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MESLIN: If a billboard falls in a forest… Part 4
Exactly fifteen years ago this week, I received this short and uplifting e-mail from Toronto city staff: January 12, 2006 Hi Dave, We have researched these two [billboards] and we have no records of...
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Book Review – Here & Gone: Artwork of Vancouver & Beyond
Text and watercolours by Michael Kluckner, Midtown Press, 2020 I could not have imagined Vancouver becoming such a city of contrasts even 30 or so years ago when I was writing the original Vanishing...
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BRADFORD OP-ED: Making 2021 Toronto’s year of the missing middle
The year 2021 comes with high expectations, expectations to get back to the work we started pre-COVID and to build back stronger when it’s over. In addition to our continued fight against COVID, this...
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LORINC: The never-ending war between Queen’s Park and City Hall
There could have scarcely been a more succinct visual metaphor for the chronically dysfunctional relationship between City Hall and Queen’s Park than the sight, this week, of that big yellow backhoe...
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Progress during a pandemic – a cycling year in review
Toronto City Council approved a ten year bike plan in June 2016, which called for 335 kilometres of on-street cycling infrastructure. To track the progress (or lack thereof), Albert Koehl – founder of...
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When it comes to parking minimums, less is more
Is parking policy in Toronto finally going to be meaningfully reformed? On January 5th, the City of Toronto released a “Report for Action” signalling it will review its parking policies. This is an...
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LORINC: Calculating the pandemic’s carbon footprint
Does your Blue Bin runneth over? On my morning dog walks, I’ve noticed in the past several months that a growing number of blue bins hauled to the curb are not just over-filled, but come accompanied...
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LORINC: A first-responder service for mental health crises
This column was originally published in Spacing‘s fall, 2020, edition. City council’s executive committee yesterday voted to recommend a $1.7 million pilot project to test a “community crisis response...
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OP-ED: YongeTOmorrow is an opportunity not to be missed
This is an op-ed by from YongeTOmorrow and co-signers Richard Florida, Rana Florida, Ken Greenberg, Dr. Robin Mazumder, Brent Toderian, Yvonne Bambrick, Shauna Levy, Marcello Cabezas As cities all over...
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LORINC: Raising the stakes in the MZO wars
The judge who handed down a temporary injunction last week, halting the demolition of the historic Dominion Foundry in the West Donlands, was withering in his assessment of the provincial government’s...
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OP-ED: Why we have to save the first parliament site
Recent reports that the Queen’s Park may expropriate the First Parliament site, at Parliament and Front Streets, for construction of the Metrolinx Ontario Line offer another reminder of the dual...
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LORINC: Welcome to the City’s policy-by-surveillance
I enjoy the revelations of a muck-raking auditor-general’s report as much as the next red-blooded taxpayer, but I must confess a sense of unease about the way Beverly Romeo-Beehler presented her...
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The ‘bashment’ parties of my childhood are Black history
In 2002, reggae artist Sean Paul shot the video for his song ‘Get Busy/Like Glue,’ in Vaughan. Directed by Toronto’s own Director X, the video begins with Sean Paul exiting his car in the middle of...
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From the Stacks – Tom Kundig: Houses
Edited by Dung Ngo (Princeton Architectural Press, 2006) Tom Kundig: Houses is the kind of monograph that makes most architect’s heart skip a beat. As a member of the successful architectural firm...
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EXCERPT FROM ‘UNCLE’: Aunt Jemima in Chicago
Excerpted with permission from Uncle: Race, Nostalgia and the Politics of Loyalty, published this month by Coach House Books. Thompson, a Ryerson University assistant professor in the School of...
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NEW SPACING BOOK: ‘Packaged Toronto’ and the emergence of the city’s design...
Back in 2011, I was brainstorming ideas for future projects with local historian Stephen Otto. He was intrigued by what the BBC and New York Times had both published at the time: lists of important,...
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The role of cricket in an inclusive city
Cricket has a rich cultural history in Toronto. The sport is closely tied to Black history, following the Black Diaspora throughout the colonized world – and especially in Toronto, a British colonial...
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How racism in Ontario schools today is connected to a history of segregation
Toronto’s Africentric Alternative School first opened in 2009 after years of advocacy and then months of heated public debates and criticism about the meaning and significance of the school. For some,...
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LORINC: Some borders matter more than others in pandemic
A small procedural question, perhaps for the Ford government. Should we be expecting to see check-points erected on Highway 400 south of 7, or the QEW near Oakville anytime soon? Or maybe some kind of...
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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 often enough to actually do something about it....
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