By John Lorinc
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LORINC: Singing the gridlock blues
How does one know if the main street running through a neighbourhood, or on a route to work, is becoming more congested? There is a steadily noisier...
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Dead man/woman/child cycling
Somewhere in this city, there’s a cyclist going about their business who will die in a terrible accident — perhaps sooner, perhaps later — because...
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Toronto to Ford: Stay in your lane
There are few elected officials who understand the politics of driving, with its brain stem triggers, quite as acutely as the Fords — first Rob, who...
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Watch this space
While the bulk of last week’s media coverage of Infrastructure Ontario’s curiously-timed disclosure of Therme’s lease focused on the...
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Why is the Board of Trade shilling for The Big Doug?
There are so many sensible reasons to not build a Toronto by-pass tunnel — what we at Spacing have dubbed `The Big Doug’ after Boston’s...
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LORINC: The public space embarrassment that is College Park
When College Park (pictured above) formally re-opened, in 2019, the City of Toronto put out a rather breathless press release on what had been achieved in...
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LORINC: Booze in the corner store
Until the mid 1970s, you couldn’t buy lottery tickets in Ontario. Ontarians could go to the horse races and place bets; the ponies, after all, have...
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They Brought Back the Don
In the coming weeks, Waterfront Toronto crews will remove the final plug in the new Lower Don, thereby allowing the river to finally flow naturally...
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LORINC: Eyes in the Sky
On the evening of July 1, after the sky darkened and the fireworks over Ashbridge’s Bay began, some participants noticed eight police drones...
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LORINC: The Gordian Knot that is Toronto Island
In a city that loves to make, but not execute, plans and then overthink, but not solve, problems, there’s surely no better illustration of this...
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LORINC: The case for adaptive re-use of Ontario Science Centre
Given all the powerful arguments articulated by commentators like Elsa Lam, in Canadian Architect, or Alex Bozikovic, in The Globe and Mail, there’s...
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LORINC: The public space miracle of the moveable chair (redux)
In 1979, when the renowned American sociologist William (Holly) Whyte published The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces — which is, let’s face it, a...