LORINC: Sidewalk Labs’s district energy gambit
Within the next week or so, Sidewalk Labs will sign contracts with two as-yet unnamed engineering firms tasked with figuring out one of the central goals of Waterfront Toronto’s plans for Quayside and...
View ArticleLORINC: Toronto’s road safety shame
LEIPZIG, GERMANY, reporting from the International Transport Forum — The contrast could scarcely be starker: with yet another death last week driving up 2018’s grim toll of pedestrian and cyclist...
View ArticleLORINC: Sidewalk Labs, autonomous vehicles, and the persistent myth of driver...
LEIPZIG, GERMANY, reporting from the International Transport Forum — When Sidewalk Labs unveiled its plans for Toronto’s waterfront, the Google/Alphabet subsidiary initially bruited the idea of...
View ArticleLORINC: What Toronto should learn from Hamburg’s self-driving shuttle pilot
HAMBURG, GERMANY — At some point in 2019, the first of three curiously upright shuttle vehicles will begin tooling around a 3.6km loop of city streets in the post-industrial port zone known as...
View ArticleBook Review – Copp House
Author: Adele Weder (ORO Editions (2017) In a mansion-filled Vancouver neighbourhood not far from the University of British Columbia stands a low-slung cedar fence, silvering in decay and overflowing...
View ArticleCreating child-friendly cities
by Dr. Judy Farvolden, Josh Fullan and Angela Ma Ask a kid what makes a great city and you’ll get answers that sound like those any good urbanist might give: freedom of movement, shared spaces for...
View ArticlePODCAST: Spacing Radio 024, Ontario Votes!
Election day is fast approaching, advanced polls are already open, so let’s talk Ontario. We’re joined by TV Ontario’s John Michael McGrath (provincial affairs columnist and host of The Agenda on...
View ArticleThe need for site-specific works of art
Daniel Young and Christian Giroux’s new public art piece—Three Lines Where Two Points Meet, located at the intersection of Bathurst and Vaughan—has elicited visceral responses from some Torontonians....
View ArticleLORINC: Making sense of the most crazy-ass Ontario election ever
I have no idea if all bets are off. But you’ve got to think that the hallucinatory 48-hour period bracketed by Kathleen Wynne’s self-immolating concession and yesterday’s news bomb about Rob Ford’s...
View ArticleWhy I revived the Bureau of Municipal Research
Ten years ago, as a grad student researching the history of Toronto’s waterfront, I came across a study, published in 1977, that could very well have been written today: “Should the Island be an...
View ArticleNotes from the Maritimes
At the end of May, the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada (RAIC) held their 2018 Festival of Architecture in Saint John, New Brunswick, and celebrated the venerable organization’s 111th year. As...
View ArticleLORINC: How will Doug Ford govern?
How will Doug Ford govern? With a week left before he’s sworn in, the most crucial, and also the most elusive, question right now is what will be the form of leadership Ford brings to his new...
View ArticleWhat TCHC needs to do next with Regent Park
This is a guest column from Shauna Brail and Alfred Jean-Baptiste Over the relatively short time span of just over a decade, Regent Park has gone from a place of significant disrepair and decay to a...
View ArticleThe Architecture of Michelangelo Antonioni
In the history of modern cinema, the relationship between architecture and human drama has only been fully exploited by a few filmmakers, and it could do an architect well to learn how architecture is...
View ArticlePODCAST: Spacing Radio 025, “Until We’re Safe”
In this episode, we discuss the problems with policing in Toronto. Alok Mukherjee was Chair of the Toronto Police Services Board from 2005-2015. In that time, he wrestled with reforming the police, and...
View ArticleLORINC: Breaking down Doug Ford’s impossible, ridiculous, scandalous subway...
Because we here in Spacing’s bustling newsroom like to provide informative and constructive analysis to politicians of all stripes, we felt it would be helpful to cost out the new premier’s plan to...
View ArticleLORINC: The post-Will era begins
Waterfront Toronto’s public positioning to accompany the gang-plank resignation yesterday of its now former CEO Will Fleissig could be summarized thusly: “Nothing to look at here, please keep moving.”...
View ArticleCITY ELECTION: Fixing Vision Zero, guest column by Sarah Climenhaga
EDITOR’S NOTE Spacing is inviting candidates who are running for city council this fall to share their opinions on numerous city-building topics. Articles are not an endorsement from Spacing — we hope...
View ArticleBook Review – Preston Scott Cohen | Taiyuan Museum of Art
Edited by Benjamin Wilke – No. 11 Source Books in Architecture (Applied Research & Design 2017) Preston Scott Cohen has built a distinctive design language on the convergence of geometry and...
View ArticleLORINC: Doug Ford’s un-greening of Ontario
If you take a quick stroll through the Government of Ontario’s air quality tracker site – which I’d recommend doing before it mysteriously disappears in a puff of cost-cutting – you will come across a...
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