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RECYCLING WOES: Toronto struggles to adapt to increased contamination and...
Recycling programs across North America are struggling to cope with rising costs and declining revenues, and Toronto’s program is not immune to the challenges. “The value of the City’s recyclables has...
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CAST ASHORE: When nature creates a jewel out of human castoffs
Near the west end of Toronto, the twin peninsulas of Humber Bay Park give way to Lake Ontario in a series of scalloped bays girded by armour rock and huge slabs of concrete rubble. To the east are...
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Toronto’s squirrels have become carnivorous
On a trip to the Rogers Centre for a Blue Jays game last summer, Catia Brito caught sight of a large grey squirrel eating on a patch of green grass below the CN Tower. A native of Aracaju, Sergipe in...
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PODCAST: City scenes that saved summer
It’s been a rough summer for everyone, but people have found ways to get outside and make the most of it. In this episode, we speak to 8 80 Cities‘ Managing Director Lanrick Bennett Jr. about the...
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‘Out of this world’ sculptures land in midtown
In Toronto, there are a number of public artworks that re-imagine the human subject. I’m thinking, for example, of Hadley+ Maxwell’s Garden of Future Follies, an installation located at Front and...
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FULLAN: Take the students outside this school year
With school resuming over the next few weeks, the most important message many Canadian students can hear right now might not have anything directly to do with the coronavirus or filling the learning...
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REID: Our bridges should be places we want to walk
The City of Toronto is criss-crossed with ravines and sunken railways, and the way we connect the city across these gaps is with bridges. The most famous is likely the Bloor Viaduct (mythologized in...
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LORINC: Building a better residents association
We live in a society where individuals aren’t regulated in the ways in which they participate in (legal) group activities — from reading groups to sports to cultural or professional or activist...
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Book Review: 100 Ideas That Changed Architecture
Written by Richard Weston (Laurence King Publishing, 2020) This book’s title poses two obvious questions: what is an architectural ‘idea’, and how were the 100 ideas it discusses and illustrates...
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Farewell, Regent Park
By Lena Sanz Tovar and Keisha St. Louis-McBurnie Farewell Oak Street, produced by the National Film Board of Canada in 1953, presents a before-and-after picture of the Regent Park development in the...
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Coming clean on Regent Park’s Social Development Plan
By Keisha St. Louis-McBurnie and Lena Sanz Tovar Earlier this year, the City of Toronto at long last approved $635,000 to partially fund the Regent Park Social Development Plan (SDP). Initially...
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Fixing Avenue Road
The car wins on Avenue Road. It always does. The pattern of valuing the convenience of drivers over everything else has been fixed since 1959, when the city chopped down trees and dramatically narrowed...
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Parks, policing, and the pandemic
Park People’s national COVID-19 survey shows that parks have become more important than ever to Canadians during the pandemic. While many have been using parks to de-stress, get exercise, and connect...
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PODCAST: Toronto transit in the pandemic
It’s been too long since we had a classic Toronto transit episode. And, with the City and province grappling with the pandemic, and the threat of a second wave, there’s a lot to discuss. We talk with...
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Re-purposing Toronto’s city-owned golf courses
Public space has never been so popular. Over the summer in Toronto, we saw streets closed for active recreation, parks filled with people young and old, and bike lanes popped up almost overnight. While...
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A case for compassionate design in housing standards at Toronto shelters
For thousands of Toronto residents, housing precarity and homelessness are a lived reality. But for many others, the issue grew suddenly more visible as encampments were established throughout the city...
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What can we learn from kids who thrived during COVID-19 lockdown?
COVID-19 has been a destructive force and cruel amplifier of inequalities for many Canadian families. In addition to the damage caused directly by the virus, those who are low-income, racialized, or...
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LORINC: The digs of R.C. Harris
Anyone venturing by the Queen Street side of Old City Hall in the past couple of weeks may have noticed a small new plaque in front of E.J. Lennox’s monumental sandstone castle – one of the Toronto...
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LORINC: Preparing to weather the winter pandemic
After an emotionally complicated long weekend featuring spectacular fall colours, ambiguously-limited Thanksgiving gatherings, and disturbing statistics about new infections, I’d say it’s time for...
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REID: Piketty and the decline of “dirty mansions”
Toronto’s affordable housing crisis has many facets. One of these many facets is the conversion – or rather, re-conversion – of big old houses in the older parts of the city that are full of...
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