strong emphasis on child led participatory design, green infrastructure, and the co-benefits of school grounds as public space. Heidi’s degree in landscape architecture and education has been the foundation for her explorations into engaging and meaningful landscape typologies for children. Heidi has authored several landscape standards and guideline documents with school boards across Canada focused on the design and programming of children’s outdoor play and learning environments. She collaborates with Evergreen’s education and community programming specialists to co-create child friendly public engagement practices and iterative design approaches that engage children and their families in the reimagining of public spaces. As Lead Designer of The Children’s Garden and Play Lab at Evergreen Brick Works Center for Sustainability in Toronto, Heidi is dedicated to providing a place for children to engage in unstructured play. The Children’s Garden presents as ‘messy’ and anarchistic with a variety of open-ended provocations to inspire an emergent spirit – the space is constantly evolving through children’s expressions. Heidi’s recent publication, The Power of Play: Child-Led Placemaking in Parks, in The City at Eye Level for Kids, is an example of this work in a city context -- part of an open source project funded by Urban95 a Bernard van Leer Foundation initiative.