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COVID-19 and TTC ridership: putting the pandemic in historical perspective
When the TTC Board met on 10 February 2021, understandably, most media and public attention was focussed on the fate of the Commission’s aging SRT line. With my long-standing interest in Toronto’s...
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Toronto after the 1st Wave: How COVID-19 affected three key markets
This is co-authored by Youjing Li and Shauna Brail In the fall of 2020, a University of Toronto research team set out to track key metrics from the city to assess the impact of COVID-19 on Toronto’s...
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EXCERPT: Indigenous Toronto, Stories That Carry This Place
This essay is excerpted with permission from Indigenous Toronto: Stories That Carry This Place (Coach House Books, 2021). NOW THAT WE KNOW When I first accepted a faculty position at the downtown...
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PODCAST: Spacing Radio 055, Post-Pandemic Transit Ridership
Before the pandemic, the Toronto Transit Commission was actively looking for ways to grow its ridership. Now, after taking a hit in numbers during the pandemic, it’s important to think about ways to...
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LORINC: How over-crowding has made housing lethal during pandemic
There were so many truly awful details about the death, from COVID-19, of 13-year-old Emily Victoria Viegas — Brampton’s wall-to-wall hotspots, the lack of vaccination clinics, the over-burdened...
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Recording Hart Massey’s Factory and Concert Hall
In 1986, I photographed the historic, sprawling Massey Ferguson farm machinery plant in Toronto just as demolition work was getting underway. Staying one step ahead of the wreckers, I was able to...
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LORINC: New transit funding will help developers instead of low-income families
Nothing quite smells like an election coming ‘round the corner than large deposits of transit funding. The federal Liberals liberally strew many billions across Greater Toronto on Monday — for the...
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Examining the ambiguous keepers of the hotel shelter list
The hotel shelter program is a highlight of the City’s homelessness solution strategy, galvanized by the effects of the pandemic. In a December press release last year, the City boasted that it created...
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LORINC: The cautionary tale of Rail Deck Park
If Toronto’s Rail Deck Park plan ended up dying in a dense thicket of legalistic land-use planning arguments, it would be fair to say that the idea began with a fundamental and, in this case, tragic,...
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Chinatown: Uncovering the future in the past, and the present in the future
The new issue of Spacing includes an article by Paula Tran, “What will happen to Toronto’s Chinatown?” In conjunction with that question, and with Asian Heritage Month, we present this discussion by...
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PODCAST: Spacing Radio 056, Rail Deck Park and best laid (official) plans
This episode is all about plans: big and small, successful and dashed. First, Toronto Star city hall reporter Jennifer Pagliaro takes us through the story of Rail Deck Park from its ambitious...
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Sleuthing a ghost sign on River Street
Ghost signs: The slowly fading hand-painted advertisements that cling to the sides of older buildings, redundantly promoting companies, products and services that disappeared long ago. I’ve been...
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Mapping Indigenous history on the TTC
June has begun, marking the start of Indigenous History Month. The recent discovery of an unmarked grave of 215 Indigenous children at a Kamloops, B.C. residential school reminds us once again of the...
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Book Review: Patented – 1,000 Design Patents
Thomas Rinaldi, Phaidon Press, 2021 From patents that have gone on to become world famous design classics to everyday, anonymous objects that have become indispensable and much loved possessions in...
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LORINC: Why Toronto’s urban design needs a lesson on climate and equity
Many Torontonians, including critics, have long bemoaned the absence, at least in recent decades, of a unique architectural character for the city. Beyond the undistinguished glass towers and all that...
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REID: Is ActiveTO on life support?
On a Sunday in the middle of May, I went for a bike ride along the south end of Bayview Ave., which was open to pedestrians and cyclists / closed to motor vehicles for the weekend as part of...
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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 I
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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