Urban Design
-
KidScore: Towards a more child-friendly, post-pandemic city
For many of us, one of the nagging questions added to our pile of brand-new worries in recent weeks concerns the physical and mental well-being of...
By Josh Fullan -
KidScore: Children telling planners what they value in public space
In the world of city planning and design, there are tools for measuring everything from the number of vehicles passing through an intersection to the...
By Josh Fullan -
Hey Presto! The strange history and modest potential of the soon-to-be closed TTC subway booths
The future arrived in Toronto in 1948, but it was hidden away from view, in a 19th century transit garage on Sherbourne St. Six years before the...
By Gerry Flahive -
OP-ED: Waterfront Toronto continues its Kafka-esque Quayside saga, but why?
Thorben Wieditz is an urban geographer who works at the intersection of labour, community and big tech. He helped establish regulatory frameworks for...
By Thorben Wieditz -
LORINC: Downsview offers city-building opportunity with a long runway
The key take-away in the Metrolinx business case report released last week, on the economics of the Scarborough subway, is as simple as can be: the vast...
By John Lorinc -
PODCAST: Spacing Radio 043, We are the public realm
In this episode, we talk about public space issues of the past, present, and future. Spacing Publisher Matthew Blackett tells us how the magazine itself...
By Spacing Radio -
The delicate dance of governing Sidewalk Lab’s Quayside project
Three-and-a-half months after The Great Re-Set trimmed the sails of everyone’s favorite smart city villain, Sidewalk Labs CEO Dan Doctoroff and Waterfront...
By John Lorinc -
REID: The secret small-town urbanism of TV Christmas movies
At first glance, the made-for-TV Christmas movies that have come to dominate the holiday season on certain channels – and recently, Netflix – are...
By Dylan Reid -
Toronto’s missing middle should be built along collector roads
Much of the conversation about missing middle development in Toronto has been focused on how to smuggle additional housing units into residential areas...
By Geoff Turnbull and Laurence Holland -
The Beautiful Mess of Toronto Laneways, my newest book for Spacing
There is no public space that holds my heart quite like a laneway. When I moved downtown in the mid-1990s I began to wander the city’s alleys to marvel at...
By Matthew Blackett -
Transportation tech bros need to listen to the Vision Zero folks
When we talk about Smart Cities, which seems to be all the time now, we hear about tensions between public governance and corporate interests. It is...
By Tricia Wood -
Toronto’s 10-year public art strategy
Last week, Mayor John Tory dropped by OCAD to declare that 2021 would be the year of public art in Toronto. This announcement sets up the release, later...
By Sarah Ratzlaff