Book Launch: How to Build a River by Vid Ingelevics and Ryan Walker

How do you build a river?

Join photographers Vid Ingelevics and Ryan Walker for an evening about How to Build a River and the project behind it, along with reflections from the book’s esteemed essay contributors.

The Port Lands Flood Protection and Enabling Infrastructure Project (PLFPEI) is a $1.35-billion project led by Waterfront Toronto and funded by all three levels of government.

Following the discussion, there will be refreshments, time to connect with the speakers and guests, and a book signing. Copies will be available for purchase.

About the Speakers

Vid Ingelevics is a visual artist, independent curator, writer, and professor emeritus at Toronto Metropolitan University in the School of Image Arts.

Ryan Walker is a lens-based artist and educator specializing in documentary storytelling, whose work has been exhibited internationally and has appeared in The Guardian, Bloomberg, The Globe and Mail, and more.

Chloë Catán is the executive director of the Lassonde Art Trail (LAT), an open-air destination for contemporary art in Biidaasige Park. Before joining LAT, she headed the Public Art Program for Waterfront Toronto.

Shannon Baker served as project director of Parks and Public Realm for the Port Lands Flood Protection project at Waterfront Toronto. Shannon has led some of the most complex and transformative projects on the waterfront, including The Bentway Phase I and the recently opened Biidaasige Park in the Port Lands.

Jennifer Bonnell is the author or co-editor of four books, including Reclaiming the Don: An Environmental History of Toronto’s Don River Valley, which released its second edition published by the University of Toronto Press in 2024.

Dr. Soren Brothers is the Allan and Helaine Shiff senior curator of climate change at the Royal Ontario Museum, and an assistant professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Toronto.

Blake Fitzpatrick holds the position of professor emeritus at Toronto Metropolitan University. His photo-based work has been shown nationally and internationally in exhibitions that include the Canadian Embassy in Berlin.

Cristian Ordóñez is an artist working across analogue photography, printed matter, graphic design, and publishing. His photographic practice explores territories and landscapes, capturing fragments shaped by memory, presence, and impermanence, often approached through walking, where chance, trace, and process play a fundamental role.

About the Book

How to Build a River, through photographs and incisive, contextualizing essays, ventures behind the construction hoardings of the Port Lands Flood Protection project to reveal the transformation of hundreds of acres of polluted brownfields into a new public park, a new river and a site for future housing.

Awarded to photographers Vid Ingelevics and Ryan Walker in 2019, the commission resulted in an illuminating series of photographs that explore key themes and historical contexts of this legacy-building endeavour. Central to this project was the construction of a new wider, naturalized mouth for the Don River as well as a new public park on this former brownfield site. Additionally, the photographs explore the necessary demolition of many existing industrial buildings, the involvement of First Nations, the excavation of the new river valley and the complex bio-engineering techniques involved, archeological discoveries during the excavation, the re-naturalization of the site and, most recently, the opening of a significant section of Biidaasige Park to the public in July 2025.

The photographs and accompanying essays invite readers to look closely at how cities can be reimagined in response to a changing climate. They reveal the social, historical, and environmental stories behind this landmark transformation of Toronto’s waterfront and contemplate the importance of documenting publicly funded projects of this scale.