Last week the National Film Board held a screening of One Millionth Tower, an interactive documentary imagining the future for a highrise in northern Etobicoke. The six-minute film asks viewers to reject the idea of the highrise as failed experiment and instead contemplate the potential locked within vertical living. To help provoke conversation, a panel [...]

“While there’s little or no gravy to be found in current city operations, there’s enormous wastefulness in the form of our cities… [T]he extra cost of operating a widespread, low-density city such as Toronto, compared with a more compact city such as Zurich or Vienna (to say nothing of Manhattan or Hong Kong), [is] an [...]

There’s a concrete pad in front of 52 Division (east of University Avenue and Dundas Street) where the police park their cruisers. Lots of people know that it was originally intended to be a public space. But Mark Osbaldeston, whose second book of local city-planning nonstarters, Unbuilt Toronto 2, was released on October 24, discovered [...]

Yesterday Gary Webster, the chief general manager of the TTC, went cap-in-hand to the House of Commons Standing Committee on Transportation, Infrastructure and Communities, looking for money to make the TTC affordable and efficient. The committee’s job is to recommend to the government whether or not Canada should have a federal strategy for public transit. [...]

Katerina Cizek’s biggest challenge has been working in a medium “that hasn’t been invented yet.” No mere film, Cizek’s new documentary, One Millionth Tower, combines video, photos, and animation in a 3D virtual space to tell the story of an aging Toronto highrise apartment and the people that live there. It’s being billed as “one [...]

On the day the TTC unveiled the future of its streetcar fleet, it seemed appropriate to begin my day on the Queen streetcar, trudging from Corktown to my downtown day-job. Taking the four steps from the street onto the McCaul-bound Canadian Light Rail Vehicle is a back-to-the-future experience. Even with the faded fluorescent light fixtures, [...]

On Thursday, Mike Layton tweeted that, as part of the new comprehensive streets bylaw [PDF] being proposed by the Public Works and Infrastructure Committee, the City would basically make it illegal for anyone to lock their bike to anything other than an official bike post. This was quickly followed by some self-appointed sensible people pointing [...]

“This could be the issue that forces Transit City in front of this council for the first time.” —Councillor Gord Perks (Ward 14, Parkdale-High Park) to the Globe and Mail, commenting on the problems posed by trying to bury the proposed Eglinton LRT, and specifically on the fact that if the line is completely buried [...]

SPOTTED BY: Photographer Martin Reis WHERE: Dupont and Lansdowne WHEN: Between 7:15–9:15 a.m. this morning WHAT: Back in July, city council voted to adjust the Dupont Street bike lane, specifically to “move the beginning of bicycle lanes from a point 40 metres east of Lansdowne Avenue to a point 70 metres west of Lansdowne Avenue.” [...]

In the run-up to the provincial election on October 6, we’ll be comparing the major parties’ platforms on issues that matter to urban voters. Infrastructure sounds like a boring subject until a bridge falls on you. In Toronto, where we have as much infrastructure as the rest of the province combined and the only subway, [...]

The history, design, and development of building projects, brought to you by Urban Toronto. photo An information centre has opened at the east end of York University’s York Lanes very close to where a new subway station will open in four years’ time. The TTC’s storefront unit includes scale models and renderings, has lots of [...]

On May 18, Toronto’s councillors decided to let the planned Fort York pedestrian and cycling bridge die. Last night they gave it a prize. The Toronto Urban Design Awards “acknowledge the significant contribution that architects, landscape architects, urban designers, artists, design students, and city builders make to the look and livability of our city.” Awarded [...]