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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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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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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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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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LORINC: A first-responder service for mental health crises
This column was originally published in Spacing‘s fall, 2020, edition. City council’s executive committee yesterday voted to recommend a $1.7 million pilot project to test a “community crisis response...
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OP-ED: YongeTOmorrow is an opportunity not to be missed
This is an op-ed by from YongeTOmorrow and co-signers Richard Florida, Rana Florida, Ken Greenberg, Dr. Robin Mazumder, Brent Toderian, Yvonne Bambrick, Shauna Levy, Marcello Cabezas As cities all over...
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LORINC: Raising the stakes in the MZO wars
The judge who handed down a temporary injunction last week, halting the demolition of the historic Dominion Foundry in the West Donlands, was withering in his assessment of the provincial government’s...
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OP-ED: Why we have to save the first parliament site
Recent reports that the Queen’s Park may expropriate the First Parliament site, at Parliament and Front Streets, for construction of the Metrolinx Ontario Line offer another reminder of the dual...
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LORINC: Welcome to the City’s policy-by-surveillance
I enjoy the revelations of a muck-raking auditor-general’s report as much as the next red-blooded taxpayer, but I must confess a sense of unease about the way Beverly Romeo-Beehler presented her...
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The ‘bashment’ parties of my childhood are Black history
In 2002, reggae artist Sean Paul shot the video for his song ‘Get Busy/Like Glue,’ in Vaughan. Directed by Toronto’s own Director X, the video begins with Sean Paul exiting his car in the middle of...
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From the Stacks – Tom Kundig: Houses
Edited by Dung Ngo (Princeton Architectural Press, 2006) Tom Kundig: Houses is the kind of monograph that makes most architects’ hearts skip a beat. As a member of the successful architectural firm...
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EXCERPT FROM ‘UNCLE’: Aunt Jemima in Chicago
Excerpted with permission from Uncle: Race, Nostalgia and the Politics of Loyalty, published this month by Coach House Books. Thompson, a Ryerson University assistant professor in the School of...
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NEW SPACING BOOK: ‘Packaged Toronto’ and the emergence of the city’s design...
Back in 2011, I was brainstorming ideas for future projects with local historian Stephen Otto. He was intrigued by what the BBC and New York Times had both published at the time: lists of important,...
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