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The Power of Place: Artists as City Builders
Welcome to The Power of Place: Artists as City Builders. This series emerged out of my strong interest to share with you the incredible work that is happening across the city by artists supported by...
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LORINC: Highway 413 and Doug Ford’s tactical whataboutism
Going in to this election, did anyone really expect that it would come to focus so intensively on that great big ribbon of blacktop planned and now known, indelibly, as Highway 413? Weren’t we were...
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REID: Sixty-two pages of overdue staff reports
Asking overburdened staff for reports is one of the favourite pastimes of Toronto city council. But what happens to those report requests? It turns out a lot of them simply disappear into a...
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Why We Can’t Go: A Report on Toronto’s Public Washrooms, pt. 1
Because this is Toronto, and because it’s important for officialdom to do certain things backwards, we’re going to spend this week — the days getting longer, the temperatures settling into the summer...
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Book Review: Architecture of Normal – The Colonization of the American Landscape
Written by Daniel Kaven, Birkhäuser Verlag, 2022 In the weeks leading up to my 40th birthday, I took an epic road trip. I drove east from Los Angeles through the desert highways, pueblos, and truck...
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Why We Can’t Go: City Flushes Time Away, pt. 2
Anyone who spends time in cities, and not just Toronto, likely has both a mental map as well as a strategy for finding a place to go, and knowing what to avoid (e.g., bus stations). It might include...
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WHY WE CAN’T GO: Debunking the Costs of Operating Public Washrooms, pt. 3
Parks Forestry and Recreation (PFR), according to City of Toronto data, operates over 1,500 parks, nearly 700 sports fields, 123 community recreation centres, 59 indoor and 59 outdoor swimming pools,...
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The Overhead: Fixing the housing market
Spacing and the Balanced Supply of Housing research node proudly present The Overhead: Understanding Canada’s Affordable Housing Crisis, a special podcast series. THIS EPISODE: Fixing the housing...
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The emergence of the “Toronto Special” Modernist walk-up apartments
The “Toronto Special” is a distinctly urban home that emerged during a post-war period associated with the rapid expansion of suburban subdivisions. They appeared suddenly across Toronto in the 1950s...
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Growing the urban forest in the face of climate change
Todd Irvine is an arborist (cityforest.ca) and a co-founder of Spacing. This article is reprinted from issue 58 of the magazine. For anyone who has ever sought refuge under the canopy of a tree on a...
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LORINC: This fall’s election shouldn’t be a victory lap
Mayor John Tory was out and about late last week, talking up what was billed as a plan to revive the city’s economy but which looked mostly like a poorly disguised attempt to shill for the owners and...
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REID: The Toronto vote in the 2022 Ontario provincial election
Municipal issues in the City of Toronto are deeply affected by the results of the provincial election. Planning regulations, Ministerial Zoning Orders, transit decisions and funding, our electoral...
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The Bentway kicks off a packed summer
Tucked under The Bentway by the Strachan Gate, the Bentway hosted its STREET series summit kick-off weekend on May 27-28. The Bentway is an organization “dedicated to the creation of shared and...
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PODCAST: Spacing Radio 066, Toronto Election Engagement
The Toronto municipal election is underway, and we’ll be spending the summer bringing you coverage, all the way up to E-Day on October 24th. But how do we get people engaged, and avoid the abysmally...
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ELECTION: Rethinking progressive populism
If I’m a populist, it’s because I’m with the majority. And the majority want to live in a city with dignity. For decades, my practice of political engagement has been at the door, in one-on-one...
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Urban planning is not a science
Urban planning is not a science. For as long as planning has been a profession, however, we’ve tried to make it one. I’ve been a planner for over 15 years, and I worked at the City of Toronto for 13 of...
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Transit transformation, part 1: confronting Scarborough’s housing challenges
With Edison Gao and Anika Munir In this “Transit Transformation” series, University of Toronto Scarborough (UTSC) City Studies students lead an investigation into the Scarborough subway extension....
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LORINC: Does Toronto need strong mayor powers or just a strong mayor?
Over the 16 years prior to the news last week that Premier Doug Ford’s Tories are planning to impose so-called strong mayor powers on Toronto council, the Ontario government has enacted two sets of...
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Biking through Barrie’s Black history
Cycling along Barrie’s waterfront trail, on a cloudless day with the sun burnishing the sky, the trees quiet in the still air, I came across a heritage plaque that stopped me in my tracts. It was in...
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LORINC: The future of Ontario Place must become an election issue
The only thing worse than the design proposed for Ontario Place’s indoor spa mega-project is the fact that a firm with such a storied history in Toronto urbanism would be willing to put its name to...
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