Hasan, Ali2025-08-272025-08-272025-08-272025-08-07https://hdl.handle.net/10012/22288Ontario’s gravel mining belt stretches across vast swaths of land, leaving behind a fractured geography of extraction voids that scar ecosystems, disrupt fertile farmland, and give rise to monotonous suburban sprawl. Since the early 2000s, the Greater Toronto Horseshoe Area has welcomed nearly 100,000 new residents each year, with 86% of this growth shaped by low-density, car-centric development. This expansion continues to encroach on agricultural land, intensifying ecological imbalance and threatening long-term food security. This extractive form of urbanism treats Ontario’s rural terrain as a consumable resource to fuel the material needs of metropolitan expansion. These landscapes, often dismissed as post-industrial or peripheral, are the frontlines where the converging crises of climate change, land commodification, and environmental degradation manifest most visibly. Yet, architectural discourse remains largely silent on this issue, overlooking the spatial politics of gravel pits and the suburban paradigms they perpetuate. Increasingly subjected to gridded, cartesian systems of control, these territories are erased of their histories and stripped of their potential futures. This project responds to a moment of heightened urgency, marked by a housing crisis along with global supply chain disruptions, resurgent push for domestic extraction, and deepening climate precarity. Scholars across architecture, geography, and environmental humanities, such as Pierre Bélanger’s articulation of the “Extraction Empire”- have begun exposing the global entanglements of resource infrastructures. Within this critical discourse, this project will push for a growing momentum around design strategies that resist extraction and prioritize repair. Envisioning a reclamation corridor across adjacent gravel pits. Structured as dense, reconfigured suburban fabrics centered around housing, food production, and ecological regeneration. This future oriented design reimagines the suburban ideal by coupling resilient infrastructure with regenerative land use, transforming extraction voids into productive terrain of renewal. Ultimately, it proposes a new kind of productive suburban belt that counters sprawl while fostering ecological stewardship and collective belonging through a shared sense of place.enGravel pitReclamationUrbanismSuburbCommonsMaster Thesis