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Mapping defensive urban design in Toronto
What if you found out your neighbourhood public park may not be as welcoming as you thought? Over a few weekends in June, teams of volunteers set out to discover and map the unwelcoming features of our...
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Book Review – The Largest Art: A Measured Manifesto for a Plural Urbanism
Author: Brent D. Ryan (MIT Press, 2017) Contemporary cities are the most complex entities humanity has ever created. To be sure, we are only beginning to appreciate the implications and impacts of...
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PODCAST: Spacing Radio 037, Ken Greenberg’s Toronto
To celebrate three years of the Spacing Radio, we have an in-depth conversation with urban designer Ken Greenberg. We talk about his new book “Toronto Reborn: Design Successes and Challenges,” the...
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Book Review – The Smart Enough City: Putting Technology In Its Place To...
Author: Ben Green (MIT Press, 2019) This book is about the battle for the future of cities. The smart city may represent the next major urban transformation, with digital technology playing the role...
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WexPOPS pops-up in a vibrant suburban stripmall
WexPOPS is a pilot of the plazaPOPS project, an initiative spearheaded by Daniel Rotsztain, aka The Urban Geographer, and Brendan Stewart (OALA, CAHP), professor of landscape architecture at the...
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Time for public art: the New Toronto Courthouse construction site mural
As readers of my column know, I am an avid promoter of site-specific artworks, and I’m not alone. The kinds of conversations we are having today about site-specificity first started with the rise of...
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Planning City-Wide: A Primer – Part 1
Can city design be good? Few would doubt that they can, yet an honest answer must be tentative. It must pry into city planning, objectives, and the relations between objectives, reality, decisions,...
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EXCLUSIVE: John Tory discusses housing goals and planning reforms
Later this fall, city council will receive the first of what will likely be a long series of planning reports responding to a July motion (MM9.36) moved by mayor John Tory and housing czar Ana Bailao...
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Planning City-Wide: A Primer – Part 2
Common City Planning Initiatives We would be forgiven if our initial reaction to the nature of the contemporary city described in Part 1 is to run away screaming, but that does little for the problem...
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Is there a smarter way to spend Toronto’s housing dollars?
In June, 2019, Toronto’s Auditor General, Beverly Romeo-Beehler published an audit on Rent-Geared-to-Income (RGI) housing. According to her report, entitled “Opening Doors to Stable Housing, ” there...
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PODCAST: Spacing Radio 038, Take it to the Streets
Lanrick Bennett starts us off, talking about a pop-up pilot bike lane project on Toronto’s Danforth Ave. Jared Kolb is stepping down as executive director at Cycle Toronto. After nine years, he tells...
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Planning City-Wide: A Primer – Part 3
Planning Goals and Objectives – Shortcomings The usefulness of the methods and techniques described in Common City Planning Initiatives revolves around the fact that they generally avoid the...
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Planning City-Wide: A Primer – Part 4
Planning Goals and Objectives – Criteria In light of the common shortcomings described earlier, let’s consider a list of criteria that should be met by any set of goals and objectives for a city-wide...
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LORINC: When e-scooters hit Toronto’s streets
When city council this summer passed new and moderately more stringent training regulations for Uber and Lyft drivers, no one could have been shocked by the reason for the additional regulatory...
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Planning City-Wide: A Primer – Part 5
Weighting Goals and Objectives Now that we have a sense of how to approach setting usable goals and objectives for city-wide planning and criteria to weight them against, we’re still left with many...
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Planning City-Wide: A Primer – Part 6
Developing Alternatives Let’s assume that we’ve managed to develop clear, meaningful objectives that have been made more comprehensive through connecting them strongly to the form of the city, we...
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Planning City-Wide: A Primer – Part 7
Time and the City: A Living City-wide Plan We’ve come a long way in addressing the many challenges associated with city-wide planning, but the issue of time deserves further elaboration. When I...
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How to build a low-rise apartment building
If you’re in the Bloor and Dufferin neighbourhood a couple of summers from now and happen to head north on Dufferin, just past the subway station, you’ll be greeted by a couple of apartment buildings...
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Book Review – Growth: From Microorganisms to Megacities
Author: Vaclav Smil (MIT Press, 2019) There are few terms as pervasive in discussions about contemporary cities than “growth”. It monopolizes debates around everything, from economics and population,...
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Spacing’s Tactical Urbanism workshop
WHEN: Friday, September 27th, 9am-4:30pm WHERE: 197 Spadina Avenue, Lake Ontario Room, 5th Floor COST: $125 for professionals, $50 for students (five spots available) LINK: Buy your ticket now at The...
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