By John Lorinc
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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...
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LORINC: Toronto’s transit agenda has gone missing
A day or so before the deadline for a threatened TTC strike, New York State governor Kathy Hochul torpedoed a much anticipated and controversial...
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LORINC: Major planning change for Toronto’s major streets
Though it normally seems as if the gears of Toronto’s planning machinery are barely moving, the reforms of the past four years add up to what will...