From spacing.ca
Cities are missing topic in the 2025 federal election campaign - Spacing Toronto
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There’s nothing even the least bit surprising about the fact that cities, or urban affairs more generally, have had so little play in the federal election. Yes, all three major parties talk about housing and housing affordability. Both the Conservative and the Liberals have unveiled crime...
on Apr 17
From spacing.ca
Bringing Poetry Back to the TTC - Spacing Toronto
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The Toronto Transit Commission (TTC) is more than just a means to a destination, it is also a shared space where passengers from all walks of life come onto trains and buses together. Poems in Passage, a public art initiative that brings diverse poetry to TTC commuters, aims to revive a...
on Apr 8
From spacing.ca
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Being a first time parent is a constant barrage of new and unexpected experiences. Some, like an infant’s first smile, are pure magic. Others, like sleep disruption, are nightmares. While spending time with my 4-month-old nephew last week, I asked my sister what the most surprising thing as a...
on Mar 16
From spacing.ca
OP-ED: E-Cargo Bikes Aren't the Problem – SUVs Are - Spacing Toronto
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Picture this: A parent pedals up to their child’s school on an e-cargo bike, their kid safely strapped in, chatting about their day. The pedal assist motor provides just enough boost to handle the weight, making the ride smooth and efficient. Now imagine a police officer stopping them, saying...
on Feb 26
From spacing.ca
High speed rail arrives at a low speed... again - Spacing Toronto
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It’s curious and quaint how successive generations of federal Liberals rekindle their (rhetorical) affection for high-speed rail (HSR) at almost exactly the same moment in their respective tenures, i.e., with 20 minutes left to govern. We seem to be pulling into that station again, with this...
on Feb 25
From spacing.ca
Black History Month 2025: Racial Discrimination at Toronto’s Nightclubs - Spacing Toronto
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Cheryl Thompson is a Tier 2 Canada Research Chair in Black Expressive Culture & Creativity, Associate Professor of Performance at Toronto Metropolitan University. It’s Black History Month and this year feels different. Across the U.S., as led by Donald Trump’s campaign to erase “inconvenient”...
on Feb 18
From spacing.ca
2025 Toronto State of the Bike Lane - Spacing Toronto
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Bike lanes have been a controversial issue in Ontario this past year with not only a record breaking six cyclists killed in Toronto, but also the Ford government’s Bill 212 which limits new bike lane installations and risks ripping out existing ones. However, with a provincial election called...
on Feb 10
From spacing.ca
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David A. Balfour Park, midtown Toronto’s largest public green space, has finally re-opened after being closed for infrastructure repairs and upgrades since April 2018, shutting off residents from 20 hectares of walking trails, a playground, community garden, and sports field during the height of...
on Jan 17
From spacing.ca
OP-ED: Taking another look at who's using bike lanes - Spacing Toronto
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Toronto’s bike lanes have always been about more than just cycling – they are about building a city that moves smarter, cleaner, and safer. As someone who currently rides a pedal-assist e-bike, both for work as the Urbanist-in-Residence at the University of Toronto’s School of Cities and as a...
on Jan 16
From spacing.ca
The Barcelona Chronicles: Introduction - Spacing Vancouver
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In the spring of 2024, a group of urban planners from British Columbia embarked on an enlightening week-long journey to Barcelona, Spain, as part of an immersive field school aimed at giving working planners a rare chance to learn directly from those exploring innovative urban solutions....
on Jan 9
From spacing.ca
The lost streets of South Parkdale - Spacing Toronto
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No Toronto neighbourhood paid for the Gardiner Expressway quite like Parkdale. Before construction of the lakefront highway in 1958, the land south of Springhurst Avenue and the rail tracks was just like the rest of Parkdale: residential, consisting of mostly detached homes on spacious lots. At...
on Dec 13
From spacing.ca
The high cost of on-street parking - Spacing Toronto
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In case you hadn’t checked recently, there are, according to the Toronto Parking Authority’s very helpful “Find Parking” map, no fewer than 43 Green P lots along Bloor-Danforth, between Woodbine in the east and the Kingsway in the west. An unscientific visual inspection of said map would...
on Dec 12
From spacing.ca
Follow the money to Ontario Place - Spacing Toronto
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The Ontario auditor general’s review of the Ontario Place scandal contains enough muck to start an industrial-scale pig farm, with plenty left over to get the OPP or the RCMP going on an investigation of how this, um, process could have become so extraordinarily stinky. That muck, which is...
on Dec 9
From spacing.ca
How the TTC lost and found its subway style - Spacing Toronto
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Not many people could have known that behind the advertising billboards on the platform of College station was something no-one had seen for more than three decades. Last week, workers upgrading the metal hardware that covers large portions of the station walls revealed a little bit of Toronto...
on Dec 9
From spacing.ca
Establishing affordable creative spaces - Spacing Toronto
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This article is published in conjunction with issue #68 of Spacing magazine, which is focused on the state of the arts in Toronto. Look for it soon on the shelves of your local bookstore, or in your mailbox if you are a subscriber. Artists are increasingly being displaced from Toronto, and...
on Nov 30
From spacing.ca
Old Gables and Pizza Slices: 648-656 Spadina Avenue - Spacing Toronto
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As an architectural photographer, I am always keen to record surviving fragments of older streetscapes in areas of downtown Toronto that have been subject to intensive redevelopment. From experience, I know that this type of documentation can serve as a mnemonic device, reinforcing viewers’...
on Nov 27
From spacing.ca
EVENT: Strollin' — an evening talking about walking November 28 - Spacing Toronto
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WHAT: An evening talking about walking on November 28 at 6PM. WHO: Shawn Micallef, Spacing Sr. Editor, Toronto Star columnist and University College instructor, will discuss the experience of rewriting the new edition of his book Stroll: Psychogeographic Walking Tours of Toronto. Joining him to...
on Nov 20
From spacing.ca
The scouring of Ontario Place - Spacing Toronto
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Between 2021 and 2023 architectural and documentary photographer Steven Evans trained his eye and camera on Ontario Place as plans for its future were unfolding. That work culminated in his book As It Is: A Precarious Moment in the Life of Ontario Place. On October 31, 2024, Evans returned to...
on Nov 13
From spacing.ca
Dead man/woman/child cycling - Spacing Toronto
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Somewhere in this city, there’s a cyclist going about their business who will die in a terrible accident — perhaps sooner, perhaps later — because Doug Ford thinks his campaign to remove bike lanes will make for an excellent wedge issue in the forthcoming provincial election. That individual has...
on Nov 1
From spacing.ca
New study reveals zoning effects affordability - Spacing Vancouver
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Social cohesion, environmental health, and industrial development are paramount characteristics to sculpting a sustainable community. Yet a recent, ground-breaking report by a graduate student at Simon Fraser University found zoning restrictions are largely exacerbating British Columbia’s...
on Oct 30
From spacing.ca
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Mr. Christie first came to Toronto in 1848. He was still a teenager back then, but he had already spent a few years as an apprentice to a baker back home in Scotland. When he arrived in Canada, he got a job working at a bakery on Yonge near Davisville. He’d spend his nights bakingContinue...
on Oct 24
From spacing.ca
A call to preserve Kensington Market - Spacing Toronto
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Kensington Market: Heart of the City is a neighbourhood documentary that’s been in the making since 2016. “It’s really a look into the heart of the city of Toronto, how it came to be, the state that it is today and what it will become in the future,” says director Stuart Clarfield, a Toronto...
on Oct 23
From spacing.ca
Watch this space - Spacing Toronto
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While the bulk of last week’s media coverage of Infrastructure Ontario’s curiously-timed disclosure of Therme’s lease focused on the financial terms and the mega-garage, the bits that most intrigued me have to do with a phrase that comes up dozens of times in this 297-page contract: “Therme...
on Oct 17
From spacing.ca
Ontario Place’s West Island trees on death watch - Spacing Toronto
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Every week this summer Francesca Bouaoun has launched her kayak at Ontario Place to check on the trees. They’re a stand of 850 trees planted 54 years ago by landscape architect Michael Hough on the West Island of Ontario Place that has become a mature forest, home to birds, foxes and rabbits,...
on Oct 3
From spacing.ca
Why is the Board of Trade shilling for The Big Doug? - Spacing Toronto
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There are so many sensible reasons to not build a Toronto by-pass tunnel — what we at Spacing have dubbed `The Big Doug’ after Boston’s Big Dig — that it’s scarcely worth the time to itemize them all. But besides the cost — staggering! — and the inevitable induced congestion — crushing! — a...
on Oct 3
From spacing.ca
LORINC: The public space embarrassment that is College Park - Spacing Toronto
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When College Park (pictured above) formally re-opened, in 2019, the City of Toronto put out a rather breathless press release on what had been achieved in this “placing making” exercise: “[a] multi-year, multi-use redevelopment project has resulted in an exhilarating and engaging outdoor...
on Sep 21
From spacing.ca
PODCAST: Spacing Radio 081, Talking Transit '24 - Spacing Toronto
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It’s been a while since we had a good, old-fashioned transit talk with friends of the show Tricia Wood (York University urban geography professor and Spacing contributor) and Matt Elliott (Toronto Star columnist and publisher of the City Hall Watcher newsletter). We talk about returning TTC...
on Sep 14
From spacing.ca
From drainage ditch to vibrant, pollution-absorbing habitat - Spacing Toronto
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When Douglas Counter heads out the front door of his Etobicoke home to appreciate the day’s new blooms, he doesn’t have to go far. The flowers are waiting for him right in his yard, including the city-owned boulevard beside the road. Like many in Etobicoke, his boulevard is a drainage ditch. But...
on Aug 23
From spacing.ca
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EDITOR: This is the second post of a new collaboration with the Toronto Dreams project by Adam Bunch (see the first here). The project is a series of postcards hidden around the city for people to randomly find. On the cards are strange, fictional dreams set in the place the postcard was left....
on Jul 12
From spacing.ca
LORINC: Eyes in the Sky - Spacing Toronto
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On the evening of July 1, after the sky darkened and the fireworks over Ashbridge’s Bay began, some participants noticed eight police drones monitoring the crowds, occasionally sweeping their lights down on specific locations to indicate some activity for the accompanying officers to...
on Jul 12
From spacing.ca
Spacing investigation: Toronto Public Library ransomware attack, pt. I - Spacing Toronto
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This is a five-part series independently produced and investigated by Spacing As a parent to a two-year-old, Markus Harwood-Jones made visiting a Toronto Public Library branch an essential mainstay in his week. Several branches near his area offered opportunities to check out toddler-friendly...
on Jul 9
From spacing.ca
LORINC: The Gordian Knot that is Toronto Island - Spacing Toronto
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In a city that loves to make, but not execute, plans and then overthink, but not solve, problems, there’s surely no better illustration of this twin-set of frustrating civic habits than the recently released 25-year Toronto Island Master Plan, which has done an absolutely masterful job of...
on Jul 5
From spacing.ca
LORINC: The case for adaptive re-use of Ontario Science Centre - Spacing Toronto
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Given all the powerful arguments articulated by commentators like Elsa Lam, in Canadian Architect, or Alex Bozikovic, in The Globe and Mail, there’s every reason to conclude that the Doug Ford government’s abrupt and unjustified move to shutter the Ontario Science Centre last Friday is yet...
on Jun 26
From spacing.ca
Book Review: Surviving Vancouver - Spacing National
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“There’s a tranquil spot at Georgina Point on Mayne Island where I sat in 2021 and looked back across the Salish Sea to the mainland. It was a clear day, the north shore mountains and the towers of Vancouver faintly visible in the left distance but so far away as to be just a memory.Continue...
on Jun 26
From spacing.ca
LORINC: The public space miracle of the moveable chair (redux) - Spacing Toronto
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In 1979, when the renowned American sociologist William (Holly) Whyte published The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces — which is, let’s face it, a love letter to New York — he was training his gaze on a city that had been through the ringer. After decades of Robert Moses’ mega-project...
on Jun 26
From spacing.ca
Saving an oak forest - from bylaw enforcement - Spacing Toronto
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Eric Davies is one of Toronto’s most vocal advocates for the heritage oak trees that have managed to survive in this rapidly developing urban environment. For more than a decade, Eric has been collecting and propagating acorns from the city’s oldest oak trees and giving young trees to community...
on Jun 26
From spacing.ca
Are commercial "third places" a dying breed? - Spacing Toronto
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Finding a public space to sit down and write this article was a struggle. My neighbourhood library is under renovation and will be for the next 12-18 months, and it was still too chilly and rainy this past month to set up in a park nearby. When the weather eliminates outdoor options in Toronto,...
on May 22
From spacing.ca
OP-ED: Addressing Toronto’s congestion will take more than technology - Spacing Toronto
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In a recent ranking index, Toronto is listed as the third worst congested city in the world (after London and Dublin). The metric used by the company (Tomtom) is how long it takes to drive 10 kilometers. Toronto ranks high for terrible congestion by other indices with other metrics, too. A...
on May 16
From spacing.ca
The story behind the first computer in Canada - Spacing Toronto
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In 1949, a team of professors and graduate students at the University of Toronto began building a machine no-one in Canada, and few in the world, had ever seen before. The University of Toronto Electronic Computer Mark I—UTEC for short—was to become the first and only functional computer in the...
on Apr 30, 2024
From spacing.ca
What is the cost of ransomware attack on Toronto Library? - Spacing Toronto
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This is a follow up to Spacing’s five=part series on the ransomware attack on the Toronto Public Library in the fall of 2023. Part I: Toronto Public Library ransomware attack: Overview Part II: Toronto Public Library ransomware attack: Unanswered Questions Part III: Toronto Public Library...
on Apr 12, 2024
From spacing.ca
LORINC: Therme's likely carbon nightmare at Ontario Place - Spacing Toronto
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The environmental critiques of Therme Canada’s mega-spa scheme have rightly focused on the project’s most visible and violent impacts: the clear-cutting of hundreds of mature trees on the West Island, the destruction of a migratory bird sanctuary, and the lake contamination caused by the...
on Apr 6, 2024
From spacing.ca
Take the Yonge subway to the future! (expect some delays) - Spacing Toronto
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EDITOR: It’s 1954. Fictitious Bert Xanadu is the Mayor of Toronto and owner of the Imperial Six cinemas on Yonge Street. Mayor Xanadu has been governing from his twitter account for many years, and also from occasional Spacing Toronto posts straight out of the last century and into Toronto’s...
on Mar 30, 2024
From spacing.ca
REVIEW: As it is - A precarious moment in the life of Ontario Place - Spacing Toronto
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Over a three-day weekend last winter, the last few residents of the retirement home at the west end of our street were quietly moved out. No one really saw them leave—there weren’t any telltale moving vans—and it took a while to realize that the building was now locked and empty, unlit, with a...
on Mar 12, 2024