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The Tranzac Club: “Toronto’s Living Room”
As Toronto begins the process or re-opening the economy for the summer, Spacing will occasionally look at businesses and venues that have either survived or been lost during the pandemic. There is a...
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Shining a light on Toronto’s streetlamps
Street lighting is an important, yet overlooked, part of any city’s standard infrastructure. For over seventy years, Toronto’s streets were lit with an elegant and increasingly unique streetlamp...
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REID: Sidewalks — snow-free at last!
I have been writing and advocating about the need to expand sidewalk snow clearing to every sidewalk in the city for what seems like forever. Usually I wrote about it when there was actually snow on...
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How to collect oral histories about cities in the age of COVID-19, Part 1
This is the first of a four-part series on urban oral history. Do you want to learn about a city by talking to people who have been walking its streets for decades? Would you like to organize a local...
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Urban Oral History: A tale of two immigrant neighbourhoods, Part II
This is the second of a four-part series on urban oral history. “Explore the city you live in. Open your eyes to a new life,” advised Gregory, an elder immigrant from the Caribbean who settled in...
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Urban Oral History: Understanding The Village of 1970s and ’80s, Part III
This is the third of a four-part series on urban oral history. My first conversation with Bart Birmingham (he/him) was a little awkward. After six months of social distancing, chatting with a complete...
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Urban Oral History: To understand cities we must talk to elders more, Part IV
This is the fourth of a four-part series on urban oral history. When Bart described the secret Toronto gay bars he frequented in the 1970s, Hannah created a map of them, and layered on the new safe gay...
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The Moccasin Identifier Project: Marking Indigenous history on the land
Earlier this month, I spoke to Carolyn King, historian, former Chief of the Mississaugas of the Credit, and founder of the Moccasin Identifier Project. While she was chief from 1997 to 1999, she helped...
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Preserving the queer identity in safe spaces
LGBTQ+ spaces in urban areas have been establishing themselves for decades, growing larger and larger as each generation brings its voice and creativity. Many of these spaces are composed (at least...
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LORINC: Trinity Bellwoods encampment and the persistence of Toronto’s old...
The violent clearing of the encampments at Trinity Bellwoods Park on Tuesday revealed Toronto at not only its most Tory, pun intended, but also, and particularly, its most Orange. The action...
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Scarborough’s First Bicycle Path – and the students behind it
The university students behind Scarborough’s first bicycle path couldn’t have predicted that it would one day provide a lifeline to cooped-up families during a global pandemic. In fact, had the...
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PODCAST: Spacing Radio 057, Trinity Bellwoods encampment evictions
In the aftermath of the Trinity Bellwoods Park encampment evictions, which saw a massive police presence, private security, and protests, we reached Sanctuary Toronto outreach worker Lorraine Lam, who...
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Book Review | Growing Up Modern: Childhoods in Iconic Homes
Written by Julia Jamrozik and Coryn Kempster (Birkhäuser Publishing, 2021) Publishing these stories allows both architects and those interested in architecture to view these iconic buildings from...
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LORINC: Fiddling while Toronto burns
I watched Greta Thunberg ream out world leaders at the Austrian World Summit, a climate conference, last week, and found myself pondering a key theme of her speech as I read the latest City of Toronto...
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Anishnawbe Health finds a new home
On Indigenous People’s Day, June 21, Anishnawbe Health Toronto held its ground-breaking ceremony for the Indigenous Hub that will stand at Front and Cherry Street. The project is more than 20 years in...
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LORINC: Editing the moralism out of post-pandemic Toronto
We met friends for dinner on the weekend, on the patio of a little taco place along St. Clair West. Outside the patio, on the sidewalk, was a bench and on the bench were two women, waiting to be...
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2021 Toronto Bike Plan Update: Does it Build Back Better?
The City of Toronto is currently working on the 2021 – 2023 Cycling Implementation Plan, which will come to the Infrastructure and Environment Committee (IEC) and City Council this fall. Will this plan...
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The Un-Avenues: Integrating new intensity for housing, open spaces, and streets
“You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.” – Buckminster Fuller Quiet, and quite often invisible, streets...
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LORINC: The failing of governance of Toronto
The debacle that was last week’s so-called debate over multi-tenant housing, which ended in a stalemate, was quite plainly evidence of a grievous failure of governance on the part of Toronto City...
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Q&A with Umbereen Inayet: How to decolonize a city’s museums
Toronto’s history museums are in the midst of a transformation. The City’s Awakenings project, lead by Artistic Producer Umbereen Inayet, seeks to reimagine history and art museums through the lens of...
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