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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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Urban Oral History: A tale of two immigrant neighbourhoods, Part II
This is the second of a four-part series on urban oral history. “Explore the city you live in. Open your eyes to a new life,” advised Gregory, an elder immigrant from the Caribbean who settled in...
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Urban Oral History: Understanding The Village of 1970s and ’80s, Part III
This is the third of a four-part series on urban oral history. My first conversation with Bart Birmingham (he/him) was a little awkward. After six months of social distancing, chatting with a complete...
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Urban Oral History: To understand cities we must talk to elders more, Part IV
This is the fourth of a four-part series on urban oral history. When Bart described the secret Toronto gay bars he frequented in the 1970s, Hannah created a map of them, and layered on the new safe gay...
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The Moccasin Identifier Project: Marking Indigenous history on the land
Earlier this month, I spoke to Carolyn King, historian, former Chief of the Mississaugas of the Credit, and founder of the Moccasin Identifier Project. While she was chief from 1997 to 1999, she helped...
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Preserving the queer identity in safe spaces
LGBTQ+ spaces in urban areas have been establishing themselves for decades, growing larger and larger as each generation brings its voice and creativity. Many of these spaces are composed (at least...
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LORINC: Trinity Bellwoods encampment and the persistence of Toronto’s old...
The violent clearing of the encampments at Trinity Bellwoods Park on Tuesday revealed Toronto at not only its most Tory, pun intended, but also, and particularly, its most Orange. The action...
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Scarborough’s First Bicycle Path – and the students behind it
The university students behind Scarborough’s first bicycle path couldn’t have predicted that it would one day provide a lifeline to cooped-up families during a global pandemic. In fact, had the...
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PODCAST: Spacing Radio 057, Trinity Bellwoods encampment evictions
In the aftermath of the Trinity Bellwoods Park encampment evictions, which saw a massive police presence, private security, and protests, we reached Sanctuary Toronto outreach worker Lorraine Lam, who...
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Book Review | Growing Up Modern: Childhoods in Iconic Homes
Written by Julia Jamrozik and Coryn Kempster (Birkhäuser Publishing, 2021) Publishing these stories allows both architects and those interested in architecture to view these iconic buildings from...
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LORINC: Fiddling while Toronto burns
I watched Greta Thunberg ream out world leaders at the Austrian World Summit, a climate conference, last week, and found myself pondering a key theme of her speech as I read the latest City of Toronto...
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