{"id":10483,"date":"2023-12-01T00:15:08","date_gmt":"2023-12-01T05:15:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/spacing.ca\/national\/?p=10483"},"modified":"2023-11-30T22:53:09","modified_gmt":"2023-12-01T03:53:09","slug":"new-issue-celebrating-20-years","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/spacing.ca\/national\/2023\/12\/01\/new-issue-celebrating-20-years\/","title":{"rendered":"NEW ISSUE: Celebrating 20 years"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Dylan<\/a><\/p>\n

Twenty-one years ago, I read an article about the Toronto Public Space Committee in Eye Weekly<\/em>. Intrigued, I visited their website (back in Web 1.0 days) and, poking around, came across an obscure page that mentioned starting a magazine. I wrote to the generic email address and suggested I could write about some interesting public space projects in other cities that I\u2019d heard about. Instead, I was invited to an organizing meeting at a picnic table in Grange Park, and then just kept going to the biweekly evening meetings. Dozens of people floated in and out of those meetings in living rooms of cheap downtown apartments over the next year and a bit. By the end, there were just a few of us left, but we\u2019d produced the first issue of a magazine we dubbed Spacing<\/em>.<\/p>\n

A lot has changed over the past twenty years in Toronto. For one thing, there are a lot fewer cheap apartments downtown \u2013 I\u2019m not sure it would even be possible to reproduce the circumstances that enabled Spacing<\/em>\u2019s long foundation process. But there have also been some improvements \u2013 a lot more, and better, bike lanes, for example. If Spacing<\/em> can take direct credit for a few things, we also like to think that our existence shifted the urban discussion, getting the public, staff, and politicians to take public space issues seriously.<\/p>\n

Our model is possibly unique \u2013 there are international print magazines that cover urban issues, city print magazines that cover real estate, politics, and lifestyles, and websites that cover urban issues in particular cities. But there aren\u2019t a lot, if any, print magazines that focus on urbanism, and especially public space, in a specific city-region. And that also run a retail store while they\u2019re at it.<\/p>\n

We usually tell other people\u2019s stories, but this anniversary issue is a chance to tell our own story, to look back and celebrate our two decades of existence. It\u2019s also a chance to have some fun, as we have in past anniversary issues, with features like imagined covers from a century of Spacing<\/em>. This issue starts introspectively, with the magazine itself \u2013 our origins and evolution, and some of the impact we\u2019ve had. Then we pull out to get some outside perspectives on Spacing<\/em>. Finally, we look at the broader landscape, taking the opportunity to be positive, such as what has changed in the city for the better, and profiling some of the people we\u2019ve worked with and admired.<\/p>\n

Looking back to our foundation, we were filled with a spirit of optimism, which is recalled and captured in some of the pieces in this issue. Even at our tenth anniversary, in the midst of Rob Ford madness, that positive spirit persisted to some extent. As John Lorinc notes in his column in this issue, that spirit has sadly been deadened, both by years of a do-little mayor and council under John Tory, and also by a housing affordability crisis, a pandemic, a hostile provincial government, and other problems that seem all-encompassing. But we\u2019re here, in part, to sustain the optimism we launched with.<\/p>\n