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In defense of Toronto becoming a charter city
This column is in response to Professor Zack Taylor’s analysis of Toronto becoming a Charter City on Spacing In an opinion column here on Spacing two weeks ago, Zack Taylor raised a couple of good...
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National Housing Innovation event tackles Toronto’s housing affordability crisis
Toronto’s housing affordability crisis has long dominated headlines and political discourse, but measures introduced by our governments have so far been unable to appease it. Our housing market...
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PODCAST: Spacing Radio 042, The revitalizing power of heritage
This episode was a live panel discussion, moderated by our host in London, Ontario. The “Heritage Matters in Conversation” event was put on by the Ontario Heritage Trust, to explore how to rethink,...
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When do we admit that Toronto’s housing crisis is an emergency?
Should the City of Toronto declare a housing and homelessness emergency? Reports on deaths of homeless people, increasing levels of housing unaffordability and rising homelessness indicate that the...
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The delicate dance of governing Sidewalk Lab’s Quayside project
Three-and-a-half months after The Great Re-Set trimmed the sails of everyone’s favorite smart city villain, Sidewalk Labs CEO Dan Doctoroff and Waterfront Toronto chair Stephen Diamond appeared on a...
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The Future Fix Podcast: The secret life of sensors
Spacing and Evergreen proudly present The Future Fix: Solutions for Communities Across Canada, a special podcast series. THIS EPISODE: The secret life of sensors A major component of “smart” cities is...
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Embodied carbon and the problem of concrete Toronto
Whatever else you might think about Sidewalk Labs (SWL), the controversial smart city proposal has made one undeniably positive contribution to Toronto’s civic discourse: it forced a discussion about...
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Remembering the city-building poet laureate
In 2004, I was introduced to Pier Giorgio DiCicco, then recently unveiled at the City of Toronto’s poet laureate. Little did I know that I’d spark up a great friendship with a Catholic priest despite...
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Book Review: Soft City
Author: David Sim (Island Press, 2019) Bringing the soft back to cities Cities are often caricatured as hard and harsh. Concrete, steel, loud noises, crowds and congestion, bright lights, fast speeds,...
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We have a housing crisis— why aren’t we talking about rent control?
In the mad-dash scramble to call out the culprits and cheer on the saviours in Toronto’s ever-accelerating housing crisis, there’s been an outpouring of emergent thinking about what a solution could...
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When Poverty Mattered: The 1970 uprising at the Social Planning Council
Editor’s note: Excerpted from the book When Poverty Mattered, Then and Now, by Paul Weinberg (Fernwood Publishing, 2019). There is something both surreal and very immediate in this account of the 1970...
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PODCAST: Spacing Radio 043, We are the public realm
In this episode, we talk about public space issues of the past, present, and future. Spacing Publisher Matthew Blackett tells us how the magazine itself sprung out of conversations about the public...
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Book Review: New Investigations in Collective Form – The Open Workshop
Edited by Neeraj Bhatia – Actar Publishers/CCA Architecture Books (2019) More than fifty years have passed since the publication of Fumihiko Maki’s seminal text, Investigations in Collective Form,...
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LORINC: Council ponders $600 million affordable housing incentive
It is Toronto’s ur-question, the riddle of riddles, the fodder for a thousand earnest studies. What combination of public policy, political will and pixie dust is required to re-kindle the market for...
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LORINC: Just who is the face of the TTC these days?
With apologies to the famously elusive picture book figure, where’s Rick? Increasingly, as the TTC finds itself in a public relations nightmare, I have found myself wondering why an agency that is so...
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MUKHERJEE: Why Toronto police are worse off under Chief Mark Saunders
In Act I, Scene IV of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Marcellus, a guard, renders this famous verdict on his country’s politics: “Something is rotten in the kingdom of Denmark.” A similar feeling seems to...
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LORINC: Burning down the (laneway) house
In recent months, I’ve found myself wondering whether Toronto City Council’s much-touted laneway suites policy, circa 2018, was nothing more than an elaborate bait-and-switch operation. This is a...
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Beverly Mascoll, a trailblazing Black entrepreneur
At this year’s Academy Awards, Hair Love won the Oscar for Best Animated Short Film. The six-minute film tells the story of an African American father learning to do his daughter’s hair for the first...
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Questions for City Charter supporters: What and whom is it for?
Note: At the end of November, I was part of a panel hosted by the Institute for Municipal Finance and Governance on “Does Toronto Need a City Charter?” This column is an edited version of my comments...
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LORINC: Downsview offers city-building opportunity with a long runway
The key take-away in the Metrolinx business case report released last week, on the economics of the Scarborough subway, is as simple as can be: the vast sums we’re burying in that mega-project will...
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