By Dylan Reid
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REID: The Toronto vote in the 2022 Ontario provincial election
Municipal issues in the City of Toronto are deeply affected by the results of the provincial election. Planning regulations, Ministerial Zoning Orders...
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REID: Sixty-two pages of overdue staff reports
Asking overburdened staff for reports is one of the favourite pastimes of Toronto city council. But what happens to those report requests? It turns out a...
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REID: Shadows and light – a longstanding debate
It’s an argument, it turns out, that has been going on for centuries. When new tall or mid-rise buildings are discussed, one of the issues that always...
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NEW ISSUE: City Growing
Sometimes we get a series of pitches that don’t fit well into a particular issue, but relate to each other as they accumulate in our pitch pile over time...
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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...
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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...
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REID: Yes exit
It’s the kind of thing that has always hung out at the edge of our urban consciousness, that we used to occasionally notice and find irritating, but not...
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Reading List: John Sewell, “The Shape of the Suburbs”
When John Sewell’s book The Shape of the Suburbs: Understanding Toronto’s Sprawl came out in 2009, I read it soon after publication, flagging passages...
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REID: Piketty and the decline of “dirty mansions”
Toronto’s affordable housing crisis has many facets. One of these many facets is the conversion – or rather, re-conversion – of big old houses in the...
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REID: Our bridges should be places we want to walk
The City of Toronto is criss-crossed with ravines and sunken railways, and the way we connect the city across these gaps is with bridges. The most famous...
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REID: Remembering Doug Taylor, a historian of Toronto
Doug Taylor, one of Toronto’s local historians, died recently at the age of 82. I got to know Doug because we were both among the inaugural inhabitants of...
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REID: Examples of east side gentle density
One of the things I started looking out for on my local walks during the our locked-down pandemic spring (in addition to former corner stores) was...