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Canadian Urbanism Uncovered

  • The bungalow horizon of Willowdale

    If you look at a map of Toronto, you'll see two bands that run across the top. One is the fat and wide 401 that we're all familiar with. The other...

  • Street smarts for students

    Close your eyes and try to remember your early education, say between your first day of kindergarten and your high school graduation. In those years, how...

  • Goodbye to the fish bowl bus

    The New Look bus has been an essential fixture of the TTC fleet for 50 years. The model, discontinued since 1985, was once popular across Canada and the...

  • Gas pumps of the future

    There are five hydrogen refueling stations already in operation around the GTA, but you can't use most of them — yet. Right now they're for...

  • Our home and native archaeology

    Kris Nahrgang is telling me about his uncle. "In the 1970s he and some friends took some shovels to one of the old cemeteries downtown," he...

  • An honest bench in the Annex

    On the edge of the sidewalk on Brunswick Avenue between Harbord and Bloor streets sits a loveseat-sized wooden bench with a small plaque on the back...

  • Neighbours with a buzz

    Except for the constant thrumming of the 60-cycle hum, these Jekyll-and-Hydes make no other noise. Perfect neighbours, they go about their super-heated...

  • Dupont gets it done

    Dupont is the quintessential back — or above — street of the old city of Toronto. For drivers it's a shortcut across the city that avoids...

  • This ain’t a library

    It's a cold Wednesday night in February, and the windows of 572 College Street are steamed up. Eighty people are packed into Soundscapes Music...

  • Power shortage

    When I was a boy in Flemingdon Park, all of us kids who resided in the public housing units had to trek across the broad east-west hydro fields on...