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LORINC: Tall or small is a false choice between main streets and intensification
At its meeting Monday, the Toronto Preservation Board (TPB) voted to adopt a set of staff recommendations that seemed, to some observers as well as development industry insiders, like a classic...
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Ten tips for the cycling advocate at City Hall
When Bells on Bloor was formed in 2007, we thought that convincing City Hall to install bike lanes was simply a question of demonstrating strong community support with annual bike parades. By 2009, our...
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COVID-19 stimulus spending needs to be wise to the perils of road building
In times of economic crisis, stimulus spending is important. But spending it wisely is even more important. In the midst of the climate and public health crisis you’d think we’d be on a recovery better...
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LORINC: Crombie’s resignation from Greenbelt Council reminds us to look upstream
Of course, the Ford government responded with misdirection and a bit of money. In the wake of David Crombie’s weekend resignation from the Greenbelt Council, followed by the rest of its members,...
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Weston Road as my main street
This selection of photographs by Peter MacCallum documenting Weston Road is published in conjunction with Spacing’s new issue themed around main streets. In July, 2020, after searching in vain for new...
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Reading List: John Sewell, “The Shape of the Suburbs”
When John Sewell’s book The Shape of the Suburbs: Understanding Toronto’s Sprawl came out in 2009, I read it soon after publication, flagging passages with the intent to write about in for Spacing....
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The City in Sight Podcast: Who’s in Charge of the Pandemic?
Spacing and Massey College proudly present City in Sight: Canada’s constitutional city crisis, a special podcast series. THIS EPISODE: Who’s in Charge of a Pandemic? Dealing with COVID-19 has been a...
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Book Review – Tom Kundig: Working Title
Princeton Architectural Press, 2020 When considering Kundig’s buildings, twenty-nine examples of which are included here in his fourth book, one is struck by how palpably they express, and how...
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LORINC: 2020, a year of urban resilience
The answer to the “whither-cities” question that’s buzzed around the edges of pandemic punditry was never seriously in doubt. Cities are humanity’s sturdiest invention. They’ve endured deadly plagues,...
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PODCAST: Spacing Radio 052, Public Realm Resolutions
We began 2020 with a bit of optimism — how could we know? We had an episode about the public realm and its importance, and spoke to urban researcher/writer Cara Chellew about re-starting the Toronto...
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Book Review – The 99% Invisible City: A Field Guide to the Hidden World of...
Authors: Roman Mars and Kurt Kohlstedt (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2020) It is not a stretch to say that most contemporary urbanists have come across the 99% Invisible radio show at some point over...
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Sam Carr and Toronto’s Soviet spies
Sam Carr walked out of the Don Jail on a crisp autumn day in 1942. He had been living underground for two years, and detained for the previous month. While the Canadian government was concerned that...
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LORINC: Yonge Street’s new mission
It sometimes seems as if the ‘whither-Yonge Street’ question has been loitering on the edges of our civic debates ever since the City iced the short-lived pedestrian mall project from the 1970s for...
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MESLIN: If a billboard falls in a forest… Part 4
Exactly fifteen years ago this week, I received this short and uplifting e-mail from Toronto city staff: January 12, 2006 Hi Dave, We have researched these two [billboards] and we have no records of...
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Book Review – Here & Gone: Artwork of Vancouver & Beyond
Text and watercolours by Michael Kluckner, Midtown Press, 2020 I could not have imagined Vancouver becoming such a city of contrasts even 30 or so years ago when I was writing the original Vanishing...
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BRADFORD OP-ED: Making 2021 Toronto’s year of the missing middle
The year 2021 comes with high expectations, expectations to get back to the work we started pre-COVID and to build back stronger when it’s over. In addition to our continued fight against COVID, this...
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LORINC: The never-ending war between Queen’s Park and City Hall
There could have scarcely been a more succinct visual metaphor for the chronically dysfunctional relationship between City Hall and Queen’s Park than the sight, this week, of that big yellow backhoe...
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Progress during a pandemic – a cycling year in review
Toronto City Council approved a ten year bike plan in June 2016, which called for 335 kilometres of on-street cycling infrastructure. To track the progress (or lack thereof), Albert Koehl – founder of...
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When it comes to parking minimums, less is more
Is parking policy in Toronto finally going to be meaningfully reformed? On January 5th, the City of Toronto released a “Report for Action” signalling it will review its parking policies. This is an...
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LORINC: Calculating the pandemic’s carbon footprint
Does your Blue Bin runneth over? On my morning dog walks, I’ve noticed in the past several months that a growing number of blue bins hauled to the curb are not just over-filled, but come accompanied...
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